6 ms·

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

by slver 5y ago

oblio 5y ago
And then we discovered that not only English speakers want to use PCs.
- geenew 5y ago
  Didn’t extended ASCII cover that and make text terminals usable with non-English character sets? Genuinely curious.
  - skrebbel 5y ago
    How would you use extended-ascii to write Arabic?
    - superjan 5y ago
      The following was actually used: https://www.charset.org/charsets/iso-8859-6 https://www.charset.org/charsets/iso-8859-6 There’s no single byte encoding for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean though.
    - enqk 5y ago
      In practice, young folks write arabic with roman script when they chat. (with numbers to supplement the missing letters)
  - qsort 5y ago
    Extended ASCII was actually several different and incompatible encoding, "codepages". It was kind of a solution, but there were major issues that made it much worse than Unicode/utf8: - Asian languages needed special encodings, 256 characters weren't sufficient. - It was impossible to work with different languages in the same document, each codepage only covered some character/alphabet. - There was no 'safe subset': Unicode codepoints 0-127 are exactly ASCII, which means that ASCII is compliant utf8. The same wasn't true at the time.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Not even just non English speakers, we in en-gb land had enough trouble getting £ to work 100% of the time, which was kind of a basic requirement for business use.
  - account42 5y ago
    It's not a basic requirment, just convenient. In the absence of £, GBP works nearly as well.
crazygringo 5y ago
No, things are as hard as they need to be. Fixed-width ASCII terminals didn't work for virtually anyone except English-speaking users. Turns out the entire world needs to use computers. That's a "need". Not "allowing".
- slver 5y ago
  It depends how big you think. Dealing with status quo, things like text direction are necessary complication. But at a higher scale it’s purely incidental complexity: you only need one direction for all languages. All languages are linear. No language uses direction to encode meaning. Direction in language is just “stuff starts one place and ends in another”. Balkanization of the encodings is not a good thing. Imagine if every city had a different color for a traffic stop light. Why not? Maybe it’s a matter of cultural pride. What if every country had its own network protocols? Imagine what a nightmare internet would be. But thankfully we had common sense in few cases. In many others we don’t. And Unicode is full of incidental complexity itself. Did we really need skin color emoji. Who is yellow here? Anyone being brightly yellow perchance? No. We had the perfect abstract color for emojis. But now we have to deal with this shit.
  - zaptheimpaler 5y ago
    ?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS
    - slver 5y ago
      > ?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS So you just said all non-English speakers use right-to-left? No, the direction isn't what's confusing me, rather the fact you're trying to score a cheap outrage comment, but actually wrote non-sense no matter which direction you read it. How about maybe educate yourself a little, and rephrase your question to reflect reality, and we can have an intelligent conversation about it. Most of the world uses left-to-right and top-down (yes look around when you go out and notice all the vertical logotypes in English around the city). Right-to-left is relative minority. If you have democratic thinking and we gotta vote for it, the winner is obvious. Yet, I'd rather learn to read fluently English in right-to-left than the current mish-mash of "whatever". Also read about Korean. It was a top-down right-left language, today it's written left-right. People are surprisingly adaptive, you know, it's supposedly our top advantage as a species. No one is born with "right-to-left" grafted in their DNA. We honestly gotta tone down the ignorance in these discussions. My native language isn't English, by the way. And I don't mind adapting.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Only if you didn't leave the US. Over in Europe (and I assume Asia) it was a constant source of problems.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I thought it was fine really. It forced us to drop some of the quirkier characters sooner. Nobody in the Netherlands uses things like the paragraph sign anymore, or the 'ĳ' glyph. And accents on words are now pretty much optional.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

by slver 5y ago

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

oblio 5y ago

And then we discovered that not only English speakers want to use PCs.

geenew 5y ago
Didn’t extended ASCII cover that and make text terminals usable with non-English character sets? Genuinely curious.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  How would you use extended-ascii to write Arabic?
  - superjan 5y ago
    The following was actually used: https://www.charset.org/charsets/iso-8859-6 https://www.charset.org/charsets/iso-8859-6 There’s no single byte encoding for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean though.
  - enqk 5y ago
    In practice, young folks write arabic with roman script when they chat. (with numbers to supplement the missing letters)
- qsort 5y ago
  Extended ASCII was actually several different and incompatible encoding, "codepages". It was kind of a solution, but there were major issues that made it much worse than Unicode/utf8: - Asian languages needed special encodings, 256 characters weren't sufficient. - It was impossible to work with different languages in the same document, each codepage only covered some character/alphabet. - There was no 'safe subset': Unicode codepoints 0-127 are exactly ASCII, which means that ASCII is compliant utf8. The same wasn't true at the time.
pjc50 5y ago
Not even just non English speakers, we in en-gb land had enough trouble getting £ to work 100% of the time, which was kind of a basic requirement for business use.
- account42 5y ago
  It's not a basic requirment, just convenient. In the absence of £, GBP works nearly as well.

crazygringo 5y ago

No, things are as hard as they need to be. Fixed-width ASCII terminals didn't work for virtually anyone except English-speaking users. Turns out the entire world needs to use computers. That's a "need". Not "allowing".

slver 5y ago
It depends how big you think. Dealing with status quo, things like text direction are necessary complication. But at a higher scale it’s purely incidental complexity: you only need one direction for all languages. All languages are linear. No language uses direction to encode meaning. Direction in language is just “stuff starts one place and ends in another”. Balkanization of the encodings is not a good thing. Imagine if every city had a different color for a traffic stop light. Why not? Maybe it’s a matter of cultural pride. What if every country had its own network protocols? Imagine what a nightmare internet would be. But thankfully we had common sense in few cases. In many others we don’t. And Unicode is full of incidental complexity itself. Did we really need skin color emoji. Who is yellow here? Anyone being brightly yellow perchance? No. We had the perfect abstract color for emojis. But now we have to deal with this shit.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  ?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS
  - slver 5y ago
    > ?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS So you just said all non-English speakers use right-to-left? No, the direction isn't what's confusing me, rather the fact you're trying to score a cheap outrage comment, but actually wrote non-sense no matter which direction you read it. How about maybe educate yourself a little, and rephrase your question to reflect reality, and we can have an intelligent conversation about it. Most of the world uses left-to-right and top-down (yes look around when you go out and notice all the vertical logotypes in English around the city). Right-to-left is relative minority. If you have democratic thinking and we gotta vote for it, the winner is obvious. Yet, I'd rather learn to read fluently English in right-to-left than the current mish-mash of "whatever". Also read about Korean. It was a top-down right-left language, today it's written left-right. People are surprisingly adaptive, you know, it's supposedly our top advantage as a species. No one is born with "right-to-left" grafted in their DNA. We honestly gotta tone down the ignorance in these discussions. My native language isn't English, by the way. And I don't mind adapting.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

Only if you didn't leave the US. Over in Europe (and I assume Asia) it was a constant source of problems.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
I thought it was fine really. It forced us to drop some of the quirkier characters sooner. Nobody in the Netherlands uses things like the paragraph sign anymore, or the 'ĳ' glyph. And accents on words are now pretty much optional.