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With the understanding that arc was released as a tech demo of a personal project at this stage, I took what pg wrote to mean that he thought he had better thin
by vlad 19y ago
With the understanding that arc was released as a tech demo of a personal project at this stage, I took what pg wrote to mean that he thought he had better things to do than make it do X (in this case, add and test international support). I think there were enough disclaimers in the announcement, web site, and posts to conclude this is all he meant. He simply released his project as it was.
Why should PG say "unicode support will be easy and that he will accept patches"? Wouldn't making promises be contrary to the entire disclaimer he wrote? (Have you read disclaimers before? Paul's addresses at least as many facets as those written by lawyers.)
If bloggers want to influence PG into feeling guilty in order to get him to spend more time on arc regardless of his disclaimer of "when it's done, it's done," they can do it by phrasing things like adults. Or, writing their own languages.
(Great post. Maybe PG wouldn't have realized this perspective had you not posted it for users to upvote. I know I didn't notice your perspective. On the other hand, I wouldn't change a thing. You're expecting PG to plan for all potential hurt feelings, be it Mac users, Linux users, corporations, people in remote locations without access to the Internet because this means they can't download arc, and more. This is impossible to do, and leads to nothing being released at all.)
- prescod 19y agoI'm not expecting PG to plan for hurt feelings. I'm expecting him simply not to go out of his way to hurt feelings. For no particular reason he took a technical time-to-release issue and turned it into a political correctness issue (and therefore made the whole debate around it political). Simply take this paragraph: "Which is why, incidentally, Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact with it, and I don't want to spend even one day dealing with character sets. Character sets are a black hole. I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost offensive, like calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc anyway." And change it to: "Currently, Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. At some point (I don't know when) I or someone else on the Arc team will probably figure out how to take advantage of it." That's all. Say less. Stick to the technology. Avoid politics. Controversy avoided.