6 ms·

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 comp

by 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.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    I'm not who you're responding to, and obviously the commenter should have said "some" non-English speakers rather than "all". But the main point is still obvious and true: how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers? No need to get snarky about it. Comments like "maybe educate yourself a little" are against HN guidelines. [1] Also, Korean is different because the characters represent entire syllables, so legibility isn't impaired as much by direction. CJK scripts have historically been flexible in direction in a way that Latin scripts never have been. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - slver 5y ago
      > how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers? I'd actually like it. You know, thanks to this we have Murican Internet that's the same stack everywhere. How would YOU like it if "Internet" was just your country? We gotta disentangle this obsession with encodings as some kind of national cause for pride. Encodings are INCIDENTAL. Encodings are LEARNED. You weren't born reading right-to-left or left-to-right and you can switch both in surprisingly short amount of time, if you bothered.
      - crazygringo 5y ago
        Pride doesn't even matter here. It's simple economics. It's far less effort and cost for developers to accomodate the world's existing scripts, than it is for the vast majority of the world's population to re-learn how to read and write a new script. By orders of magnitude. And obviously, it's not just direction that differs from English but a whole host of other aspects as well.
        brulard 5y ago
        I see it the other way. It would be actually orders of magnitude less effort for the rest of the world to learn one standard system/language than to have every app/product/document adapted to every single language/script/whatever in existence
- bombcar 5y ago
  It's not the last time major portions of the world fundamentally changed how they did things to align with the major powers at the time. Even WITH all the Unicode support that currently exists in the computing world I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII. I guess you could count APL there (or perl!).
  - slver 5y ago
    Imagine if Europe was pre-metric system today. Merely proposing unification I'd be instantly downvoted, and called a bigotted racist who doesn't respect the cultural heritage of every nation. Unfortunately those are the times right now. We, the most adaptable and intelligent species on the planet, have become used to bragging about not having to adapt or know a lot. We sure do have really strong opinions about everything, though.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      I think that's the dividing line - each person decides if it's worth it to learn something new. For example, some people love foreign media so much that they trade fansubs of said media or even learn the language so they can watch. Someone who wants to program computers will most likely learn functional English, just because of how much content on that subject is in English (the "lingua franca" of computers). But someone in Mongolia who wants to text his mom has no inclination to learn a whole new language just to handle the limitations of ASCII. And if you want to sell him a phone you'll meet him where he is. (This doesn't even begin to touch the "it's not fair" aspect that people like to point at.)
      - slver 5y ago
        You PoV is understandable, but still do you believe the ongoing long-term pain of this fragmentation is LESS than the short-term pain of unifying? This is why I mentioned the metric system, and what not. Every time throughout history when we decided to unify, the advantages VASTLY, and I mean VASTLY have outweighed the short-term drawbacks. In fact I'd say, one of the biggest test for us as species is that we can fully understand, internalize and implement this concept. Because we always reach for the short term. Short term profits over long-term strategy in the enterprise. Short term economy benefits over long-term climate impact. And so on and so on. Someone in Mongolia won't have to switch overnight. Someone in Mongolia may gain the option to have it both ways until they're used to it, and eventually there will be unification. That's basic change management. Change management is a necessary art to survive and to thrive.
- account42 5y ago
  I was not aware that english is the only left-to-right language.
account42 5y ago
> 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”. I think an interesting example here is Chinese which is traditionally written top-down-right-left but these days is just as if not more commonly written left-right-top-down. There seems to be almost no push for supporting vertical text while its just assumed that RTL is a must, why is that?

by slver 5y ago

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.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  I'm not who you're responding to, and obviously the commenter should have said "some" non-English speakers rather than "all". But the main point is still obvious and true: how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers? No need to get snarky about it. Comments like "maybe educate yourself a little" are against HN guidelines. [1] Also, Korean is different because the characters represent entire syllables, so legibility isn't impaired as much by direction. CJK scripts have historically been flexible in direction in a way that Latin scripts never have been. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - slver 5y ago
    > how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers? I'd actually like it. You know, thanks to this we have Murican Internet that's the same stack everywhere. How would YOU like it if "Internet" was just your country? We gotta disentangle this obsession with encodings as some kind of national cause for pride. Encodings are INCIDENTAL. Encodings are LEARNED. You weren't born reading right-to-left or left-to-right and you can switch both in surprisingly short amount of time, if you bothered.
    - crazygringo 5y ago
      Pride doesn't even matter here. It's simple economics. It's far less effort and cost for developers to accomodate the world's existing scripts, than it is for the vast majority of the world's population to re-learn how to read and write a new script. By orders of magnitude. And obviously, it's not just direction that differs from English but a whole host of other aspects as well.
      - brulard 5y ago
        I see it the other way. It would be actually orders of magnitude less effort for the rest of the world to learn one standard system/language than to have every app/product/document adapted to every single language/script/whatever in existence
bombcar 5y ago
It's not the last time major portions of the world fundamentally changed how they did things to align with the major powers at the time. Even WITH all the Unicode support that currently exists in the computing world I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII. I guess you could count APL there (or perl!).
- slver 5y ago
  Imagine if Europe was pre-metric system today. Merely proposing unification I'd be instantly downvoted, and called a bigotted racist who doesn't respect the cultural heritage of every nation. Unfortunately those are the times right now. We, the most adaptable and intelligent species on the planet, have become used to bragging about not having to adapt or know a lot. We sure do have really strong opinions about everything, though.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I think that's the dividing line - each person decides if it's worth it to learn something new. For example, some people love foreign media so much that they trade fansubs of said media or even learn the language so they can watch. Someone who wants to program computers will most likely learn functional English, just because of how much content on that subject is in English (the "lingua franca" of computers). But someone in Mongolia who wants to text his mom has no inclination to learn a whole new language just to handle the limitations of ASCII. And if you want to sell him a phone you'll meet him where he is. (This doesn't even begin to touch the "it's not fair" aspect that people like to point at.)
    - slver 5y ago
      You PoV is understandable, but still do you believe the ongoing long-term pain of this fragmentation is LESS than the short-term pain of unifying? This is why I mentioned the metric system, and what not. Every time throughout history when we decided to unify, the advantages VASTLY, and I mean VASTLY have outweighed the short-term drawbacks. In fact I'd say, one of the biggest test for us as species is that we can fully understand, internalize and implement this concept. Because we always reach for the short term. Short term profits over long-term strategy in the enterprise. Short term economy benefits over long-term climate impact. And so on and so on. Someone in Mongolia won't have to switch overnight. Someone in Mongolia may gain the option to have it both ways until they're used to it, and eventually there will be unification. That's basic change management. Change management is a necessary art to survive and to thrive.
account42 5y ago
I was not aware that english is the only left-to-right language.

account42 5y ago

> 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”. I think an interesting example here is Chinese which is traditionally written top-down-right-left but these days is just as if not more commonly written left-right-top-down. There seems to be almost no push for supporting vertical text while its just assumed that RTL is a must, why is that?