6 ms·

That's an incredibly English (speaking) centric view of machine design. Why should our 26 letter alphabet with only two cases be the restrictive set of characte

That's an incredibly English (speaking) centric view of machine design. Why should our 26 letter alphabet with only two cases be the restrictive set of characters that everybody in the world has to write terminal commands and filenames and code in? Are you saying that all code should be written in English? Even without bringing up languages with different writing systems, 7 bit ASCII doesn't allow you to correctly write words in many western languages.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
collegeburner 5y ago
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > English is the language of the world Math is the language of the universe. How am I supposed to represent/parse/write mathematical symbols like ∊ or ℚ or π or µ or ⊃ or ⎷ or ⋦ or ∑ when I only have ASCII?
  - collegeburner 5y ago
    Hmm fair point. I think maybe stuff like LaTeX is better for domain-specific though. Still we could have a much simpler unicode with a max 2-byte character and characters with consistent width, no joining/merging/shaping, eliminate the need for harfbuzz if we just refuse to support non-English human languages on computers.
    - colejohnson66 5y ago
      That’s what we had before Unicode, and it was hell. Every country had their own opinions on what to put in the blank spaces in the codepoint map. As for a max 2-byte encoding, UCS-2 tried that. Turns out 65k points isn’t enough (even ignoring emoji), and now we have the hack known as UTF-16. Unicode currently encompasses over 144 thousand codepoints. How many are emoji? Only ~3.5k. So even if we removed emoji, 16 bits still wouldn’t be nearly enough. Instead of saying we should go back to the past, one should first see why we don’t do the things we did in that past
- rkangel 5y ago
  > English is the language of the world and we should use computers to push everyone to learn This (and everything you wrote after) is incredibly bigoted. English is only just the most spoken language in the world. 1.35bn people have English as a 1st or 2nd language whereas 1.12bn people have Mandarin Chinese[1]. And even if it is the most popular language (by a narrow margin) why should that mean that everyone else has to speak it? Let's imagine a world where the Chinese government got everyone (Cantonese etc.) retrained to speak Mandarin over the next 10 years so that it overtook English. Would you then change your view to think that everything should be written in Mandarin? No, you just want everyone else to adopt your own self centred approach so that you don't have to take into account anyone else's preferences. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-languages-worldwide/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20there%20were%20around,at%20the%20time%20of%20survey https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-l....
  - collegeburner 5y ago
    Because it's an effective tool to maintain American cultural hegemony and I want to do that. It's an effective way to spread American values and further American interests and computers are a good way to do it. I reject using chinese as a global language because it furthers chinese influence.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      It's an effective way to get every country to make their own text encoding, thereby returning us all to the dark ages of computing where you actually had to care about this stuff instead of just using unicode for everything. I mean seriously, text encodings as a propaganda tool?
temac 5y ago
Yet I would say the majority of the unicode posts linked on HN are not about non latin scripts but about silly emoji / flags etc
- JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
  Because it's easier to visualize / talk about than some weird (to us) Hangul script but the problem is exactly the same: english isn't the only language on earth.
  - temac 5y ago
    I would prefer to see issues on real text if they even exist. I don't care about some missing combining support for emojis esp for probably a quickly moving target.
- rkangel 5y ago
  Yes, I don't understand why non 'text' characters such as flags and emoji were allowed in Unicode. They appear to me to be a fundamentally different concept. That said, I have always assumed that these problems we get with emoji also have equivalents that show up in other languages, it's just that we speak English and so only see them with Emoji. Maybe it's good that Emoji were included because it actually stresses our Unicode implementations! And this is all before you introduce text that is written right-to-left like arabic scripts.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    > Yes, I don't understand why non 'text' characters such as flags and emoji were allowed in Unicode. Just my 2 cents, but if ASCII includes, among other things, "characters" for linefeed, 4 unspecified "device control characters", EOT (End of Transmission), and a character to ring a bell, then I guess its okay to put some smileys and flags into Unicode.
  - numpad0 5y ago
    I believe it was solely about disrupting Japanese flip phone web which was an appendix to the web that was starting to swell up really badly.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Coincidentally, this would be my response to the root comment as well. If anything more complicated than a box doesn't belong in a Terminal, how do we expect speakers of non-western languages to use the Terminal?
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  I specififcally wrote "my terminal", not "a Terminal". I am well aware, and supportive, of the need to encode the entirety of human script and written symbolics in a unified format. And the reason why my terminal doesn't need anything beyond basic modifying diacritic marks and single-codepoint symbols (like blocks and line characters for text-user-interfaces) is because I do not use it to write prose is a variety of languages, I use it to communicate with a machine, administrating systems, designing backend software, and analysing machine-written logfiles.
Galanwe 5y ago
I knew that kind of comment would pop up, and oddly enough, I have the exact opposite opinion. I am NOT a native English speaker. I cannot even write my name with ASCII letters. To me, the situation looks exactly the reverse of your comment, I see the urge of putting Unicode everywhere as an essentially white savior syndrome that nobody asked for. I want to be able to write name in Word or other text processing software, but nothing more. The command line, network protocols, etc. There are not the realm of fancy dynamic length characters. I want simple glyphs with fixed size bytes mapping. I don't want to embed a complicated Unicode parsing library in every software. When I'm in the realm of programming, I'm not here to do politics. I'm here for the most reasonable, straightforward, working solution for a set of problems. If that means accepting a fixed set of characters, I'm 100% fine with that.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > The command line, network protocols, etc. There are not the realm of fancy dynamic length characters. So how does one write, say, the backend for a reservation system managing thousands of hotel room bookings every hour, all over the world? I'm pretty sure there will be ALOT of customers with non-ascii names, not to mention adresses and hotel names. How does one write a system like twitter, where messages in every known system of writing need to be be sent, processed, stored, delivered, commented, displayed? And btw. network protocols and backends work with arbitrary data all the time: Audio & video streaming, networked gaming, sensor readouts, images. Even plaintext webpages are often transmitted in compressed form. So if these systems are the "realm" of arbitrary bytestreams to encode everything from classical music, over sha-hashes, to gifs of dancing dogs, they may as well encode a few hundred different systems of writing and some smiley faces.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  You may not care about putting your non-ASCII name in a file, but others do. As a programmer, you shouldn’t be preventing the user from doing what they want when other software lets them do it just fine. Especially things as simple as file names. You can’t say you’re just solving problems when you ignore the requirements of those problems. Internationalization requires Unicode support. The cat is out of the bag, and if your software doesn’t support Unicode. you’re limiting what your users can do with it. Maybe that’s fine with you and a certain program, but it’s not for a lot of people. You also don’t need to embed full Unicode parsing/support libs if you just treat the user’s input as a byte stream. When programmers try to get fancy and ToUppercase() a byte blob with no regard for what that blob represents - that’s when we have problems.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

