

Dear Programmers, Please Learn to Read Before You Speak: In Defense of Arc - rml
http://chartophylax.blogspot.com/2008/01/dear-programmers-please-learn-to-read.html

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bct
Complaining about Unicode support doesn't mean people haven't been reading pg
correctly, it means they disagree about the importance of it.

I don't see how lacking it makes the language any more artistic.

Edit: and characterizing people as pedants for wanting a useful feature is
silly and unproductive.

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rglullis
The annoying part is about the "complaining", as PG's followers are entitled
to anything, _just because_ they feel they are part of the cult.

Guess what? You don't get the right to complain. Nobody does. Nobody has paid
a support contract for anyone to include Unicode support on the language.

The guy wrote a language for himself. Not for you, not for me. And he does not
want to work on Unicode support. I bet he doesn't want to work on database
abstraction. Or Ajax widgets. Or whatever.

If those are so important to you, go somewhere else. But please, stop
complaining.

 _EDIT_ : bad wording. As bct put it, _complain_ all you want, but don't feel
in the right to _demand_ anything.

~~~
bct
> You don't get the right to complain.

Yes we do. What we don't get is the right to demand.

~~~
asdflkj
Yes we do. What we don't get is the right to have our demands met.

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jsnx
I can not believe you linked to yourself!

It does not speak well of an author's arguments when they rely on generalities
-- "you don't know everything" and "programmers can't communicate". As for
Leibniz, Euclid and Newton -- Gauss was by all accounts more productive, more
important, more fundamental than any of those guys; and a famously poor
communicator.

The smooth, poorly reasoned prose of this article bears the mark of a real
English major. The manifest lack of respect for the mores of the programming
community is the sure sign of a n00b -- or a Java/.NET programmer -- who can
not see a new computer technology in the context of the life of the field,
because they are unaware of it.

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eusman
He actually spent time to write that bullshit? I really hate articles that
offense their readers.

All these people he mentions were lead to create something out of need or by a
strike of genious, and I don't see this guy getting either of both.

Unicode is not a luxury, is a need.

Supported or not by Arc at this version or in the future, is another issue and
if the community needs it, a totally another one.

But leaving a language without builtin support for Unicode, its destiny not
far should it be from ending up like what is to day to writting C++ in
Windows, which is a tottally NIGHTMARE to handle strings as there more than 10
different types.

I don't think anybody attacked Arc or its creatos by stating their "dumb"
needs!

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pius
<http://www.koziarski.net/archives/2007/12/1/they>

Interestingly enough, in the three months the above link has been around, I've
found it germane to something like four threads on Hacker News.

This is open source, people. If you need something, add it yourself. This is a
Lisp for God's sake, you can actually add syntax to the language!

In general, grumble, but don't be obnoxious about gaps unless you're paying
the developer for the privilege.

The Tao of Steve applied to free and open-source software:

1) Be desireless; 2) Be excellent; 3) Be gone.

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dfens
If I really wanted to procrastinate, I would find all the blog posts
complaining about lack of unicode, and count how many times a non-ASCII
character was used.

~~~
ehird
Perhaps you should try reading one not written in English?

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zeka
If I remember correctly, Ruby doesn't have Unicode support either. Shit, some
languages don't even have built-in strings.

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Elfan
I think that is sort of the point people are trying to make. Pretty much every
language messes this up badly. It would be nice to see something learned from
those mistakes.

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airhadoken
Seems like some languages are getting the point. While looking for a resource
about Unicode support, I saw promising things as well as inauspicious. Seems
like multibyte character support would be a good thing to catalog for
programming languages (specs as well as implementations)

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edw519
"In other words, CS guys, you must (gasp!) acknowledge that you don't know
everything."

Is he still gasping? (He forgot his closing tag.)

Oh that's right, CS guys don't know everything.

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lst
It's really curious that so many people are so pessimistic about something
they get for free...

Me simply is playing around a little every now and then, and it's giving me
much, much fun! It brings me back the feeling when I first started learning
Lisp!

So my summary is clear: nice!, great!, fun!! (And I'll omit a 'hallelujah'
here...)

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curi
boring. don't read.

~~~
curi
<3

