4 ms·

I think it would have been better to have every body just learn english as their second (computer usage) language. I'm german and my english was horrible until

by j-pb 7y ago

I think it would have been better to have every body just learn english as their second (computer usage) language. I'm german and my english was horrible until I switches my computer and my websites to english ones. Imagine a world where everybody speaks at least one common tongue, we could have so much more peace and understanding. English becoming the esperanto of the world is an accident but I don't care which language it is, as long as it has less than 255 letters. (Hawaiian would have fit into a nibble which is cool)

defanor 7y ago
While it sounds nice to me too (and neither am I a native English speaker), apparently there was a bit of misunderstanding in another comment, and possibly here too: I rather wonder about a hypothetical more efficient (and computing-oriented) writing system, not just/necessarily/only using monospace latin characters. It doesn't seem very realistic that something like that would happen (judging by the mess that are date formats and units of measurement, which seem much easier to fix), but observing the complexity that doesn't come from fundamental constraints, it's hard to not wonder about that.
- j-pb 7y ago
  Hawaiian has 16 Characters, Hangul was designed to be easy to learn, Lojban is based on Predicate logic. What they all lack is reach, and thats the most important feature when it comes to a common tongue. (That and having a phonetical system ^^')
pcr910303 7y ago
> I think it would have been better to have every body just learn english as their second (computer usage) language. Hmm... it might not be well known to the western world, but AFAIK most parts of the world learns English as their second language. At least East Asia learns English pervasively throughout your life. We start learning English when we're five. But still, English is not the only language, and we want to communicate with other people. Just that people can use English doesn't mean they prefer English & Latin characters to communicate. You can't just er... force people use Latin characters for the sake of programmers' comfort. Will you use your terminal if the terminal demands you to press space & backspace everytime when you're typing in English characters?
- j-pb 7y ago
  I know that many parts of the world including Asia learn english, thats why I think it should be used as the langua franca, and thats why I said, that I don't care which language it is, as long as it doesn't have weird ligatures or a large amount of characters. For what it's worth I'd remove all characters that are not from that "computer language" including the german ones. This is more than programmer convenience, this is about system simplicity, absolute correctness (too many bugs because of unicode and complex layouting) and above all about _forcing_ people to use said lingua franca to become comfortable speaking it. If you want your own writing system, fine, but put the effort in and build it yourself apart from the common bug free code base that the world shares, it should be less buggy overall anyways, than a system which tries to speak every language and support every writing system.
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
    I can understand (but don't fully agree to) a claim like that a F/OSS software should be primarily in English to maximize its community, as many programmers already speak English to some extent out of necessity anyway. But forcing English to ordinary people not using English? Plain absurd. For starters, while young people may feel more comfortable with occasional English older people don't, and your proposal will make them much more uneasy. Smartphone penetration rate around the world [1] can easily reach 50% for many countries and that would include many people unable to understand English---I live in Korea and older people are technologically no inferior to younger people in that regard. Impossible when you force them to use English. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphone_penetration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphon...
    - j-pb 7y ago
      Then have local operating systems for them in Hangul (Hangul would also be a nice lingua franca writing system, too bad its very local). I think you'd be surprised how well even older people can learn a new language when required to. I doubt that understanding new technology is easier than learning a new language. And all recent studies show that "adults don't learn languages well" is pretty much a myth. https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn-language-to-fluency-nearly-as-well-as-children-1de888d1d45f https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn... https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-semi-literate-children-in-a-remote-indian-village-taught-themselves-molecular-biology/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-semi-literate-children-in-... http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/paper13.pdf http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/paper13.pdf
tralarpa 7y ago
> better to have every body just learn english as their second (computer usage) language Why not Chinese? It would have many advantages: - Text layout would be much easier (Chinese fonts are mostly mono-space). - In addition to the first point, Chinese characters can be easily used for vertical text. Looks much nicer in narrow, tall buttons than latin letters. - Chinese characters are (mostly) pronunciation independent. No they/there/their anymore. - It has been shown that dyslexic children have less problems recognizing Chinese characters than latin letters. - Chinese characters are part of the culture heritage of billions of people (both Chinas, Japan, Korea) and not just something they learn at the university. - Old-school C enthusiasts can now have meaningful variables names while keeping their self-imposed three-character limit (or was it four?) - Finally, everybody will use wchar_t - Edit: But there is one disadvantage. There is no Chinese character for "/s" which some people here seem to need
- j-pb 7y ago
  Logographic writing systems are just a pain in the ass. You have to create huge fonts, you waste ridiculous amounts of space, and you need phonetic descriptions of new words anyways. Like I said, Hawaiian would be cool since it fits inside a nibble with 16 characters, although the words tend to get long.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    Considering how the brain seems to process words when reading ('glancing in context' more than analyzing each letter), I'm pretty sure the length of words does not make reading much longer. Writing is another matter but with auto-predict you could probably shove half the typing off on average. As a software engineer and cousin of Stitch, Hawaiian gets my vote! :handclap:
- munmaek 7y ago
  A /s is necessary when dealing with the latin alphabet hegemony ;-)
hevi_jos 7y ago
You are highly biased as a german speaker. English is a germanic language. You say "gut" instead of "good", "zu" instead of "to", "wir" instead of "we", "Wetter" instead of "Weather", "nichts zu tun" instead of "nothing to do". You will not be doing as much effort as someone from a totally different native language. The CIA calculated that it requires over 4 times the effort to learn Chinese for an English speaker than learning French. It also applies back, a Chinese will find it very hard to learn proper English. Learning English for a german student is as easy as taking the train and spending some days in England. Now for most Chinese, or even Indian(they have more than 20 languages) people, or Arabic,it is not so easy. The fact is that they are in a disadvantage,not in a leveled field and they don't like it. They are the majority of the population in the world, so if they develop their economies they will force everybody else to learn their native language, not the other way around.
- j-pb 7y ago
  By then everybody will speak enough english that it won't matter. The economies of the network effect are quite simple. And of course I'm at an advantage, the very fact that I'm german would put me at an advantage even if english was as far away as possible from german, because I have the resources, I have free education and I have free medicare, plus 400 years of the subjugation of the third world in my back. So what. Life isn't fair, the worlds top 30 People own as much as the bottom 3 Billion, thats unfair. Instead of bickering about which language would be fairest to adopt you should help make everyone adopt SOME language so that they can organize and exchange. So that they can understand for themselves what other are saying instead of having to rely on potentially biased news. So that they can talk to each other, for sympathy and empathy and understanding. My bet is on English for that one. Plus it seems that it's not so hard after all: http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Beginnings.html http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Beginnings.html
wruza 7y ago
That would mean throwing away a heap of literature (books, songs, etc) and legal documents, which are hard to translate respectfully. And english isn’t an excessive language itself, for better or worse. Also, the idea that switching to esperanto-english subset would lead to more peace and understanding seems at least debatable to me. At the bottomline I find it amazing that a human managed to draw symbols in columns or rows in any direction for centuries, but computers still have trouble with it. Maybe we should blame computer makers, not languages?
- j-pb 7y ago
  Not everything needs to be digitized. My life was happier when bookstores were still around. And when I had paper forms to fill for bureaucracy, because it meant that there was human compassion and wit involved, something that is required for fairness. A digital application of laws does the law no justice. As for writing direction: Simple tools allow for complex creation. Complex tools allow you to only create simple things. And boy are computers complex.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> I think it would have been better to have every body just learn english as their second (computer usage) language. That seems a little extreme to me. It seems like it might have been better to just adapt writing systems for computer usage. Originally a lot of computer systems didn't have lower case letters, japanese tended to just use katakana, etc. Sure, it kinda forces everyone into an alphabet or syllabary, but language adapting to medium is hardly a new thing.

