10 ms·

The curious case of the disappearing Polish Ś (2015)

125 points by rappatic 3y ago

Freak_NL 3y ago
There is probably a lesson in here about trying to be too clever about perceived bugs. It feels similar to developers removing the ability to select text from not just one-word buttons, but all kinds of UI elements on a website (because it looks ugly when people accidentally select the text), which has the effect of also removing the user's ability to, well, select text, for all sorts of valid reasons (dictionary lookup of an unfamiliar word, copying a line of text to someone else (bug report: “the app says '[…]' when I do this, but it should say […]”)).
Digit-Al 3y ago
There is probably a lesson here on the importance of having a culturally diverse team as well.
- fortran77 3y ago
  Has any diversity officer in any American company every had adding people from Poland (or any European country) as a goal? In fact, I was chastized in a big company for having too many people from Europe -- and I'm not from Europe myself!
  - ajuc 3y ago
    Diversity is mostly perceived through American lenses = skin color, gender, sex :) It's a cargo cult at this point.
  - Swizec 3y ago
    As a 0th gen immigrant from a low income country (Slovenia), I have been told many times that DEI is not for me. My minority is too small so I just count as white. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - mbork_pl 3y ago
      > My minority is too small I can't decide whether this is hilarious, depressing, or both at the same time. (BTW, another Pole here, who can't really comprehend the American obsession with race/skin color. I'd understand it – in a sense – 100 or 500 years ago, but it's 2024, why does anyone even care?)
      - mikrl 3y ago
        In North America you get lumped in with the Germans and the Russians and the Austrians too… glad I have a morbid sense of humour!
        Swizec 3y ago
        > and the Austrians too Funfact: Nobody knows exactly how many people of Slovenian descent live in USA because until 1918 many of them just said "Austrian" on the immigration forms to avoid anti-slavic sentiment. And we were technically part of AustroHungary so it wasn't even lying. Officially there's about 180,000 of us. Orders of magnitude fewer than the minorities that DEI efforts tend to think about.
      - sangnoir 3y ago
        > who can't really comprehend the American obsession with race/skin color America's very founding was based on the "obsession" of race/skin color. The expansion west wasn't very, uh, egalitarian. > I'd understand it – in a sense – 100 or 500 years ago 100 years ago was 1924 - the "Tulsa race riots" had been 3 years prior, and a certain voluntary organization known for grandiose titles and its obsession with race/skin color was having a massive resurgence.
deruta 3y ago
Prior discussion (May 2021): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27230826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27230826 Btw, I cannot recommend enough the other work by Marcin Wichary. For me, he's the paragon of making the most of what you can do in terms of, to put it best, tailoring things exactly to your specific needs and tastes. (My copy of Shift Happens is on its way, can't wait!)
kakaz 3y ago
Very interesting, however author, probably because of his age, told you bullshit about computers industry in Poland during communism era. Poland has flourishing, internal, computer industry, and I would say, vwry6food one, even comparing to western standards. Models such as Odra ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer) ) was not worse than IBM products, and constrictors designed, at 70ties, several prototypes which fits suitcase and able to be transported by single person. It was groundbreaking conception predating any PC or laptop idea on the western market. It all ends with 1980, the rise of Jaruzelski junta and War State declaration.
- szajbus 3y ago
  You can call Odra anything but a PC and the author is clearly referring to availability (or lack of) of personal computers.
  - Cosi1125 3y ago
    Polish (personal) computing industry definitely had a great – and, sadly, largely wasted – potential, however Odra is the worst example to prove this point. A poster child of the Polish "engineering thought" in the 70s was K-202[1], whose creator's tragic story shows how the dreams of the "Polish Silicon Valley" were defeated by the communist reality. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202
- etc-hosts 3y ago
  There is a really interesting museum of pre-90s minicomputers on a floor of the Palace Of Culture in the middle of Warsaw. The units are huge. The computers are well preserved. They're not plugged in or powered on.
baq 3y ago
