7 ms·

?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
        crazygringo 5y ago
        That's just factually untrue. The percentage of the world population involved in script adaptation and language translation is really quite tiny. Consumers vastly, vastly, vastly outnumber producers. Not to mention that we have things like automated translation that are "good enough" for many cases as well. Whereas learning a new language to fluency, for most adults, takes about ten years.
        5y ago
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  Okay, well sorry I was being snarky, so let me try to be a bit more serious. You are proposing that we teach millions-billions of people a new way to write, rather than teach a few hundred thousand at most how to write computer programs that accommodate existing ways of writing. Like maybe you underestimate how genuinely ridiculously hard of a problem it is to get billions of people to do anything! It would take literal decades of work by multiple governments and unimaginable amounts of money! Getting 10 people to agree on a favorite programming language is hard enough. Teaching a city full of kids a new way to multiply numbers takes 1000s of hours of prep, planning, syllabus development etc. by teachers. Just imagine how much harder this is. Certainly I can see how nice it would be if the whole world used the same date format, same language, same metric system etc. But from a practical point of view, making systems to accommodate the way people do things is 1000s of times cheaper and easier than getting them all to change.
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.

> ?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
      - crazygringo 5y ago
        That's just factually untrue. The percentage of the world population involved in script adaptation and language translation is really quite tiny. Consumers vastly, vastly, vastly outnumber producers. Not to mention that we have things like automated translation that are "good enough" for many cases as well. Whereas learning a new language to fluency, for most adults, takes about ten years.
        5y ago
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Okay, well sorry I was being snarky, so let me try to be a bit more serious. You are proposing that we teach millions-billions of people a new way to write, rather than teach a few hundred thousand at most how to write computer programs that accommodate existing ways of writing. Like maybe you underestimate how genuinely ridiculously hard of a problem it is to get billions of people to do anything! It would take literal decades of work by multiple governments and unimaginable amounts of money! Getting 10 people to agree on a favorite programming language is hard enough. Teaching a city full of kids a new way to multiply numbers takes 1000s of hours of prep, planning, syllabus development etc. by teachers. Just imagine how much harder this is. Certainly I can see how nice it would be if the whole world used the same date format, same language, same metric system etc. But from a practical point of view, making systems to accommodate the way people do things is 1000s of times cheaper and easier than getting them all to change.

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.