8 ms·

Only programmers from English-speaking countries like ASCII. There are millions of us living in other countries who are thankful that Unicode exists, and who ar

Only programmers from English-speaking countries like ASCII. There are millions of us living in other countries who are thankful that Unicode exists, and who are constantly annoyed that a some of our tools don't support it well enough. As someone who grew up bilingual in a country where it's not uncommon for people to speak three or more languages, I hate the idea of being prevented from using one of the languages I speak while doing my job. Especially when I'm building products that eventually get translated into five or six different languages, all using different scripts. This is one reason I prefer using GUI applications over CLI applications: Unicode support is terrible across terminals and CLI apps, while most of the commonly used GUI frameworks are okay. If your app has no issues rendering हैकर न्यूज़ (Hacker News), then it should have no issues rendering Emoji. If your app cannot render that bit of Hindi text, then the problem is your app and not Unicode.

DagAgren 7y ago
Ironically, you can't even write proper English in ASCII. It is missing many characters widely used in English text.
- ithkuil 7y ago
  Can you make a few examples?
  - tedunangst 7y ago
    I suppose emdash may count. Spellings like résumé or coöperate if you're fussy about that.
    - turdnagel 7y ago
      Though the New Yorker is an eminent institution, their usage is pretty uncommon. Definitely not “widely used.”
    - ithkuil 7y ago
      is "résumé" an English word? EDIT: I guess then that also "café", "façade" and "señor" can retain their original spelling. The question is: where does it stop? will latin-1 suffice?
      - DagAgren 7y ago
        Latin-1 will definitely not suffice. And Unicode exists, and is near-universally supported and used. Just use it. It's ok. Really.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  You most certainly can. a-z A-Z 0-9 and , . ? ! ; : - ' " ( ) should suffice in nearly all cases apart from anything hyper specialized. You could probably write the majority of all English literature with only those characters, and there's more characters I left off. What other characters are "widely used" in English texts that are missing from ASCII
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    How do I write a letter to my fiancé? What do I do when I want to take a break and go to a café? How can I write about that cornerstone of English myth and legend, Bēowulf?
    - nkrisc 7y ago
      Perhaps ASCII itself is to blame, but in my experience the first two spellings you list are less widely used than "fiance" and "cafe", respectively. I wouldn't base a paper on it, but (fiancé versus fiance): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fianc%C3%A9%2Cfiance&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfianc%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cfiance%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fianc%C3%A9%2C... café versus cafe: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Ccafe&year_start=1840&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccaf%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccafe%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Cca... I argue "Bēowulf" is does not fall under "widely used." Even my high school version of it it was printed "Beowulf." I'm not claiming "ASCII contains all characters used at all in English," just refuting the claim that you can't "write proper English" with ASCII and that it is missing "widely used" characters.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      You write just like everyone normally writes, by dropping the accent. I only see such spellings when people are trying to convey some sort of sophistication, rather than in casual, day-to-day use.
      - nkrisc 7y ago
- GrayShade 7y ago
  Amazon used to print my name with an HTML entity on the shipping labels. Buggy software is buggy. Saying "who cares about accents?" only sweeps the problem under the rug.
AstralStorm 7y ago
Yes, also my problem is not understanding every language in the world and how to use a Chinese keyboard to type this in. (Yes, I know this is not, I'm being facetious. OP probably cannot use it either. If not, substitute 3-bulsik Korean.) The one thing English has going for it is the ease of typing it on any keyboard everywhere. Romanizations are fine too. Heck, even Russian is a bit problematic. Much more CJK, Hebrew, Arabic and Indian languages. Emoji are easier to type in.
- GeneralMaximus 7y ago
  > The one thing English has going for it is the ease of typing it on any keyboard everywhere. Is that an inherent property of English, or because we haven't invested enough effort into making non-English keyboards better? Here's an interesting bit of data: ever since Google added support for Hindi in Google Assistant, it has become the second most used language used for voice search globally [1]. I don't know about other countries, but there's definitely a demand for non-English languages on computers in India. > Romanizations are fine too. No they're not. It implies you have knowledge of two separate languages, two separate writing systems, and the ability to convert between them. This is not always the case. People do write Romanized Hindi (and Tamil, Kannada, etc) in India, but that has more to do with the lack of native keyboards than anything else. With the rise of mobile devices, more people are writing Indian languages in their native scripts, thanks of the excellent work Google and Apple have done with their keyboards. I'm as much a native English speaker as I am a Hindi speaker, and I'm entirely unwilling to accept a worse experience for either of these languages on my devices. Language is part of people's identities, and you can't really divorce language from script without losing something of its character in the process. People across the world have protested and rioted for their right to use their own languages. Governments are elected based on language issues. Supporting your target audience's primary language is part of your job as a good engineer, whether your target audience is non-tech people or other developers. Where is this unwillingness to support multiple languages in software coming from, anyway? [1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/hindi-second-most-used-assistant-language-globally-says-google/articleshow/71206202.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/hindi-sec...
hwj 7y ago
I'm not from an English-speaking country, but also like ASCII. It works without setting $LANG, $LC_ALL, ':set enc=utf-8', 'use utf8' and who knows what else.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
iaml 7y ago
As a person from another country speaking not-english, I just switch all my devices to english nowadays.
- gear54rus 7y ago
  And imagine how much programming and debugging effort could be saved worldwide if everyone did as you and I do.
  - warent 7y ago
    This is completely absurd. English is my only language but I would never hope for something like this. We're not supposed to cater to the needs of our tools; we're supposed to make technology cater to our needs. Following your logic to its natural conclusion, think about how much programming and debugging effort could be saved worldwide if we just stopped using machines and their features altogether.
    - gear54rus 7y ago
      You learn the language to communicate with everyone else on the planet. Computers are tools for manipulating and transferring information so spend time learning their language. Instead of wasting colossal effort catering to needs of everyone let everyone spend some time learning the language of everyone else.
    - iaml 7y ago
      As a counterexample, when I open some lib's repo and see comments in code are non-english, I just close it and don't use the lib. Not because I'm a racist, mind you, but because it complicates trying to understand/modify it by unreasonable amount of time. When I'm working I have to deal with spec requirements in other languages too, which is also troublesome. I kinda agree with gp on this, things would be much, much simpler.
      - kiney 7y ago
        Reminds me of the time when StarOffice became OpenOffice. As StarOffice was developed in germany all the comments where in german. This hindered development for several years when the project became more international before alls comments where translated by volunteers.
GoblinSlayer 7y ago
My system (windows 10) has no issues with Hindi, but doesn't always render emoji. That said, when Hindi started to exist and how many countries have emoji as an official language?
Iv 7y ago
As a non-native English programmer, I disagree. I love ASCII despite it lacking many characters from my own language. Sometimes Instead of the Ç I expect, I'll get a Chinese character. What do you do then? Well you switch to an ASCII-only mode and debug the encoding by looking at the bytes. You go one level of abstraction lower than the unicode. The ability to do that is precious. > If your app has no issues rendering हैकर न्यूज़ (Hacker News), then it should have no issues rendering Emoji First, that's not true. Many fonts have partial support or an app may have an issue with displaying mutli-colored glyphs. There are many possibilities for this partial failure. > then the problem is your app and not Unicode. Yes. Precisely. I don't think unicode or emojis are problematic per se. But they belong to a higher layer than the one a lot of (non-web) programmers spend their times in. Unicode support is HARD. ASCII support is easy. Making ASCII tools is easy and promises an ecosystem full of useful tools. > This is one reason I prefer using GUI applications over CLI applications: Unicode support is terrible across terminals and CLI apps, while most of the commonly used GUI frameworks are okay. And that's fine, but realize that by doing so, you depend on a layer that relies on an ASCII layer. Tools that require unicode can't be used there.