Default keepass config used to steal a global shortcut for one of the polish diactrics. Countless browser extensions do the same. US-centric devs look around for unused key combinations and are happy to find them without asking themselves the question of 'why are these free?' Can't blame them too much, though.
throw0101d 3y ago
For anyone using an Apple OS (macOS, iOS), you can get this character on a US keyboard (with US keymap) by pressing and holding "S" (shift-s): a mini-menu will pop-up, and "Ś" will be one of two options. For lower-case "ś", the pop-up mini-menu will have three options, the first being "ß".
- verandaguy 3y ago
  For readers unfamiliar with German: ß is the German sharp S. It’s pronounced like a normal English “s” in situations where the letter “s” may be pronounced closer to the English letter “z.” For example: Strase -> shtrazeh Straße -> shtrasseh
  - syncsynchalt 3y ago
    For anyone who has trouble sight-reading a ß as a beta, it may help to know the ß glyph shape is formed as a ligature of two letters: one now-archaic "long s" (ſ), followed by a "z". Americans will know the "long s" from documents such as the US constitution (every child jokes about the "Congrefs" misspelling). The name of the character (eszett) means "sz" but actually represents "ss" for tortured historic reasons that I can't recall, but which I think [1] tries to explain. More typographic trivia: The uppercase transform of "ß" is "SS", which causes bugs in code that assumes case changes won't change the character count. The language council fought for decades against recognizing an uppercase ß but eventually gave in if only to have the ability to computer-encode erroneous capitalizations, and it's been in Unicode for over a decade now: ẞ [1] https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/11/05/the-story-of-eszett-s/ https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/11/05/the-story-of-eszett...
- JadeNB 3y ago
  There's also a character viewer that you can display under the Input menu in the menu bar; and there's a keyboard viewer that lets you discover unexpected, say, SHIFT-OPTION-blah key combinations that will produce those characters at a stroke.
jakub_g 3y ago
Linking to previous and previous-previous discussions: ś is not the only disappearing Polish latter. See also: - ł and ć: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988553 - ą: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27245193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27245193
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
It's great that the OP thought to copiously comment the opaque conditional that led to the 'collision of features' that caused the key to disappear. But that isn't really helping. He had to find the code to begin with, go down the debug trail from scratch to get to the point of reading the comment. He had special knowledge to help him; most of the rest of us would have taken longer. Big code bases need a 'business requirements' document. If e.g. you wanted to rewrite the codebase, you could read the BR doc and know that if you accomplished all that, you'd be feature-compliant in your new implementation. That is, you weren't going to get any rash of calls from customers about their feature being broken or entirely missing. You can pore over the codebase and get all that info without the BR doc. But like my son complains at his job, shepherding a million-line behemoth ten years forward, much of what he sees in the code is opaque, badly done (and thus hard to figure out what's the feature and what's accidental side effects) or obsolete (that customer special became irrelevant five years ago or whatever). A business requirements doc can be reviewed by actual non-programmers and judgements made of what's still relevant. So revisiting the project (reimplementing, integrating a new feature into the rats nest without disturbing previous features) becomes if not easy, at least possible in a bounded timeframe. You young folks will have lots of tools for this kind of thing, born of Agile processes I suppose. I suspect any such database of entries is woefully sparse, badly described or never referenced. Like most 'productivity tools', if they aren't part of somebody's job description they become orphans. Don't know the ultimate solution. People are people, and diligent leaving of breadcrumbs is just another annoying thing to do. But somebody (maybe you?) will bless you for it down the line!
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Note that I do not discourage comments. Comments in code can be very useful. But they do not help you find the code responsible for a certain business requirement. Not unless that's what you put in the comment e.g. a BR reference. I find code comments to be at their best, when they explain how the code works or is to be used or how it relates to something elsewhere. You know, comments about the code or other code. Relevant to understanding what you're about to read. Comments that are essentially user stories disrupt the flow and don't help interpret the actual logic. Those comments belong elsewhere.
