
Paul Graham's kind of dirty (On Unicode support as an exercise for the programmer) - toffer
http://plasmasturm.org/log/491/
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BrandonM
I think the author fails to realize that Arc is open source and free. You want
Unicode support? Write it in. PG didn't say that it should be in a library, he
just said that he didn't want to work on it. Which is a good reason to open
source it.

I forget where I read it, but an article claiming the superiority of open
source software said something like

 _Who is most likely to do a good job on Unicode support?

1\. An international who needs it

2\. A hacker who is interested in that sort of thing

3\. A corporate worker who is told he has to support it_

The answer, of course, was basically "anything but 3," and I had to agree. I
think the same logic applies to this situation. Do you expect PG to do a good
job on Unicode when he could care less about it and feels like it's a waste of
time? Of course not. The whole point of open sourcing it is to allow someone
who _would_ be interested in such an undertaking to go about doing it.

Also, when he said Arc isn't the kind of language for people who would be
upset with lack of Unicode support, I mentally appended _in a development
release of a beta language_ to the end of that sentence. If PG isn't even
guaranteeing a consistent language to build on, how can anyone be upset about
lack of Unicode support? Clearly, people are missing the point of the beta
release cycle and open source in general.

~~~
axod
"You want Unicode support? Write it in."

Sorry but that's like selling someone a car and saying "Oh you want the
chassis to be made of metal instead of wood? Well you can change that can't
you."

I disagree. If you're building something from the start, you decide on a good
character set, and use it. Namely Unicode. It's a lot easier to do that than
to try and fix things afterwards.

Look at php. Dealing with Unicode in php is a major hassle because it wasn't
designed from the ground up to support Unicode. It was added in later as a
library. So now you have special functions for dealing with unicode, and all
the hassle and verbosity that entails in your code.

In Javascript or Java however, Unicode just works universally.

I'd say choosing a character set is one of the first things you should do as a
language designer - that's why I was surprised with the lack of support for
anything but ascii which just doesn't cut it any more for real world
applications.

Saying that adding Unicode is a couple of days work for anyone interested
sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster - see how php turned out.

~~~
koolmoe
_Sorry but that's like selling someone a car and saying "Oh you want the
chassis to be made of metal instead of wood? Well you can change that can't
you."_

Except pg isn't selling anything, he's just letting you see and use what's
ostensibly made his life easier.

I'd modify your simile to something more accurate, but modifying similes is a
black hole.

~~~
axod
OK, he's _giving_ us a car with a wooden chassis. Might be a great car, fun to
drive. But it will probably need the chassis replacing unless you want to
crash.

~~~
koolmoe
It's more like he gave you a scalpel, a tool that's great - even indispensible
- for a specific set of cutting tasks, but that might leave you disappointed
if you chose to use it for cutting down a tree.

Except that scalpels aren't really all that extensible.

See, I told you it was a black hole...

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bsaunder
I agree with the author, Unicode seems like it should be right in the core of
a language, but I'm incredibly sympathetic to not wanting to spend even a day
on the issue.

I also am incredibly grateful for any open source released (I feel like it
shifts political power to individual programmers vs. corporations).

All that being said, it sure would be nice for Paul to spend that day or two
of effort that would seemingly save thousands of community man hours. But I
can't really blame him if he doesn't want to.

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trekker7
What's with all this negativity... it's not like you paid for the code and he
owes you something. It's like someone builds a new type of car and gives it to
you, and you say it totally sucks because there isn't any paint on it.

~~~
inklesspen
I dunno, we're just expecting that this awesome new language he's promoting
have basic functionality. Crazy, huh?

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curi
boring. don't read.

~~~
curi
<3

