3 ms·
Because the designers of Unix used whatever keys happened to be available on the teletype keyboards that they had in their lab, and didn’t give a second thought
by pavlov 2y ago
Because the designers of Unix used whatever keys happened to be available on the teletype keyboards that they had in their lab, and didn’t give a second thought to international keyboard layouts.
Programming languages used to be more cognizant of this. For example Pascal used mostly keywords rather than ASCII symbols, and this was entirely intentional to enable programmers in all countries to easily work in the language.
Of course C inherited Unix’s approach, killed Pascal, and nobody cares anymore. Except all those millions of non-English users trying to learn programming, but nobody in Silicon Valley thinks about them.
- lokimedes 2y agoNot to be snarky, but which popular programming languages have come out of Silicon Valley? I can think of Swift and perhaps Java (Sun)?
- xxs 2y agoJava did try to be C as much as possible, as language/syntax principles it's pretty much just C.
- pavlov 2y agoJava, JavaScript. Those two adopted the C syntax and cemented it as the baseline for everything that followed. Still in the 1990s, Microsoft had a focus on BASIC which had a keyword-centric syntax. But Java and the web killed that.