koliber 3y ago
In a similar fashion, you can not type the capital letter Ł in Notion. You type the letter with SHIFT-OPTION-L on the Polish keyboard on a Mac. Notion uses the SHIFT-OPTION-L keyboard combo for it's own purposes. This happens in many programs for various keys, depending on which keyboard shortcuts a program implements. A solution to this is to allow remapping of keyboard shortcuts in an application.
ajuc 3y ago
Outlook has a shortcut Alt+S to send the current e-mail. In Polish "Hello" is "Cześć". When you acidentally have non-Polish locale enabled and write "Cześć" in Outlook - you send "Cze" as your whole e-mail. "Cze" is a very informal greeting, sth like "Yo". There has been thousands of such e-mails in Polish companies sent to people who really shouldn't be greeted with "Yo" :) It happened to me too, and I'm still not sure how it happened. I think it might have been caused by windows update. And in the past it was even worse - Windows installed both Polish-programmer and Polish-typist keyboard layouts by default and there was a very easy to hit accidentally shortcut to switch between them. If you hit it most of things still work but your "y" and "z" were swapped. So if you had "z" or "y" in your password - the next time you log in - you suddenly can't. This caused countless problems for IT support all over the country :)
- Swizec 3y ago
  > both Polish-programmer and Polish-typist keyboard layouts Brilliant! Growing up in Slovenia there was only the typist locale, qwertz of course. Coding was full of altgr + <key> combos and it gets real annoying real fast. Most of us nerds switched to the US layout fairly early and simply ignored diactritics. š becomes s, č becomes c, ž becomes z. Especially when texting came around and mobile phones didn’t even have those letters. Most people from Slovenia can fluently read words without diacritics and recognize based on context. Even if you weren’t a nerd, in the 90’s and 00’s it was a gamble if the software or website you’re using will render those characters so people learned not to use them. iOS still doesn’t have a Slovenian layout. Not sure about Android. I hear in the commodore days people used to write ss, cc, zz but that didn’t catch on in my generation.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    > Brilliant! Maybe it was brilliant early on, but by 2000 like 99% of computer users didn't knew about the typist layout and yet it was always one accidental keypress away :) It was a shortut that you could press accidentally when you highlighted whole words with ctrl+shift+left/right. > ignored diactritics Yeah we wrote without diacritics too early on. On computers because in 90s there were 3 competing 8bit encodings so it was like 66% chance you got the encoding wrong. Most nerds (me included) could recognize the most common encoding mismatches visually :) Thank god for utf-8 :). We had diacritics in phones but it was a hassle to type them with numerical keyboards on dumbphones, so most people didn't. So now it looks "lazy" to avoid diacritics and most people use them AFAIK. BTW it's funny how outdated Polish ortography (we still have digraphs sz/cz/rz/dz and even some trigraphs like dzi which most Latin Slavic scripts replaced with š etc.) became a positive early on during the computer revolution.
pjmlp 3y ago
Quite an interesting read. In Portugal we had a similar workaround in the early days of computers not supporting our alphabet properly. Like in Polish there are plenty of words that without diacritics get another completly unrelated meaning, e.g. caça vs caca, which you didn't want the interpretation to be left to the receiver. So tricks got invented, like adding additional letters for the missing diatrics, é becomes eh, è becomes he or eh as in the former case, the example above would be cac,a and so on. However it was still quite flexible, not everyone uses the same extension set.
Tade0 3y ago
I had a similar issue when ASUS's bloatware background service decided to bind something to both Alt+S and Alt+A globally. I have to keep it disabled or else I won't be able to type ą, Ą, ś and Ś without using Caps Lock to work around the issue.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
