title: What would happen if all languages began doing strings in UTF-8?
body: <p>Unicode is awesome. There aren't too many people who disagree with this.</p>
  
  <p>Apart from Python 3 (<a href="http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/" rel="nofollow">which did it wrong</a>), what would be the negative impact (if any) of the next major version of all programming languages defaulting to using Unicode/UTF-8 strings?</p>
  
  <p>I'm talking specifically about the many cases which require workarounds to get UTF-8. For example, running a Java program:</p>
  
  <pre><code>java ... -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Or working with strings in Python 2:</p>
  
  <pre><code># -*- coding: utf8 -*-
  ...
  unicode_string = u"This is Unicode Text"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Certain MySQL databases default to a different character encoding by default:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[server]
  collation_server=utf8_unicode_ci
  character_set_server=utf8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>etc. etc. </p>
  
  <p>Why don't we all just default to using Unicode/UTF-8 and allow users to use the workarounds if they need support for other character encodings? What would be the problems with doing this?</p>