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Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

It depends how big you think. Dealing with status quo, things like text direction are necessary complication.

But at a higher scale it’s purely incidental complexity: you only need one direction for all languages. All languages are linear. No language uses direction to encode meaning. Direction in language is just “stuff starts one place and ends in another”.

Balkanization of the encodings is not a good thing. Imagine if every city had a different color for a traffic stop light. Why not? Maybe it’s a matter of cultural pride. What if every country had its own network protocols? Imagine what a nightmare internet would be.

But thankfully we had common sense in few cases. In many others we don’t.

And Unicode is full of incidental complexity itself. Did we really need skin color emoji. Who is yellow here? Anyone being brightly yellow perchance? No. We had the perfect abstract color for emojis.

But now we have to deal with this shit.

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?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS

> ?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS

So you just said all non-English speakers use right-to-left? No, the direction isn't what's confusing me, rather the fact you're trying to score a cheap outrage comment, but actually wrote non-sense no matter which direction you read it.

How about maybe educate yourself a little, and rephrase your question to reflect reality, and we can have an intelligent conversation about it.

Most of the world uses left-to-right and top-down (yes look around when you go out and notice all the vertical logotypes in English around the city). Right-to-left is relative minority. If you have democratic thinking and we gotta vote for it, the winner is obvious. Yet, I'd rather learn to read fluently English in right-to-left than the current mish-mash of "whatever".

Also read about Korean. It was a top-down right-left language, today it's written left-right. People are surprisingly adaptive, you know, it's supposedly our top advantage as a species. No one is born with "right-to-left" grafted in their DNA. We honestly gotta tone down the ignorance in these discussions.

My native language isn't English, by the way. And I don't mind adapting.

I'm not who you're responding to, and obviously the commenter should have said "some" non-English speakers rather than "all".

But the main point is still obvious and true: how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers?

No need to get snarky about it. Comments like "maybe educate yourself a little" are against HN guidelines. [1]

Also, Korean is different because the characters represent entire syllables, so legibility isn't impaired as much by direction. CJK scripts have historically been flexible in direction in a way that Latin scripts never have been.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers?

I'd actually like it.

You know, thanks to this we have Murican Internet that's the same stack everywhere. How would YOU like it if "Internet" was just your country?

We gotta disentangle this obsession with encodings as some kind of national cause for pride. Encodings are INCIDENTAL. Encodings are LEARNED. You weren't born reading right-to-left or left-to-right and you can switch both in surprisingly short amount of time, if you bothered.

Pride doesn't even matter here. It's simple economics.

It's far less effort and cost for developers to accomodate the world's existing scripts, than it is for the vast majority of the world's population to re-learn how to read and write a new script.

By orders of magnitude.

And obviously, it's not just direction that differs from English but a whole host of other aspects as well.

I see it the other way. It would be actually orders of magnitude less effort for the rest of the world to learn one standard system/language than to have every app/product/document adapted to every single language/script/whatever in existence

That's just factually untrue.

The percentage of the world population involved in script adaptation and language translation is really quite tiny. Consumers vastly, vastly, vastly outnumber producers.

Not to mention that we have things like automated translation that are "good enough" for many cases as well.

Whereas learning a new language to fluency, for most adults, takes about ten years.

Or takes forever, for some older/middle aged people, living in their own a bit isolated communities where there's no need to learn the new language

>the rest of the world to learn one standard system/language than to have every app/product/document adapted to every single language/script/whatever in existence

But they don't. That's precisely why the text input handling is so difficult, because it has to solve it for all apps. How many apps have you worked on that has had to create their own text input system from scratch? I think for most developers that's zero.

Like the article said in the end:

>The necessary complexity here is immense, and this post only scratches the very surface of it. If anything, it's a miracle of the simplicity of modern programming that we're able to just slap down a <textarea> on a web page and instantly provide a text input for every internet user around the globe.

There is an issue with that just like with programming languages. Do we want to standardize on one programming language for all use cases? Because they have different expressiveness and core concepts, not all programming languages are the best fit for all situations (consider assembly versus TensorFlow). Similarly, different human languages have different core concepts, and express them differently (for example, English has a stronger emphasis on time branches, with all the different tenses, while Korean has a stronger emphasis on relations, with all the very specific words for different members of the family and politeness levels). If they are replaced with one language, that expressiveness would be lost.

> It's far less effort and cost for developers to accomodate the world's existing scripts, than it is for the vast majority of the world's population to re-learn how to read and write a new script.

That's the short-term analysis. But this is not a short-term impact change. And in the long-term, things turn around.

If as a species, we can't think long-term, we're basically doomed.

Even though we're basically doomed, we can still do a lot of cool and fun things at the moment though.

Okay, well sorry I was being snarky, so let me try to be a bit more serious.

You are proposing that we teach millions-billions of people a new way to write, rather than teach a few hundred thousand at most how to write computer programs that accommodate existing ways of writing.

