3 ms·

But why not make the world simpler? Eg. let's simplify those writing systems that are causing issues. Not everything needs to be encoded as text strings. Good

by dsego 2y ago

But why not make the world simpler? Eg. let's simplify those writing systems that are causing issues. Not everything needs to be encoded as text strings. Good thing you mention UTC, because guess what, time zones are a simplification, real local time is on a continuous spectrum.

Analemma_ 2y ago
Because that's authoritarian and ghoulish? The thought of forcibly changing (or eliminating) a writing system that may have been in use by millions of people for centuries with no issues, to satisfy the demands of a bunch of web developers who don't want to add some more if-else branches to their text rendering code, gives me the heebie-jeebies. And it wouldn't even save most programmers any effort: for 99.9% of us, this stuff is all abstracted away by libraries anyway. I suspect you might be over-indexing on the specific example of emojis and skin tone modifiers that the article used, but on the Unicode implementation level that's just the same modifier characters that several real languages need to use to be encoded properly. It's not a useless frivolity.
- dsego 2y ago
  Not sure why writing systems couldn't be improved and simplified for the digital age. It would reduce software complexity and be more efficient and economical.
  - MonkeyClub 2y ago
    NewSpeak with NewScript?
  - anyfoo 2y ago
    Presumably for the same reason why we're not "just" simplifying English, which is a horribly irregular language, particularly in its orthography. We could simplify English to have similar spelling and pronunciation rules as, say, German, Japanese, Italian, or countless other languages, instead of English's terrible mess. So why are we not just doing that? Funnily, in the case of English, that would likely mean replacing the latin alphabet with a more complicated script. Because in contrast to e.g. German and Italian, that script really does not fit its phonetics very well. Hell, even Japanese romanization, "romaji", makes much better and more consistent use of the latin alphabet than English. Which is just all kinds of funny to me, English is so bad in that regard, that Japanese, a language which is very far away from English in multiple ways, can make so much better use of the to it foreign latin script. In fact, English is so extraordinarily bad in using the latin script, that the English-speaking world even has literal contests about how to spell pronounced words, called "spelling bees". And yet I see no real efforts to simplify that gaining traction.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  The natural tendency is for language to get simpler as the audience becomes broader, or to suit the technology available at the time/place of writing. It doesn't have to be planned or imposed, it's happening anyway. See the development of English itself, it's basically a creole language, a mix of different influences, and and lost complexities like grammatical gender as a result. Most of the so-called complexity in English is just about scoring "style points", it's not necessary to communicate (other than the admittedly huge vocabulary - again a result of its formation from multiple influences).
kayodelycaon 2y ago
I think it would be easier if everyone just spoke and wrote English, we’re already halfway there. We can all go back to 7-bit ASCII. :) The irony is English is simultaneously the best and worst option. It can incorporate things from almost any other language while making spelling them correctly impossible. Good luck memorizing adjective order and the nearly infinite number of idioms. A lot of them come from British sailors.
- dsego 2y ago
  When you think about it, they didn't use cursive for printing presses for a reason. Cursive is good for hand writing, block letters are good for print or carving into stone. See how the technology dictates the form. If the writing system can't be represented as an array of codes, maybe either the writing adapts to the limitations in some way (call it digital letters or whatever) or the digital representation needs more work. But you can't say that if printing presses don't solve human handwriting, it's ghoulish and authoritarian, like one commenter concluded.
  - kayodelycaon 2y ago
    I was being sarcastic. :) The whole point of Unicode is to encode languages. We already handle Arabic, which means we should be able to handle most languages. Even if we can’t convert a language into codepoints, we have the ability to record sound and images in resolutions beyond human acuity. You’re right the technology dictates form. The computers represent English different than print. Due to the limitations of previous technology, indented paragraphs are less common than an empty line between paragraphs. Same with single-width or double spaces after periods.
anyfoo 2y ago
The fact that the simplification stopped at time zones, and not at making one "global time zone", tells you how much you can stretch such "simplification" before it becomes a burden in other ways.

by dsego 2y ago

Analemma_ 2y ago

Because that's authoritarian and ghoulish? The thought of forcibly changing (or eliminating) a writing system that may have been in use by millions of people for centuries with no issues, to satisfy the demands of a bunch of web developers who don't want to add some more if-else branches to their text rendering code, gives me the heebie-jeebies. And it wouldn't even save most programmers any effort: for 99.9% of us, this stuff is all abstracted away by libraries anyway. I suspect you might be over-indexing on the specific example of emojis and skin tone modifiers that the article used, but on the Unicode implementation level that's just the same modifier characters that several real languages need to use to be encoded properly. It's not a useless frivolity.

dsego 2y ago
Not sure why writing systems couldn't be improved and simplified for the digital age. It would reduce software complexity and be more efficient and economical.
- MonkeyClub 2y ago
  NewSpeak with NewScript?
- anyfoo 2y ago
  Presumably for the same reason why we're not "just" simplifying English, which is a horribly irregular language, particularly in its orthography. We could simplify English to have similar spelling and pronunciation rules as, say, German, Japanese, Italian, or countless other languages, instead of English's terrible mess. So why are we not just doing that? Funnily, in the case of English, that would likely mean replacing the latin alphabet with a more complicated script. Because in contrast to e.g. German and Italian, that script really does not fit its phonetics very well. Hell, even Japanese romanization, "romaji", makes much better and more consistent use of the latin alphabet than English. Which is just all kinds of funny to me, English is so bad in that regard, that Japanese, a language which is very far away from English in multiple ways, can make so much better use of the to it foreign latin script. In fact, English is so extraordinarily bad in using the latin script, that the English-speaking world even has literal contests about how to spell pronounced words, called "spelling bees". And yet I see no real efforts to simplify that gaining traction.
HPsquared 2y ago
The natural tendency is for language to get simpler as the audience becomes broader, or to suit the technology available at the time/place of writing. It doesn't have to be planned or imposed, it's happening anyway. See the development of English itself, it's basically a creole language, a mix of different influences, and and lost complexities like grammatical gender as a result. Most of the so-called complexity in English is just about scoring "style points", it's not necessary to communicate (other than the admittedly huge vocabulary - again a result of its formation from multiple influences).

kayodelycaon 2y ago

I think it would be easier if everyone just spoke and wrote English, we’re already halfway there. We can all go back to 7-bit ASCII. :) The irony is English is simultaneously the best and worst option. It can incorporate things from almost any other language while making spelling them correctly impossible. Good luck memorizing adjective order and the nearly infinite number of idioms. A lot of them come from British sailors.

dsego 2y ago
When you think about it, they didn't use cursive for printing presses for a reason. Cursive is good for hand writing, block letters are good for print or carving into stone. See how the technology dictates the form. If the writing system can't be represented as an array of codes, maybe either the writing adapts to the limitations in some way (call it digital letters or whatever) or the digital representation needs more work. But you can't say that if printing presses don't solve human handwriting, it's ghoulish and authoritarian, like one commenter concluded.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  I was being sarcastic. :) The whole point of Unicode is to encode languages. We already handle Arabic, which means we should be able to handle most languages. Even if we can’t convert a language into codepoints, we have the ability to record sound and images in resolutions beyond human acuity. You’re right the technology dictates form. The computers represent English different than print. Due to the limitations of previous technology, indented paragraphs are less common than an empty line between paragraphs. Same with single-width or double spaces after periods.

anyfoo 2y ago

The fact that the simplification stopped at time zones, and not at making one "global time zone", tells you how much you can stretch such "simplification" before it becomes a burden in other ways.