by j-pb 7y ago

defanor 7y ago

While it sounds nice to me too (and neither am I a native English speaker), apparently there was a bit of misunderstanding in another comment, and possibly here too: I rather wonder about a hypothetical more efficient (and computing-oriented) writing system, not just/necessarily/only using monospace latin characters. It doesn't seem very realistic that something like that would happen (judging by the mess that are date formats and units of measurement, which seem much easier to fix), but observing the complexity that doesn't come from fundamental constraints, it's hard to not wonder about that.

j-pb 7y ago
Hawaiian has 16 Characters, Hangul was designed to be easy to learn, Lojban is based on Predicate logic. What they all lack is reach, and thats the most important feature when it comes to a common tongue. (That and having a phonetical system ^^')

pcr910303 7y ago

> I think it would have been better to have every body just learn english as their second (computer usage) language. Hmm... it might not be well known to the western world, but AFAIK most parts of the world learns English as their second language. At least East Asia learns English pervasively throughout your life. We start learning English when we're five. But still, English is not the only language, and we want to communicate with other people. Just that people can use English doesn't mean they prefer English & Latin characters to communicate. You can't just er... force people use Latin characters for the sake of programmers' comfort. Will you use your terminal if the terminal demands you to press space & backspace everytime when you're typing in English characters?

j-pb 7y ago
I know that many parts of the world including Asia learn english, thats why I think it should be used as the langua franca, and thats why I said, that I don't care which language it is, as long as it doesn't have weird ligatures or a large amount of characters. For what it's worth I'd remove all characters that are not from that "computer language" including the german ones. This is more than programmer convenience, this is about system simplicity, absolute correctness (too many bugs because of unicode and complex layouting) and above all about _forcing_ people to use said lingua franca to become comfortable speaking it. If you want your own writing system, fine, but put the effort in and build it yourself apart from the common bug free code base that the world shares, it should be less buggy overall anyways, than a system which tries to speak every language and support every writing system.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  I can understand (but don't fully agree to) a claim like that a F/OSS software should be primarily in English to maximize its community, as many programmers already speak English to some extent out of necessity anyway. But forcing English to ordinary people not using English? Plain absurd. For starters, while young people may feel more comfortable with occasional English older people don't, and your proposal will make them much more uneasy. Smartphone penetration rate around the world [1] can easily reach 50% for many countries and that would include many people unable to understand English---I live in Korea and older people are technologically no inferior to younger people in that regard. Impossible when you force them to use English. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphone_penetration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphon...
  - j-pb 7y ago
    Then have local operating systems for them in Hangul (Hangul would also be a nice lingua franca writing system, too bad its very local). I think you'd be surprised how well even older people can learn a new language when required to. I doubt that understanding new technology is easier than learning a new language. And all recent studies show that "adults don't learn languages well" is pretty much a myth. https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn-language-to-fluency-nearly-as-well-as-children-1de888d1d45f https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn... https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-semi-literate-children-in-a-remote-indian-village-taught-themselves-molecular-biology/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-semi-literate-children-in-... http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/paper13.pdf http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/paper13.pdf