BTW, Ś can be typed using the new AZERTY by pressing Alt Gr + 2 then S : https://norme-azerty.fr/en/ https://norme-azerty.fr/en/ > Right Alt in Windows was internally mapped as a rarely-used combination of Ctrl and Alt pressed together. Why "was" ? (the link is broken) You will also note that the new AZERTY doesn't use left Alt, rightly assuming that it's expected to be used for menu shortcuts. (It's a shame though that the new AZERTY can do Greek... but not Cyrillic, a real missed opportunity for a true pan-European keyboard !) ---- > Both Windows 3.x and 95 had terrific keyboard support. The menu items and dialogs had controls that could be accessed easily by mouse… but also much quicker by pressing Alt and the underlined letter: [...] > Most of Microsoft Windows UI could be turned into a sequence of keyboard shortcuts, which was incredibly powerful (and something Mac could still learn from). Is that specifically Windows though, or rather IBM's Common User Access ? (Apple, as a competitor, and being Apple, did their own thing.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39130984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39130984 http://www.susandoreydesigns.com/software/CommonUserAccessGUIDesign.pdf http://www.susandoreydesigns.com/software/CommonUserAccessGU...
- alfanick 3y ago
  That doesn't help Polish people - no sane person would use Azerty in Poland ;)
  - ajuc 3y ago
    Or qwertz for that matter. The Polish-machinist keyboard layout even stopped being enabled by default in Windows after causing countless "I can't log in" problems for like 20 years :)
    - garaetjjte 3y ago
      I often quipped that hardest part of installing Windows was that you needed to know to switch 214 to programmer layout.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    AZERTY, just like QWERTY, and QWERTZ should probably be all discarded anyway, since they date back to the now nearly 150 years old era, designed so that typists don't type too fast, which caused jamming to these early machines. In favour maybe of the likes of Dvorak (hey, wasn't he Czech ?) or BÉPO (any central/eastern-European equivalents ?). (The same researchers seem to have made a "new BÉPO" version, which, I guess, might be a "next step", when/if the new AZERTY becomes common ??) But that's not the point of the new AZERTY, its point is to provide a keyboard layout that finally allows proper typing in (Latin- and Greek-based) languages other than English. (The old AZERTY still didn't allow that, for instance no capital letters with diacritics, unless if maybe you use more advanced software ?) (Also, a much easier access to the {([])} symbols than the old AZERTY, which programmers are sure to appreciate !) All the while still keeping a familiar layout - and you'll have to concede that it should be more familiar to QWERTY / QWERTZ users than Dvorak / BÉPO, won't you ?
crabbone 3y ago
At this point, I've forgotten the struggle of global hotkeys interfering with uncommon symbols. Using Emacs, when I need to write in a language that doesn't use only Latin symbols, I switch to phonetic translit for that language. I.e. I still type only using Latin symbols, but some sequences of symbols translate into different letters in the target alphabet. Also, maybe less so today, but at the time when internationalization was usually even worse than it is today on typical computers available to general public, it was very common, at least for Poles outside Poland to write w/o any diacritics at all. There's not so much overlap, and usually you can figure it out from the context. BTW, in a very similar way, Russian ё is often replaced by e. To the point that the "incorrect" variant is today acceptable even in newspapers. Alternatively, if I see Russian text that uses "ё", I get a feeling that it's about patriotism and must be some self-aggrandizing propaganda.
jetzzz 3y ago
The real story here is about bad JS KeyboardEvent API. I think a lot of JS code in the wild does these incorrect checks and author's code after "fixing" the bug is still incorrect. When handling keyboard shortcuts you want an exact match, in this case you want to check that the only modifier used is Ctrl. JS API does not make that easy, you need manually check that all other modifiers are not pressed.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> This is the base English alphabet, largely the same as a classic Latin/Roman alphabet: > ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ That's not all that similar. The Latin alphabet would be: > ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVX (You can browse the Pompeii graffiti and many inscriptions are just someone writing down an alphabet. It's pretty cool, if you're me.) The five letters we've added (though Y and probably Z were already in use in Latin, representing Greek letters in Greek words) are pretty comparable to Polish adding 9 letters to ours. > To find room for the extra letters, typewriters needed to dispense with some punctuation, most notably semicolons (comma + backspace + colon), and parentheses (replaced in common use by slashes). ...why? This would make sense if manufacturing typewriters were difficult and expensive, making it imperative to manufacture Polish typewriter chassis on all the same machinery that makes English ones. I tend to suspect that even at the time this was not the case, but maybe. There's no excuse today; just use more keys on Polish keyboards.

