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I was on board until "Use only plain ASCII text" Not all languages lend themselves to the ASCII character set. and "If you are unable to distill the concepts
by dusted 5y ago
I was on board until "Use only plain ASCII text"
Not all languages lend themselves to the ASCII character set.
and
"If you are unable to
distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you
have likely not fully understood the problem."
Oh, that must be why IC datasheets have those pesky timing diagrams and pinouts, the designers didn't fully understand the problem.
It is strange to see the author put so much weight on readability and comprehension in one paragraph, and then a few later, suggest that we chose deliberately NOT to use the right symbols (letters, mathematical notation, etc) and NOT to images to explain things that lend themselves to images.
- xmcqdpt2 5y agoEven English doesn't fit in ASCII! English is often used as the justification for ASCII—by technical types anyway. To use “only plain ASCII text” would mean constraining oneself (no dashes or paired quotation marks, for example). Many English loanwords are accented (outré or soupçon) as are some personal names (Zoë). Some uses of italics are considered mandatory even beyond emphasis, such as when writing the title of a work (The Art of Plain Text). Restraining the textual representation of English to ASCII due to imaginary technical limitations is ridiculous.
- RobertMiller 5y agoIn the corporate world, native or advanced English speakers who might use such loanwords may sometimes be told to knock it off and stick to using a restricted list of very basic English words, about a thousand of them. Rather than getting ESL speakers up to speed, get everybody else to use this 'LCD English'. It's all very demeaning, but if you're adhering to this you'll find that ASCII has you covered.
- transpostmeta 5y agoWhat if you want to write the name of an ESL speaker, who might well come from a country where names often don't only consist of ASCII characters? Or do they tell you to knock that off too?
- RobertMiller 5y agoDon't get me wrong, I'm not defending this "ASCII is good enough" mentality. But in the sort of environment where management is telling people not to write words like 'naïve', it's likely that somebody named Jìng is going by 'Jing' or 'John' in the office, if for no other reason than because their boss can't be bothered to figure out how to type ì without copy-pasting it. This has been my experience anyway. This sort of corporate international accessibility seems to expect concessions from everybody.