tralarpa 7y ago

> better to have every body just learn english as their second (computer usage) language Why not Chinese? It would have many advantages: - Text layout would be much easier (Chinese fonts are mostly mono-space). - In addition to the first point, Chinese characters can be easily used for vertical text. Looks much nicer in narrow, tall buttons than latin letters. - Chinese characters are (mostly) pronunciation independent. No they/there/their anymore. - It has been shown that dyslexic children have less problems recognizing Chinese characters than latin letters. - Chinese characters are part of the culture heritage of billions of people (both Chinas, Japan, Korea) and not just something they learn at the university. - Old-school C enthusiasts can now have meaningful variables names while keeping their self-imposed three-character limit (or was it four?) - Finally, everybody will use wchar_t - Edit: But there is one disadvantage. There is no Chinese character for "/s" which some people here seem to need

j-pb 7y ago
Logographic writing systems are just a pain in the ass. You have to create huge fonts, you waste ridiculous amounts of space, and you need phonetic descriptions of new words anyways. Like I said, Hawaiian would be cool since it fits inside a nibble with 16 characters, although the words tend to get long.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  Considering how the brain seems to process words when reading ('glancing in context' more than analyzing each letter), I'm pretty sure the length of words does not make reading much longer. Writing is another matter but with auto-predict you could probably shove half the typing off on average. As a software engineer and cousin of Stitch, Hawaiian gets my vote! :handclap:
munmaek 7y ago
A /s is necessary when dealing with the latin alphabet hegemony ;-)

hevi_jos 7y ago

You are highly biased as a german speaker. English is a germanic language. You say "gut" instead of "good", "zu" instead of "to", "wir" instead of "we", "Wetter" instead of "Weather", "nichts zu tun" instead of "nothing to do". You will not be doing as much effort as someone from a totally different native language. The CIA calculated that it requires over 4 times the effort to learn Chinese for an English speaker than learning French. It also applies back, a Chinese will find it very hard to learn proper English. Learning English for a german student is as easy as taking the train and spending some days in England. Now for most Chinese, or even Indian(they have more than 20 languages) people, or Arabic,it is not so easy. The fact is that they are in a disadvantage,not in a leveled field and they don't like it. They are the majority of the population in the world, so if they develop their economies they will force everybody else to learn their native language, not the other way around.

j-pb 7y ago
By then everybody will speak enough english that it won't matter. The economies of the network effect are quite simple. And of course I'm at an advantage, the very fact that I'm german would put me at an advantage even if english was as far away as possible from german, because I have the resources, I have free education and I have free medicare, plus 400 years of the subjugation of the third world in my back. So what. Life isn't fair, the worlds top 30 People own as much as the bottom 3 Billion, thats unfair. Instead of bickering about which language would be fairest to adopt you should help make everyone adopt SOME language so that they can organize and exchange. So that they can understand for themselves what other are saying instead of having to rely on potentially biased news. So that they can talk to each other, for sympathy and empathy and understanding. My bet is on English for that one. Plus it seems that it's not so hard after all: http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Beginnings.html http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Beginnings.html

wruza 7y ago

That would mean throwing away a heap of literature (books, songs, etc) and legal documents, which are hard to translate respectfully. And english isn’t an excessive language itself, for better or worse. Also, the idea that switching to esperanto-english subset would lead to more peace and understanding seems at least debatable to me. At the bottomline I find it amazing that a human managed to draw symbols in columns or rows in any direction for centuries, but computers still have trouble with it. Maybe we should blame computer makers, not languages?

j-pb 7y ago
Not everything needs to be digitized. My life was happier when bookstores were still around. And when I had paper forms to fill for bureaucracy, because it meant that there was human compassion and wit involved, something that is required for fairness. A digital application of laws does the law no justice. As for writing direction: Simple tools allow for complex creation. Complex tools allow you to only create simple things. And boy are computers complex.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

> I think it would have been better to have every body just learn english as their second (computer usage) language. That seems a little extreme to me. It seems like it might have been better to just adapt writing systems for computer usage. Originally a lot of computer systems didn't have lower case letters, japanese tended to just use katakana, etc. Sure, it kinda forces everyone into an alphabet or syllabary, but language adapting to medium is hardly a new thing.