Like maybe you underestimate how genuinely ridiculously hard of a problem it is to get billions of people to do anything! It would take literal decades of work by multiple governments and unimaginable amounts of money! Getting 10 people to agree on a favorite programming language is hard enough. Teaching a city full of kids a new way to multiply numbers takes 1000s of hours of prep, planning, syllabus development etc. by teachers. Just imagine how much harder this is.

Certainly I can see how nice it would be if the whole world used the same date format, same language, same metric system etc.

But from a practical point of view, making systems to accommodate the way people do things is 1000s of times cheaper and easier than getting them all to change.

It's not the last time major portions of the world fundamentally changed how they did things to align with the major powers at the time.

Even WITH all the Unicode support that currently exists in the computing world I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII. I guess you could count APL there (or perl!).

Imagine if Europe was pre-metric system today. Merely proposing unification I'd be instantly downvoted, and called a bigotted racist who doesn't respect the cultural heritage of every nation.

Unfortunately those are the times right now. We, the most adaptable and intelligent species on the planet, have become used to bragging about not having to adapt or know a lot. We sure do have really strong opinions about everything, though.

I think that's the dividing line - each person decides if it's worth it to learn something new. For example, some people love foreign media so much that they trade fansubs of said media or even learn the language so they can watch.

Someone who wants to program computers will most likely learn functional English, just because of how much content on that subject is in English (the "lingua franca" of computers).

But someone in Mongolia who wants to text his mom has no inclination to learn a whole new language just to handle the limitations of ASCII. And if you want to sell him a phone you'll meet him where he is.

(This doesn't even begin to touch the "it's not fair" aspect that people like to point at.)

You PoV is understandable, but still do you believe the ongoing long-term pain of this fragmentation is LESS than the short-term pain of unifying?

This is why I mentioned the metric system, and what not. Every time throughout history when we decided to unify, the advantages VASTLY, and I mean VASTLY have outweighed the short-term drawbacks.

In fact I'd say, one of the biggest test for us as species is that we can fully understand, internalize and implement this concept. Because we always reach for the short term. Short term profits over long-term strategy in the enterprise. Short term economy benefits over long-term climate impact. And so on and so on.

Someone in Mongolia won't have to switch overnight. Someone in Mongolia may gain the option to have it both ways until they're used to it, and eventually there will be unification. That's basic change management.

Change management is a necessary art to survive and to thrive.

> the advantages VASTLY, and I mean VASTLY have outweighed the short-term drawbacks.

Except you're not even including the value of diversity in your argument.

"Unity" also leads to groupthink and monocultures which are less resistant to new challenges. Unity comes with costs you're ignoring.

Languages aren't just an encoding, but an entire paradigm of thinking. Eradicating linguistic differences eradicates entire perspectives.

Languages aren't just measuring systems. Culture is embedded in them too.

Languages aren’t paradigms of thinking. We borrow phrases and concept from each other at a higher level, they’re basically identical, unless you’re isolated on an island and don’t interact with anyone.

For proof, look up the etymology of a random set of words. They come from all over the world.

This is literally pride over encodings. It’s superficial, petty, and ignorance makes it seem profound and important.

You should study linguistics. Your're flat-out incorrect.

I speak two languages fluently and they really are two different modes of thinking. That's why translation is an art, not a science, and for literary stuff it's quite difficult.

You do know that the bastion of computerhood, the US, is mostly non metric?

> I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

I think if you’re reaching for _brainfuck_ as one of the solutions for the prevalence of English in programming; then you’ve probably failed.

A few of the languages on the list are designed precisely to be unreadable.

my link contains programming languages based on Arabic, Chinese, etc, not just unreadable esolangs

Let’s face it. Your link defeats your own point.

Independent third party here. I don't think it does, and as such, don't think it would really be appropriate to face it.

I think if you click a link which points to a very detailed list of programming languages based on non-English languages, then decide to take an example from a different list and suggest that’s what OP was “reaching for”; then you’ve probably failed.

Can you honestly say you know of AxumLight / Geez#, Al-Khawarizm, Jeem or anything at all that's based on another human language? These are mostly obscure.

I've used AC-Logo in middle school.

Sure, but not all people who use computers are programmers, and programmers make up a small minority of computer users. Much of the value in computers come from augmenting other workloads. There are no shortage of people composing e-mails and documents, or consuming content, in non-English languages. Probably more than there are fluent English users.

I was not aware that english is the only left-to-right language.

> But at a higher scale it’s purely incidental complexity: you only need one direction for all languages. All languages are linear. No language uses direction to encode meaning. Direction in language is just “stuff starts one place and ends in another”.

I think an interesting example here is Chinese which is traditionally written top-down-right-left but these days is just as if not more commonly written left-right-top-down. There seems to be almost no push for supporting vertical text while its just assumed that RTL is a must, why is that?

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