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I am convinced that this was one of the secrets to the USA’s rise to computing dominance: It had a language and alphabet that was amenable to a relatively simp

I am convinced that this was one of the secrets to the USA’s rise to computing dominance: It had a language and alphabet that was amenable to a relatively simple encoding combined with a massive market of people that didn’t care if anything else worked. Thus even the very slow and limited memory computers of that time could actually do useful text manipulation (like sorting phone books) in a reasonable amount of time.

dmytrish 3y ago
My perspective, from a non-native speaker: Latin alphabet has happened to overlap with majority of world capital and economy. That is all to it. It's a never-ending baroque timesink to learn English spelling properly, but it did not matter. Computing based on Chinese or Arabic would be a hindrance. Computing based on Hebrew, Cyrillic, Greek or Hindi would not be in any way (although for Slavic languages I do find flexibility of word order and plethora of word forms a hindrance, but it's a linguistic one).
- xeonmc 3y ago
  and Korean?
chris_wot 3y ago
Actually, it took a long time to get to Unicode. Computers started with 7-but character encodings (and many rivals, including EBCDIC). Thankfully, text processing became pretty critical so they formed ASCII, when they went from 7-bit encodings to 8-bit encodings things improved, but then committees realised Latin dialects together had more than 255 characters… hence for some time we were all in code page hell. That’s why you got ISO-8599 - the most famous of which is ISO-8599-1. The genius of Unicode was they took all this junk and mapper into character planes, with ISO-8599-1 plastered into the BMP. I went into it in detail years ago: http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/unicode-and-oracle.html?m=1 http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/unicode-and...
foobiekr 3y ago
I think that’s right. In practice it just took time for memory to increase a bit and for statistical input methods to show up. Certainly actively bad writing systems delayed IT adoption. In fact, famously, the underlying theory of the Fifth Generation Conputing Project was the belief that advanced intelligent machines were needed to provide a working word processor for Japanese. No small amount of cultural supremacy was involved in that era, as well, now mostly forgotten.

dmytrish 3y ago

My perspective, from a non-native speaker: Latin alphabet has happened to overlap with majority of world capital and economy. That is all to it. It's a never-ending baroque timesink to learn English spelling properly, but it did not matter. Computing based on Chinese or Arabic would be a hindrance. Computing based on Hebrew, Cyrillic, Greek or Hindi would not be in any way (although for Slavic languages I do find flexibility of word order and plethora of word forms a hindrance, but it's a linguistic one).

xeonmc 3y ago
and Korean?

chris_wot 3y ago

Actually, it took a long time to get to Unicode. Computers started with 7-but character encodings (and many rivals, including EBCDIC). Thankfully, text processing became pretty critical so they formed ASCII, when they went from 7-bit encodings to 8-bit encodings things improved, but then committees realised Latin dialects together had more than 255 characters… hence for some time we were all in code page hell. That’s why you got ISO-8599 - the most famous of which is ISO-8599-1. The genius of Unicode was they took all this junk and mapper into character planes, with ISO-8599-1 plastered into the BMP. I went into it in detail years ago: http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/unicode-and-oracle.html?m=1 http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/unicode-and...

foobiekr 3y ago

I think that’s right. In practice it just took time for memory to increase a bit and for statistical input methods to show up. Certainly actively bad writing systems delayed IT adoption. In fact, famously, the underlying theory of the Fifth Generation Conputing Project was the belief that advanced intelligent machines were needed to provide a working word processor for Japanese. No small amount of cultural supremacy was involved in that era, as well, now mostly forgotten.