125 points by rappatic 3y ago

There is probably a lesson in here about trying to be too clever about perceived bugs. It feels similar to developers removing the ability to select text from not just one-word buttons, but all kinds of UI elements on a website (because it looks ugly when people accidentally select the text), which has the effect of also removing the user's ability to, well, select text, for all sorts of valid reasons (dictionary lookup of an unfamiliar word, copying a line of text to someone else (bug report: “the app says '[…]' when I do this, but it should say […]”)).

Digit-Al 3y ago

There is probably a lesson here on the importance of having a culturally diverse team as well.

fortran77 3y ago
Has any diversity officer in any American company every had adding people from Poland (or any European country) as a goal? In fact, I was chastized in a big company for having too many people from Europe -- and I'm not from Europe myself!
- ajuc 3y ago
  Diversity is mostly perceived through American lenses = skin color, gender, sex :) It's a cargo cult at this point.
- Swizec 3y ago
  As a 0th gen immigrant from a low income country (Slovenia), I have been told many times that DEI is not for me. My minority is too small so I just count as white. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - mbork_pl 3y ago
    > My minority is too small I can't decide whether this is hilarious, depressing, or both at the same time. (BTW, another Pole here, who can't really comprehend the American obsession with race/skin color. I'd understand it – in a sense – 100 or 500 years ago, but it's 2024, why does anyone even care?)
    - mikrl 3y ago
      In North America you get lumped in with the Germans and the Russians and the Austrians too… glad I have a morbid sense of humour!
      - Swizec 3y ago
        > and the Austrians too Funfact: Nobody knows exactly how many people of Slovenian descent live in USA because until 1918 many of them just said "Austrian" on the immigration forms to avoid anti-slavic sentiment. And we were technically part of AustroHungary so it wasn't even lying. Officially there's about 180,000 of us. Orders of magnitude fewer than the minorities that DEI efforts tend to think about.
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      > who can't really comprehend the American obsession with race/skin color America's very founding was based on the "obsession" of race/skin color. The expansion west wasn't very, uh, egalitarian. > I'd understand it – in a sense – 100 or 500 years ago 100 years ago was 1924 - the "Tulsa race riots" had been 3 years prior, and a certain voluntary organization known for grandiose titles and its obsession with race/skin color was having a massive resurgence.

deruta 3y ago

Prior discussion (May 2021): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27230826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27230826 Btw, I cannot recommend enough the other work by Marcin Wichary. For me, he's the paragon of making the most of what you can do in terms of, to put it best, tailoring things exactly to your specific needs and tastes. (My copy of Shift Happens is on its way, can't wait!)

kakaz 3y ago

Very interesting, however author, probably because of his age, told you bullshit about computers industry in Poland during communism era. Poland has flourishing, internal, computer industry, and I would say, vwry6food one, even comparing to western standards. Models such as Odra ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer) ) was not worse than IBM products, and constrictors designed, at 70ties, several prototypes which fits suitcase and able to be transported by single person. It was groundbreaking conception predating any PC or laptop idea on the western market. It all ends with 1980, the rise of Jaruzelski junta and War State declaration.

szajbus 3y ago
You can call Odra anything but a PC and the author is clearly referring to availability (or lack of) of personal computers.
- Cosi1125 3y ago
  Polish (personal) computing industry definitely had a great – and, sadly, largely wasted – potential, however Odra is the worst example to prove this point. A poster child of the Polish "engineering thought" in the 70s was K-202[1], whose creator's tragic story shows how the dreams of the "Polish Silicon Valley" were defeated by the communist reality. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202
etc-hosts 3y ago
There is a really interesting museum of pre-90s minicomputers on a floor of the Palace Of Culture in the middle of Warsaw. The units are huge. The computers are well preserved. They're not plugged in or powered on.

baq 3y ago

Default keepass config used to steal a global shortcut for one of the polish diactrics. Countless browser extensions do the same. US-centric devs look around for unused key combinations and are happy to find them without asking themselves the question of 'why are these free?' Can't blame them too much, though.

