4 ms·

This is an example of overthinking and overcomplicating a task and focusing on edge cases. Not even 80-20, more like 99.8-0.02. 40th point perfectly sums it up

This is an example of overthinking and overcomplicating a task and focusing on edge cases. Not even 80-20, more like 99.8-0.02. 40th point perfectly sums it up - an edge case for feral people, slave in Sudan and someone born and left. One thing missing is a name of an alien with a name that can not be put into visual form.

jeremysmyth 11y ago
Not just alien. By some reckoning, roughly half of the known human languages have no written form.
- A_Beer_Clinked 11y ago
  I was curious about this; Ethnologue, which seems to be the base reference on this says: The exact number of unwritten languages is hard to determine. Ethnologue (17th edition) has data to indicate that of the currently listed 7,105 living languages, 3,570 have a developed writing system. We don't always know, however, if the existing writing systems are widely used. That is, while an alphabet may exist there may not be very many people who are literate and actually using the alphabet. We have data to indicate that 696 languages are unwritten. And for the remaining 2,839 languages we have no data. Source: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages... Also of intrest on the same site is this page: http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size which shows the distribution of first-languages by number of speakers. The top 90 languages account for 80% of the world. The bottom 1% of languages ~5765 have a cumulative ~70M speakers.
- cLeEOGPw 11y ago
  It's still a made up problem. I'd just say "my target audience is that and that and I don't care about edge cases until they come up". Get's the job done and prevents wasting effort on imaginary problems.
nradov 11y ago
It's not at all an edge case when writing healthcare software.

jeremysmyth 11y ago

Not just alien. By some reckoning, roughly half of the known human languages have no written form.

A_Beer_Clinked 11y ago
I was curious about this; Ethnologue, which seems to be the base reference on this says: The exact number of unwritten languages is hard to determine. Ethnologue (17th edition) has data to indicate that of the currently listed 7,105 living languages, 3,570 have a developed writing system. We don't always know, however, if the existing writing systems are widely used. That is, while an alphabet may exist there may not be very many people who are literate and actually using the alphabet. We have data to indicate that 696 languages are unwritten. And for the remaining 2,839 languages we have no data. Source: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages... Also of intrest on the same site is this page: http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size which shows the distribution of first-languages by number of speakers. The top 90 languages account for 80% of the world. The bottom 1% of languages ~5765 have a cumulative ~70M speakers.
cLeEOGPw 11y ago
It's still a made up problem. I'd just say "my target audience is that and that and I don't care about edge cases until they come up". Get's the job done and prevents wasting effort on imaginary problems.

nradov 11y ago

It's not at all an edge case when writing healthcare software.