collegeburner 5y ago

usrbinbash 5y ago
> English is the language of the world Math is the language of the universe. How am I supposed to represent/parse/write mathematical symbols like ∊ or ℚ or π or µ or ⊃ or ⎷ or ⋦ or ∑ when I only have ASCII?
- collegeburner 5y ago
  Hmm fair point. I think maybe stuff like LaTeX is better for domain-specific though. Still we could have a much simpler unicode with a max 2-byte character and characters with consistent width, no joining/merging/shaping, eliminate the need for harfbuzz if we just refuse to support non-English human languages on computers.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    That’s what we had before Unicode, and it was hell. Every country had their own opinions on what to put in the blank spaces in the codepoint map. As for a max 2-byte encoding, UCS-2 tried that. Turns out 65k points isn’t enough (even ignoring emoji), and now we have the hack known as UTF-16. Unicode currently encompasses over 144 thousand codepoints. How many are emoji? Only ~3.5k. So even if we removed emoji, 16 bits still wouldn’t be nearly enough. Instead of saying we should go back to the past, one should first see why we don’t do the things we did in that past
rkangel 5y ago
> English is the language of the world and we should use computers to push everyone to learn This (and everything you wrote after) is incredibly bigoted. English is only just the most spoken language in the world. 1.35bn people have English as a 1st or 2nd language whereas 1.12bn people have Mandarin Chinese[1]. And even if it is the most popular language (by a narrow margin) why should that mean that everyone else has to speak it? Let's imagine a world where the Chinese government got everyone (Cantonese etc.) retrained to speak Mandarin over the next 10 years so that it overtook English. Would you then change your view to think that everything should be written in Mandarin? No, you just want everyone else to adopt your own self centred approach so that you don't have to take into account anyone else's preferences. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-languages-worldwide/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20there%20were%20around,at%20the%20time%20of%20survey https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-l....
- collegeburner 5y ago
  Because it's an effective tool to maintain American cultural hegemony and I want to do that. It's an effective way to spread American values and further American interests and computers are a good way to do it. I reject using chinese as a global language because it furthers chinese influence.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    It's an effective way to get every country to make their own text encoding, thereby returning us all to the dark ages of computing where you actually had to care about this stuff instead of just using unicode for everything. I mean seriously, text encodings as a propaganda tool?

