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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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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