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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

I'm super glad programming languages were invented in a country with an alphabet.

Imagine if the computing revolution were in China instead of USA... we might all be coding using Chinese characters instead of Latin characters right now.

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> Imagine if the computing revolution were in China instead of USA... we might all be coding using Chinese characters instead of Latin characters right now.

Nah. We would all be using a binary language based on I-Ching trigrams for "octal" representation, and 6-bit (hexagram) "words". A hacker's dream right there.

For this reason I dont think it would ever have happened in China

I wouldn’t care so much, actually. After all, I am not even using my native language to write programs in, but English.

It doesn’t matter as long as I can do my work.

Well, my point is that Latin characters are much easier to learn than Chinese. You only have to memorize 26 characters, half a dozen punctuation symbols, and a dozen keywords vs. thousands of pictograms.

Chinese characters can be typed on non Latin keyboards like zhuyin. And maybe only somewhat relatedly, the fastest texters of Japanese I’ve seen don’t use a Latin keyboard but some crazy 9 button input grid.

This really isn't a problem for the task of learning PLs in Chinese where the number of keywords is bounded...

I would agree that Han characters are a suboptimal technology for everyday written communication due to its large character inventory but this is not a topic where that seems to pose a problem.

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