throw0101d 3y ago

For anyone using an Apple OS (macOS, iOS), you can get this character on a US keyboard (with US keymap) by pressing and holding "S" (shift-s): a mini-menu will pop-up, and "Ś" will be one of two options. For lower-case "ś", the pop-up mini-menu will have three options, the first being "ß".

verandaguy 3y ago
For readers unfamiliar with German: ß is the German sharp S. It’s pronounced like a normal English “s” in situations where the letter “s” may be pronounced closer to the English letter “z.” For example: Strase -> shtrazeh Straße -> shtrasseh
- syncsynchalt 3y ago
  For anyone who has trouble sight-reading a ß as a beta, it may help to know the ß glyph shape is formed as a ligature of two letters: one now-archaic "long s" (ſ), followed by a "z". Americans will know the "long s" from documents such as the US constitution (every child jokes about the "Congrefs" misspelling). The name of the character (eszett) means "sz" but actually represents "ss" for tortured historic reasons that I can't recall, but which I think [1] tries to explain. More typographic trivia: The uppercase transform of "ß" is "SS", which causes bugs in code that assumes case changes won't change the character count. The language council fought for decades against recognizing an uppercase ß but eventually gave in if only to have the ability to computer-encode erroneous capitalizations, and it's been in Unicode for over a decade now: ẞ [1] https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/11/05/the-story-of-eszett-s/ https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/11/05/the-story-of-eszett...
JadeNB 3y ago
There's also a character viewer that you can display under the Input menu in the menu bar; and there's a keyboard viewer that lets you discover unexpected, say, SHIFT-OPTION-blah key combinations that will produce those characters at a stroke.

jakub_g 3y ago

Linking to previous and previous-previous discussions: ś is not the only disappearing Polish latter. See also: - ł and ć: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988553 - ą: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27245193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27245193

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

It's great that the OP thought to copiously comment the opaque conditional that led to the 'collision of features' that caused the key to disappear. But that isn't really helping. He had to find the code to begin with, go down the debug trail from scratch to get to the point of reading the comment. He had special knowledge to help him; most of the rest of us would have taken longer. Big code bases need a 'business requirements' document. If e.g. you wanted to rewrite the codebase, you could read the BR doc and know that if you accomplished all that, you'd be feature-compliant in your new implementation. That is, you weren't going to get any rash of calls from customers about their feature being broken or entirely missing. You can pore over the codebase and get all that info without the BR doc. But like my son complains at his job, shepherding a million-line behemoth ten years forward, much of what he sees in the code is opaque, badly done (and thus hard to figure out what's the feature and what's accidental side effects) or obsolete (that customer special became irrelevant five years ago or whatever). A business requirements doc can be reviewed by actual non-programmers and judgements made of what's still relevant. So revisiting the project (reimplementing, integrating a new feature into the rats nest without disturbing previous features) becomes if not easy, at least possible in a bounded timeframe. You young folks will have lots of tools for this kind of thing, born of Agile processes I suppose. I suspect any such database of entries is woefully sparse, badly described or never referenced. Like most 'productivity tools', if they aren't part of somebody's job description they become orphans. Don't know the ultimate solution. People are people, and diligent leaving of breadcrumbs is just another annoying thing to do. But somebody (maybe you?) will bless you for it down the line!

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Note that I do not discourage comments. Comments in code can be very useful. But they do not help you find the code responsible for a certain business requirement. Not unless that's what you put in the comment e.g. a BR reference. I find code comments to be at their best, when they explain how the code works or is to be used or how it relates to something elsewhere. You know, comments about the code or other code. Relevant to understanding what you're about to read. Comments that are essentially user stories disrupt the flow and don't help interpret the actual logic. Those comments belong elsewhere.

koliber 3y ago

In a similar fashion, you can not type the capital letter Ł in Notion. You type the letter with SHIFT-OPTION-L on the Polish keyboard on a Mac. Notion uses the SHIFT-OPTION-L keyboard combo for it's own purposes. This happens in many programs for various keys, depending on which keyboard shortcuts a program implements. A solution to this is to allow remapping of keyboard shortcuts in an application.

