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A programming language designed by a Mac user might make use of the symbols §, ±, ≤ and ≥, among others. I think the tyranny of ASCII is really the tyranny of t

A programming language designed by a Mac user might make use of the symbols §, ±, ≤ and ≥, among others. I think the tyranny of ASCII is really the tyranny of the tragically poor support for entering characters beyond a small national-language set on the commonly-used OSes, especially Windows. (macOS is significantly better here but no utopia.) Windows-1252, MacRoman and so on may not be the standard character sets any more, but you wouldn't know it from what the OSes make easy to type!

qart 5y ago
I don't think there is any tyranny in any of the modern OSes. They all let you type in many languages. Maybe the feature is not enabled in some UIs, so newbies don't learn it. Linux users can use IBus or fcitx5. I often type in ಕನ್ನಡ and हिंदी when chatting with people. Typing emoticons and obscure math symbols is just as easy.
jeroenhd 5y ago
Character inputs will always differ between platforms and the most common denominator will always end up being popular for text input. Most of the world is on Windows, so most of the world will use Windows text input. From that input, a limited subset of characters will be used for common expressions, because many people simply don't know they can write the ¬ symbol. Does it make sense to use that instead of the exclamation mark for negation? I don't think so. The US International keyboard has loads of other characters currently not used in programming languages either, whether it's the ¡¿, the ²³ powers, the euro character, guillemets («») or the negation character. If Apple would decide their next Swift project will use the characters only quickly accessible to Apple users, it'll be treated just like that, only accessible to Apple users. With Apple shipping keyboards that have the £ character where the # character would otherwise be, I wouldn't be so sure if using all the available characters would blow over well. With ligature support being in every major IDE there's very little reason to step away from the old comparison operators in my opinion. What OSes make easy to type depends on where you live. It can be quite a challenge to write the Spanish ¿? style operators repeatedly, but there's no reason not to use, for example, ¿expression? instead of parentheses for "if" "switch" statements, or to use ¡expression! as a shorthand for "return". Format strings could just as easily have been written as «string» or „string”, but the characters on the American English keyboard were chosen because they were available on most layouts or out of pure laziness. I personally prefer US International over Apple's layout. I rarely need to use the paragraph key in normal text processing, and the short shift makes for a very awkward typing experience for me. The vertical enter also just seems like a waste of space to me. I don't really see how Apple's keyboard input is that much better than Windows', their special character set seems just as arbitrary as the rest. Adding more special characters found in US English only makes the situation worse for people on, for example, Italian keyboards or Polish keyboards, where despite writing in a language based on the Latin alphabet, characters with additional diacritics and such are part of the main layout and deserve separate keys. Cyrillic keyboards are just as bad, lacking most programming characters already because of the larger Cyrillic character set, although they'll have to cope with unaccessibily because of the character set difference anyway. In my opinion, the amount of special characters used in a programming language should be reduced, not increased. Backticks are already impossible to find on some keyboards, bbut languages like Javascript have gone and used them for format strings anyway. Driving people to learn a special "programmer's" keyboard layout just because the required characters aren't on their native keyboard layouts isn't a good thing. We want more compatibility, not less.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  > Apple shipping keyboards that have the £ character where the # character would otherwise be That's not really an Apple thing so much as a non-US thing. The standard PC UK layout also has a £ in that position. > I personally prefer US International over Apple's layout. Which Apple layout? Apple has its own US English, International English and British English layouts, as well as myriad other languages.

qart 5y ago

I don't think there is any tyranny in any of the modern OSes. They all let you type in many languages. Maybe the feature is not enabled in some UIs, so newbies don't learn it. Linux users can use IBus or fcitx5. I often type in ಕನ್ನಡ and हिंदी when chatting with people. Typing emoticons and obscure math symbols is just as easy.

jeroenhd 5y ago

Character inputs will always differ between platforms and the most common denominator will always end up being popular for text input. Most of the world is on Windows, so most of the world will use Windows text input. From that input, a limited subset of characters will be used for common expressions, because many people simply don't know they can write the ¬ symbol. Does it make sense to use that instead of the exclamation mark for negation? I don't think so. The US International keyboard has loads of other characters currently not used in programming languages either, whether it's the ¡¿, the ²³ powers, the euro character, guillemets («») or the negation character. If Apple would decide their next Swift project will use the characters only quickly accessible to Apple users, it'll be treated just like that, only accessible to Apple users. With Apple shipping keyboards that have the £ character where the # character would otherwise be, I wouldn't be so sure if using all the available characters would blow over well. With ligature support being in every major IDE there's very little reason to step away from the old comparison operators in my opinion. What OSes make easy to type depends on where you live. It can be quite a challenge to write the Spanish ¿? style operators repeatedly, but there's no reason not to use, for example, ¿expression? instead of parentheses for "if" "switch" statements, or to use ¡expression! as a shorthand for "return". Format strings could just as easily have been written as «string» or „string”, but the characters on the American English keyboard were chosen because they were available on most layouts or out of pure laziness. I personally prefer US International over Apple's layout. I rarely need to use the paragraph key in normal text processing, and the short shift makes for a very awkward typing experience for me. The vertical enter also just seems like a waste of space to me. I don't really see how Apple's keyboard input is that much better than Windows', their special character set seems just as arbitrary as the rest. Adding more special characters found in US English only makes the situation worse for people on, for example, Italian keyboards or Polish keyboards, where despite writing in a language based on the Latin alphabet, characters with additional diacritics and such are part of the main layout and deserve separate keys. Cyrillic keyboards are just as bad, lacking most programming characters already because of the larger Cyrillic character set, although they'll have to cope with unaccessibily because of the character set difference anyway. In my opinion, the amount of special characters used in a programming language should be reduced, not increased. Backticks are already impossible to find on some keyboards, bbut languages like Javascript have gone and used them for format strings anyway. Driving people to learn a special "programmer's" keyboard layout just because the required characters aren't on their native keyboard layouts isn't a good thing. We want more compatibility, not less.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
> Apple shipping keyboards that have the £ character where the # character would otherwise be That's not really an Apple thing so much as a non-US thing. The standard PC UK layout also has a £ in that position. > I personally prefer US International over Apple's layout. Which Apple layout? Apple has its own US English, International English and British English layouts, as well as myriad other languages.