?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS
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!).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...
A few of the languages on the list are designed precisely to be unreadable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.