DagAgren 7y ago

Ironically, you can't even write proper English in ASCII. It is missing many characters widely used in English text.

ithkuil 7y ago
Can you make a few examples?
- tedunangst 7y ago
  I suppose emdash may count. Spellings like résumé or coöperate if you're fussy about that.
  - turdnagel 7y ago
    Though the New Yorker is an eminent institution, their usage is pretty uncommon. Definitely not “widely used.”
  - ithkuil 7y ago
    is "résumé" an English word? EDIT: I guess then that also "café", "façade" and "señor" can retain their original spelling. The question is: where does it stop? will latin-1 suffice?
    - DagAgren 7y ago
      Latin-1 will definitely not suffice. And Unicode exists, and is near-universally supported and used. Just use it. It's ok. Really.
nkrisc 7y ago
You most certainly can. a-z A-Z 0-9 and , . ? ! ; : - ' " ( ) should suffice in nearly all cases apart from anything hyper specialized. You could probably write the majority of all English literature with only those characters, and there's more characters I left off. What other characters are "widely used" in English texts that are missing from ASCII
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  How do I write a letter to my fiancé? What do I do when I want to take a break and go to a café? How can I write about that cornerstone of English myth and legend, Bēowulf?
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    Perhaps ASCII itself is to blame, but in my experience the first two spellings you list are less widely used than "fiance" and "cafe", respectively. I wouldn't base a paper on it, but (fiancé versus fiance): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fianc%C3%A9%2Cfiance&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfianc%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cfiance%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fianc%C3%A9%2C... café versus cafe: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Ccafe&year_start=1840&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccaf%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccafe%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Cca... I argue "Bēowulf" is does not fall under "widely used." Even my high school version of it it was printed "Beowulf." I'm not claiming "ASCII contains all characters used at all in English," just refuting the claim that you can't "write proper English" with ASCII and that it is missing "widely used" characters.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    You write just like everyone normally writes, by dropping the accent. I only see such spellings when people are trying to convey some sort of sophistication, rather than in casual, day-to-day use.
    - nkrisc 7y ago
GrayShade 7y ago
Amazon used to print my name with an HTML entity on the shipping labels. Buggy software is buggy. Saying "who cares about accents?" only sweeps the problem under the rug.