ajuc 3y ago

Outlook has a shortcut Alt+S to send the current e-mail. In Polish "Hello" is "Cześć". When you acidentally have non-Polish locale enabled and write "Cześć" in Outlook - you send "Cze" as your whole e-mail. "Cze" is a very informal greeting, sth like "Yo". There has been thousands of such e-mails in Polish companies sent to people who really shouldn't be greeted with "Yo" :) It happened to me too, and I'm still not sure how it happened. I think it might have been caused by windows update. And in the past it was even worse - Windows installed both Polish-programmer and Polish-typist keyboard layouts by default and there was a very easy to hit accidentally shortcut to switch between them. If you hit it most of things still work but your "y" and "z" were swapped. So if you had "z" or "y" in your password - the next time you log in - you suddenly can't. This caused countless problems for IT support all over the country :)

Swizec 3y ago
> both Polish-programmer and Polish-typist keyboard layouts Brilliant! Growing up in Slovenia there was only the typist locale, qwertz of course. Coding was full of altgr + <key> combos and it gets real annoying real fast. Most of us nerds switched to the US layout fairly early and simply ignored diactritics. š becomes s, č becomes c, ž becomes z. Especially when texting came around and mobile phones didn’t even have those letters. Most people from Slovenia can fluently read words without diacritics and recognize based on context. Even if you weren’t a nerd, in the 90’s and 00’s it was a gamble if the software or website you’re using will render those characters so people learned not to use them. iOS still doesn’t have a Slovenian layout. Not sure about Android. I hear in the commodore days people used to write ss, cc, zz but that didn’t catch on in my generation.
- ajuc 3y ago
  > Brilliant! Maybe it was brilliant early on, but by 2000 like 99% of computer users didn't knew about the typist layout and yet it was always one accidental keypress away :) It was a shortut that you could press accidentally when you highlighted whole words with ctrl+shift+left/right. > ignored diactritics Yeah we wrote without diacritics too early on. On computers because in 90s there were 3 competing 8bit encodings so it was like 66% chance you got the encoding wrong. Most nerds (me included) could recognize the most common encoding mismatches visually :) Thank god for utf-8 :). We had diacritics in phones but it was a hassle to type them with numerical keyboards on dumbphones, so most people didn't. So now it looks "lazy" to avoid diacritics and most people use them AFAIK. BTW it's funny how outdated Polish ortography (we still have digraphs sz/cz/rz/dz and even some trigraphs like dzi which most Latin Slavic scripts replaced with š etc.) became a positive early on during the computer revolution.

pjmlp 3y ago

Quite an interesting read. In Portugal we had a similar workaround in the early days of computers not supporting our alphabet properly. Like in Polish there are plenty of words that without diacritics get another completly unrelated meaning, e.g. caça vs caca, which you didn't want the interpretation to be left to the receiver. So tricks got invented, like adding additional letters for the missing diatrics, é becomes eh, è becomes he or eh as in the former case, the example above would be cac,a and so on. However it was still quite flexible, not everyone uses the same extension set.

Tade0 3y ago

I had a similar issue when ASUS's bloatware background service decided to bind something to both Alt+S and Alt+A globally. I have to keep it disabled or else I won't be able to type ą, Ą, ś and Ś without using Caps Lock to work around the issue.