temac 5y ago

Yet I would say the majority of the unicode posts linked on HN are not about non latin scripts but about silly emoji / flags etc

JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
Because it's easier to visualize / talk about than some weird (to us) Hangul script but the problem is exactly the same: english isn't the only language on earth.
- temac 5y ago
  I would prefer to see issues on real text if they even exist. I don't care about some missing combining support for emojis esp for probably a quickly moving target.
rkangel 5y ago
Yes, I don't understand why non 'text' characters such as flags and emoji were allowed in Unicode. They appear to me to be a fundamentally different concept. That said, I have always assumed that these problems we get with emoji also have equivalents that show up in other languages, it's just that we speak English and so only see them with Emoji. Maybe it's good that Emoji were included because it actually stresses our Unicode implementations! And this is all before you introduce text that is written right-to-left like arabic scripts.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > Yes, I don't understand why non 'text' characters such as flags and emoji were allowed in Unicode. Just my 2 cents, but if ASCII includes, among other things, "characters" for linefeed, 4 unspecified "device control characters", EOT (End of Transmission), and a character to ring a bell, then I guess its okay to put some smileys and flags into Unicode.
- numpad0 5y ago
  I believe it was solely about disrupting Japanese flip phone web which was an appendix to the web that was starting to swell up really badly.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

Coincidentally, this would be my response to the root comment as well. If anything more complicated than a box doesn't belong in a Terminal, how do we expect speakers of non-western languages to use the Terminal?

usrbinbash 5y ago
I specififcally wrote "my terminal", not "a Terminal". I am well aware, and supportive, of the need to encode the entirety of human script and written symbolics in a unified format. And the reason why my terminal doesn't need anything beyond basic modifying diacritic marks and single-codepoint symbols (like blocks and line characters for text-user-interfaces) is because I do not use it to write prose is a variety of languages, I use it to communicate with a machine, administrating systems, designing backend software, and analysing machine-written logfiles.

Galanwe 5y ago

I knew that kind of comment would pop up, and oddly enough, I have the exact opposite opinion. I am NOT a native English speaker. I cannot even write my name with ASCII letters. To me, the situation looks exactly the reverse of your comment, I see the urge of putting Unicode everywhere as an essentially white savior syndrome that nobody asked for. I want to be able to write name in Word or other text processing software, but nothing more. The command line, network protocols, etc. There are not the realm of fancy dynamic length characters. I want simple glyphs with fixed size bytes mapping. I don't want to embed a complicated Unicode parsing library in every software. When I'm in the realm of programming, I'm not here to do politics. I'm here for the most reasonable, straightforward, working solution for a set of problems. If that means accepting a fixed set of characters, I'm 100% fine with that.

usrbinbash 5y ago
> The command line, network protocols, etc. There are not the realm of fancy dynamic length characters. So how does one write, say, the backend for a reservation system managing thousands of hotel room bookings every hour, all over the world? I'm pretty sure there will be ALOT of customers with non-ascii names, not to mention adresses and hotel names. How does one write a system like twitter, where messages in every known system of writing need to be be sent, processed, stored, delivered, commented, displayed? And btw. network protocols and backends work with arbitrary data all the time: Audio & video streaming, networked gaming, sensor readouts, images. Even plaintext webpages are often transmitted in compressed form. So if these systems are the "realm" of arbitrary bytestreams to encode everything from classical music, over sha-hashes, to gifs of dancing dogs, they may as well encode a few hundred different systems of writing and some smiley faces.
colejohnson66 5y ago
You may not care about putting your non-ASCII name in a file, but others do. As a programmer, you shouldn’t be preventing the user from doing what they want when other software lets them do it just fine. Especially things as simple as file names. You can’t say you’re just solving problems when you ignore the requirements of those problems. Internationalization requires Unicode support. The cat is out of the bag, and if your software doesn’t support Unicode. you’re limiting what your users can do with it. Maybe that’s fine with you and a certain program, but it’s not for a lot of people. You also don’t need to embed full Unicode parsing/support libs if you just treat the user’s input as a byte stream. When programmers try to get fancy and ToUppercase() a byte blob with no regard for what that blob represents - that’s when we have problems.