AstralStorm 7y ago

Yes, also my problem is not understanding every language in the world and how to use a Chinese keyboard to type this in. (Yes, I know this is not, I'm being facetious. OP probably cannot use it either. If not, substitute 3-bulsik Korean.) The one thing English has going for it is the ease of typing it on any keyboard everywhere. Romanizations are fine too. Heck, even Russian is a bit problematic. Much more CJK, Hebrew, Arabic and Indian languages. Emoji are easier to type in.

GeneralMaximus 7y ago
> The one thing English has going for it is the ease of typing it on any keyboard everywhere. Is that an inherent property of English, or because we haven't invested enough effort into making non-English keyboards better? Here's an interesting bit of data: ever since Google added support for Hindi in Google Assistant, it has become the second most used language used for voice search globally [1]. I don't know about other countries, but there's definitely a demand for non-English languages on computers in India. > Romanizations are fine too. No they're not. It implies you have knowledge of two separate languages, two separate writing systems, and the ability to convert between them. This is not always the case. People do write Romanized Hindi (and Tamil, Kannada, etc) in India, but that has more to do with the lack of native keyboards than anything else. With the rise of mobile devices, more people are writing Indian languages in their native scripts, thanks of the excellent work Google and Apple have done with their keyboards. I'm as much a native English speaker as I am a Hindi speaker, and I'm entirely unwilling to accept a worse experience for either of these languages on my devices. Language is part of people's identities, and you can't really divorce language from script without losing something of its character in the process. People across the world have protested and rioted for their right to use their own languages. Governments are elected based on language issues. Supporting your target audience's primary language is part of your job as a good engineer, whether your target audience is non-tech people or other developers. Where is this unwillingness to support multiple languages in software coming from, anyway? [1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/hindi-second-most-used-assistant-language-globally-says-google/articleshow/71206202.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/hindi-sec...

hwj 7y ago

I'm not from an English-speaking country, but also like ASCII. It works without setting $LANG, $LC_ALL, ':set enc=utf-8', 'use utf8' and who knows what else.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

iaml 7y ago

As a person from another country speaking not-english, I just switch all my devices to english nowadays.

gear54rus 7y ago
And imagine how much programming and debugging effort could be saved worldwide if everyone did as you and I do.
- warent 7y ago
  This is completely absurd. English is my only language but I would never hope for something like this. We're not supposed to cater to the needs of our tools; we're supposed to make technology cater to our needs. Following your logic to its natural conclusion, think about how much programming and debugging effort could be saved worldwide if we just stopped using machines and their features altogether.
  - gear54rus 7y ago
    You learn the language to communicate with everyone else on the planet. Computers are tools for manipulating and transferring information so spend time learning their language. Instead of wasting colossal effort catering to needs of everyone let everyone spend some time learning the language of everyone else.
  - iaml 7y ago
    As a counterexample, when I open some lib's repo and see comments in code are non-english, I just close it and don't use the lib. Not because I'm a racist, mind you, but because it complicates trying to understand/modify it by unreasonable amount of time. When I'm working I have to deal with spec requirements in other languages too, which is also troublesome. I kinda agree with gp on this, things would be much, much simpler.
    - kiney 7y ago
      Reminds me of the time when StarOffice became OpenOffice. As StarOffice was developed in germany all the comments where in german. This hindered development for several years when the project became more international before alls comments where translated by volunteers.

GoblinSlayer 7y ago

My system (windows 10) has no issues with Hindi, but doesn't always render emoji. That said, when Hindi started to exist and how many countries have emoji as an official language?

Iv 7y ago

As a non-native English programmer, I disagree. I love ASCII despite it lacking many characters from my own language. Sometimes Instead of the Ç I expect, I'll get a Chinese character. What do you do then? Well you switch to an ASCII-only mode and debug the encoding by looking at the bytes. You go one level of abstraction lower than the unicode. The ability to do that is precious. > If your app has no issues rendering हैकर न्यूज़ (Hacker News), then it should have no issues rendering Emoji First, that's not true. Many fonts have partial support or an app may have an issue with displaying mutli-colored glyphs. There are many possibilities for this partial failure. > then the problem is your app and not Unicode. Yes. Precisely. I don't think unicode or emojis are problematic per se. But they belong to a higher layer than the one a lot of (non-web) programmers spend their times in. Unicode support is HARD. ASCII support is easy. Making ASCII tools is easy and promises an ecosystem full of useful tools. > This is one reason I prefer using GUI applications over CLI applications: Unicode support is terrible across terminals and CLI apps, while most of the commonly used GUI frameworks are okay. And that's fine, but realize that by doing so, you depend on a layer that relies on an ASCII layer. Tools that require unicode can't be used there.