BlueTemplar 3y ago

BTW, Ś can be typed using the new AZERTY by pressing Alt Gr + 2 then S : https://norme-azerty.fr/en/ https://norme-azerty.fr/en/ > Right Alt in Windows was internally mapped as a rarely-used combination of Ctrl and Alt pressed together. Why "was" ? (the link is broken) You will also note that the new AZERTY doesn't use left Alt, rightly assuming that it's expected to be used for menu shortcuts. (It's a shame though that the new AZERTY can do Greek... but not Cyrillic, a real missed opportunity for a true pan-European keyboard !) ---- > Both Windows 3.x and 95 had terrific keyboard support. The menu items and dialogs had controls that could be accessed easily by mouse… but also much quicker by pressing Alt and the underlined letter: [...] > Most of Microsoft Windows UI could be turned into a sequence of keyboard shortcuts, which was incredibly powerful (and something Mac could still learn from). Is that specifically Windows though, or rather IBM's Common User Access ? (Apple, as a competitor, and being Apple, did their own thing.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39130984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39130984 http://www.susandoreydesigns.com/software/CommonUserAccessGUIDesign.pdf http://www.susandoreydesigns.com/software/CommonUserAccessGU...

alfanick 3y ago
That doesn't help Polish people - no sane person would use Azerty in Poland ;)
- ajuc 3y ago
  Or qwertz for that matter. The Polish-machinist keyboard layout even stopped being enabled by default in Windows after causing countless "I can't log in" problems for like 20 years :)
  - garaetjjte 3y ago
    I often quipped that hardest part of installing Windows was that you needed to know to switch 214 to programmer layout.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  AZERTY, just like QWERTY, and QWERTZ should probably be all discarded anyway, since they date back to the now nearly 150 years old era, designed so that typists don't type too fast, which caused jamming to these early machines. In favour maybe of the likes of Dvorak (hey, wasn't he Czech ?) or BÉPO (any central/eastern-European equivalents ?). (The same researchers seem to have made a "new BÉPO" version, which, I guess, might be a "next step", when/if the new AZERTY becomes common ??) But that's not the point of the new AZERTY, its point is to provide a keyboard layout that finally allows proper typing in (Latin- and Greek-based) languages other than English. (The old AZERTY still didn't allow that, for instance no capital letters with diacritics, unless if maybe you use more advanced software ?) (Also, a much easier access to the {([])} symbols than the old AZERTY, which programmers are sure to appreciate !) All the while still keeping a familiar layout - and you'll have to concede that it should be more familiar to QWERTY / QWERTZ users than Dvorak / BÉPO, won't you ?

crabbone 3y ago

At this point, I've forgotten the struggle of global hotkeys interfering with uncommon symbols. Using Emacs, when I need to write in a language that doesn't use only Latin symbols, I switch to phonetic translit for that language. I.e. I still type only using Latin symbols, but some sequences of symbols translate into different letters in the target alphabet. Also, maybe less so today, but at the time when internationalization was usually even worse than it is today on typical computers available to general public, it was very common, at least for Poles outside Poland to write w/o any diacritics at all. There's not so much overlap, and usually you can figure it out from the context. BTW, in a very similar way, Russian ё is often replaced by e. To the point that the "incorrect" variant is today acceptable even in newspapers. Alternatively, if I see Russian text that uses "ё", I get a feeling that it's about patriotism and must be some self-aggrandizing propaganda.

jetzzz 3y ago

The real story here is about bad JS KeyboardEvent API. I think a lot of JS code in the wild does these incorrect checks and author's code after "fixing" the bug is still incorrect. When handling keyboard shortcuts you want an exact match, in this case you want to check that the only modifier used is Ctrl. JS API does not make that easy, you need manually check that all other modifiers are not pressed.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> This is the base English alphabet, largely the same as a classic Latin/Roman alphabet: > ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ That's not all that similar. The Latin alphabet would be: > ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVX (You can browse the Pompeii graffiti and many inscriptions are just someone writing down an alphabet. It's pretty cool, if you're me.) The five letters we've added (though Y and probably Z were already in use in Latin, representing Greek letters in Greek words) are pretty comparable to Polish adding 9 letters to ours. > To find room for the extra letters, typewriters needed to dispense with some punctuation, most notably semicolons (comma + backspace + colon), and parentheses (replaced in common use by slashes). ...why? This would make sense if manufacturing typewriters were difficult and expensive, making it imperative to manufacture Polish typewriter chassis on all the same machinery that makes English ones. I tend to suspect that even at the time this was not the case, but maybe. There's no excuse today; just use more keys on Polish keyboards.