The points made may be salient, but the tone is so condescending as to be nearly unreadable without getting angry. A large number of his points around languages that are radically different from English could be summed up as: "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first."
Firstly, the problems he raises would be hard even if the native speakers of a given language were the first to develop computers. In fact I read a fascinating argument (from a link on HN?.. I forget) about Japanese computers developing into "appliances" (a gaming machine and a separate more expensive word processing machine for professionals) because early computers were too under-powered to support the Japanese character set. And that it was because lacking these problems that Americans developed "general" computing first, with the Japanese stuck in the "appliance" mindset until the late nineties.
Secondly, I'm not a native English speaker and I always had this sentiment; "why isn't all computing in English", "why do we have i18n", etc. For one, I don't think everyone studying a standard foreign language is bad, and while English is probably not the best option (Spanish is reportedly easier), it's there, it's as close or closer to being lingua franca as any other, and it's certainly easier than the language with the largest number of native speakers (Chinese). And then even someone with bad English might benefit from at least having File and Edit menus instead of often crazy translations of these things. A little bit of English and a little bit of standardization can't hurt.
Of course ultimately computers ought to display text in all those languages - if not in menus, etc. then certainly in the content itself - so this sentiment of mine isn't very helpful at all. But I wasn't offended by the article in the slightest.
In the context of some other language being the origin of computing, and since the OP mentions Russian as fairly easy to work with... What if this had been Russian everywhere instead of English? If all of the terminology, POSIX, C and other language keywords had all been Russian, with the rest of the world (including English speakers) instead learning Russian as lingua franca? (Yes, deviating substantially from history for this) Would the outcome be roughly the same? Would it avoid those pitfalls of Japanese? Would it be mildly more / less convenient?
Yes, the tone is a far cry from the cool-headed, neutral, sterile aesthetic one would expect from technical or academic writing. However, the article is very informative, and should probably be bookmarked for later reference --- in case one ever has to do this kind of work.
The article may have been written in anger, and thus it provokes anger. Good! Programmers who don't get angry while solving hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable problems are, in my experience, unlikely to truly solve those problems --- sweeping issues under the rug, or passing the problem to someone else is more likely. Anger is a very powerful motivational force if honed correctly, whereas contentment often leads to docility, complacency, and quitting.
I find that problems that make you angry or enraged are simultaneously: important and instructive. Most performance problems (or even multi-threading problems), for example, fall into this category.
> The article may have been written in anger, and thus it provokes anger. Good! Programmers who don't get angry while solving hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable problems are, in my experience, unlikely to truly solve those problems --- sweeping issues under the rug, or passing the problem to someone else is more likely.
That's a really interesting point and it makes me think of a developer that I've worked with (in a company of non-developers) who cared more about 'inconveniences' than I did.
It occurs to me that he did a much better job of engaging with these 'inconveniences' and fixing them.
I can only speak with confidence about the section on the German ss/ß, and it is dead wrong. (This has been explained a few times in sibling-of-a-sibling comments.) So it's not informative unless you fact-check every single paragraph of it.
I also don't remember anger being part of any successful learning experience.
> "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first."
What nonsense, the article says the complete opposite of that. All of the article deals with examples of why other writing systems (misnamed "languages") have specific properties that make it hard to deal with on computers. Latin and Cyrillic alphabets just so happen to be easier because of their regular properties, not because they were the first to be implemented. Lucky us.
Summarizing the article as being rooted in politically incorrectness is disingenious. Or do you really want to suggest the Chinese would have had an easy time implementing their writing system on computers if only they had invented them first?
How would those issues with the languages be dealt with if, say, one of the worst offending Asian languages(according to the author) had developed computing machinery first?
English+ASCII is simple because the rules are simple, not because the US invented the standard first.
The people with the worst offending languages had plenty of headstart for developing printing presses (at large scale) and advanced mathematics (calculus, algebra, abstract geometry, set theory, etc) first. Yet, for some reason, they didn't.
Nobody studding sociology has came out and claimed they couldn't do it only because of their language, but nearly nobody questions that the language was an important factor, and they were very diverse groups, with little else in common.
Japan and China have had some kind of computing machinery since the 1980s at least, as well as digital typesetting, so you cannot say "They never had typewriters, that's why their encoding is so messed up".
Hangeul has very simple rules, and is generally simple, but if you want Hangul Jamo (i.e., archaic letters that don't compose neatly into "standardized" syllables), you'll be in a similar place as if you want to produce mediaeval ligatures or thorn letters. Þis is hardly ever neſceſʒary in modern text.
Up until IIRC the 1950s Japan actually officially planned to cease use of Chinese characters and switch to kana entirely. This was not done for reasons of tradition, but it's what the Koreans did.
