Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

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> ?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.

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.

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.

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