On one hand, I realize it's totally meant tongue-in-cheek. So I don't want to pick on the article, because it's useful and funny.
On the other hand, I've been seeing this attitude in regards to other topics lately. "Why can't humans be perfect... like this machine?" Well, guess what, bub. We came first, and this stupid computer had better get used to it. Me, I like my clumsy, imperfect analog world.
"That's nice. I'll deal with it when you make it economically worthwhile for me to deal with it. Until then, enjoy your fixed-format fields that truncate your name."
Yeah, I've seen unironic suggestions on HN that languages should change to better accommodate computer processing. Besides the obvious absurdity, that completely ignores the problem of handling the huge amount of existing text.
Who cares about tone? Why be sensitive in this context? It's a language. Why would anyone get offended when someone says "Your language sucks"? It's not like they're saying your hair sucks or your tongue is incapable of tasting sweets or your ear is shaped like a tulip.
It's a language. No one can help what language they learned when they were a child. It wasn't up to them. Of course some of them are going to suck overall more than others, and of course there are different reasons for the suckage, and of course all languages suck in different ways.
It seems like if someone is getting offended about someone else saying their language sucks, they're probably going to get offended about pretty much anything.
At first I thought you were being sarcastic, but then I realized you are actually arguing that only overly-sensitive people are offended when their language is insulted.
Since language is a core component of human culture, many people become offended when their language is insulted or threatened. Countries have gone to war over language. Provinces succeed over language. Language is a very, very sensitive topic in many places, such as Quebec, Catalonia, the nations of former Yugoslavia, and so on and so forth.
You may think that people shouldn't be sensitive if their language is denigrated or insulted, but that is demonstrably not the case now. Some of us may not care, but many people -- maybe even most people -- would become angry or annoyed if their native language is open ridiculed.
He's not arguing about language though, but writing systems specifically. If someone would say the English writing system sucks, and gave specific reasons why, I would probably agree with them. Spellings are absurd, we have unnecessary letters, case makes no sense, etc.
But I can't get being offended even if criticizing the language itself. English certainly has a lot of strange and arbitrary rules. What is with "be", "are", "am" for example? Why should languages be above criticism?
That's very interesting. Thank you. Which cultures have gone to war over language? I'd like to educate myself on their history, and try to understand how something like language was one of the primary reasons for something as serious as a war.
Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World is a journey through human history as seen through a lense of expanding, contracting and competing languages spheres. Well worth a read.
>In the 20th century, Serbo-Croatian served as the official language of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (when it was called "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian"),[9] and later as one of the official languages of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The dissolution of Yugoslavia affected language attitudes, so that social conceptions of the language separated on ethnic and political lines. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnian has likewise been established as an official standard in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and there is an ongoing movement to codify a separate Montenegrin standard. Serbo-Croatian thus generally goes by the ethnic names Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and sometimes Montenegrin.[10]
> Who cares about tone? Why be sensitive in this context? It's a language. Why would anyone get offended when someone says "Your language sucks"? It's not like they're saying your hair sucks or your tongue is incapable of tasting sweets or your ear is shaped like a tulip.
Yet article 1 of the United Nations Charter states that one of the four purposed of the UN is "To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion".
Language politics are in fact really complicated. I myself am from a country that less than a decade ago went without a federal government for 20 months because the different language groups couldn't get along.
> It's a language. No one can help what language they learned when they were a child.
And while we're at it, why would anyone be sensitive about skin color or nationality?
Leaving aside the idea that you are the one to decide what others should be sensitive on: Because it makes the signal-to-noise ratio of this blog post _crap_. I'm not sure if particular things are a serious grief or just a bewildered look at new things. I'm not sure of the intention. Should it educate or just rant? It's unclear and wastes a lot of time on things that don't add anything.
Interesting thought: It's possible that computers would inevitably be invented in the US/UK/Russia or some other country with a relative simple character set, because the doing something like Chinese, first would posse a hindrance.
If you need 32bit to do Chinese, just to store the characters then your first step into computing is going to be harder, compared to the American that can do with 8bit.
8 bits is too much for what was used historically. Morse code had 1-5 "bits" (effectively having the compression built-in). Baudot code was 5 bits, invented by a French engineer in France in 1870, inspired by other non-English-speaking Europeans.
He says they suck to deal w/ in computing because they're hugely more complicated than English and Russian which have very small, simple alphabets that are very easy to process.
'Au contraire, mon ami, it is you and your programs that suck' retorted some languages. Though in fairness I think there was as much comic hyperbole as grating condescension.
This fairly reeks of tone-deafness.