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I'm not debating Unicode in programming languages but in domains.

Also, I disagree that domain names aren't user focused. It's the first thing you learn as a regular web user (at least that used to be the case before, now it's usually the app name).

On the contrary, the accusation is warrranted. Domain names are printed on billboards, in newspapers, shown in TV ads and a myriad other examples outside the programming domain. I have not heard anyone from a non-English speaking country argue your viewpoint.

> I have not heard anyone from a non-English speaking country argue your viewpoint.

Well, now you have. I'm not a native English speaker and I'm not from a country where English has any official status.

What characters are present in your native language, that is not in ASCII?

Tell me how many of top 100 websites in CJK use IDN...

> What characters are present in your native language, that is not in ASCII?

is that a joke? or are you really under the impression that most languages use subsets of the Latin alphabet? even English uses letters that aren't in ASCII, much less literally every other one.

I feel like you have misread the comment you are responding to, as that question was almost certainly an attempt to verify that the person who was arguing the other side of the point wasn't willing to do handedly screw over the majority of the world that doesn't use Latin characters because their non-English language--which they had thrown out for street cred here--happened to not need anything that wouldn't be readily mapped with low corruption to the Latin set.

The English alphabet does not contain non-ASCII chars. Which makes it quite unusual.

Not entirely true. There is some use of umlauts. For example, The New Yorker insists on spelling re-elect as reëlect.

I don’t think people consider them part of the English alphabet. Which letters do they sort between, according to English sorting rules?

Also, “Those two dots, often mistaken for an umlaut, are actually a diaeresis… Most of the English-speaking world finds the diaeresis inessential. Even Fowler, of Fowler’s “Modern English Usage,” says that the diaeresis “is in English an obsolescent symbol.””

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

I am from Czechia, where many diacritic marks are used. CZ domain registry makes periodic surveys whether to allow IDN domains for .cz, and 'no' wins consistently with ~ 2/3 majority. See https://www.xn--hkyrky-ptac70bc.cz/ (there are also info in english).

The main argument against is that everybody is accustomed to the current situation and knows that when a brand contains diacritic marks, they should be removed when entering URL. If IDN is introduced, it would be confusing as some would use ASCII version, some IDN version, while most would just buy two domains instead of one.

Imagine living in a world where domain names can only be written in Arabic script. Would that "best effort" be good enough for you?

If Arabic had the reach and status of the Latin script, why not?

But it doesn't, so that's an irrelevant hypothetical.

Also known as "I was born in the right part of the world, who cares?"

It is starting to seem like you are the one perturbed by the idea of Arabic script, which is weird since your brought it up.

Also known as "the way the world works".

Which is why almost every institution everywhere uses kilometers or miles to measure distances, not parasangs or barids.

TIL about parasangs and barids. Thanks!

> "the way the world works"

Well, the way the world works created IDN and Unicode identifiers in languages. How about that?

> Also known as "the way the world works".

Wait, IDNs exist, they are "the way the world works". You are arguing that they should not exist, because you don't have a use for them and they inconvenience you. How can you justify your desire for the world to work differently by saying that it's "the way the world works"?

Why would that be a problem?

Arabic looks to me uniquely hard to read but I don't mind learning Thai, Armenian or Georgian script if it would be what almost everyone else is using. Even Hebrew and Hangul looks easier to learn.

How does DNS handle RtL languages?

Are palindromes they key?

Unicode has the concept of directionality built in already but it took some work to align with the existing assumptions of DNS https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5893

Language serialization is tricky:

  Examples of Issues Found with RFC 3454

  4.1.  Dhivehi

   Dhivehi, the official language of the Maldives, is written with the
   Thaana script.  This script displays some of the characteristics of
   the Arabic script, including its directional properties, and the
   indication of vowels by the diacritical marking of consonantal base
   characters.  This marking is obligatory, and both two consecutive
   vowels and syllable-final consonants are indicated with unvoiced
   combining marks.  Every Dhivehi word therefore ends with a combining
   mark.

I think it is anglocentric and kind of outrageous, just that it's so deep rooted that most efforts are at most useless and every past attempts at correcting it basically had been pure annoyances. Those thinkings that translation is word-for-word dictionary lookups and that programming language is US English, are just annoyances.

Perhaps with current level and awareness of multi-lingualism in computer science/engineering, this whole discussions about anglocentrism in computing and possible solutions is too early to take place; very few are even aware, much less accept, that the spoken language active during a decision making affects its result for multi-lingual people.

Yeah no. English is the lingua franca of computer science and programming. It's one of the few areas where language is not getting in the way of international exchange so much. It brings people together. I can check out and understand any random project on github no matter where the author is from and what language they speak. The worst that can happen is I can't read the comments. Even then most people still at least use English names for variables and functions. Nobody stops you from thinking in your native language while coding.

What do you gain from IDN domain names other that nobody who doesn't speak your language can't even type or remember them? Apart from the obvious security issues mentioned in TFA. Same goes for handles or ids. Don't allow non-ascii for usernames to avoid scams. If you insist, have a separate display name that's displayed alongside.

> What do you gain from IDN domain names other that nobody who doesn't speak your language can't even type or remember them?

That people who do speak the language can type them?

Oh right, before those IDN domains existed, people were just sitting there in front of their computers unable to visit any website, since they couldn't type them out.

Every keyboard layout in existence for languages not based on the latin alphabet has a trivial way to switch to Latin input.

Practically that only works for European languages with extremely limited homographs and no IME prerequisites.

I appreciate every project I come across that has contributors lists using Unicode, or documentation or other resources.

It's a reminder that we live in a shared world.

And if we start seeing more keywords in alternative scripts...

That's more improvement in strong typing, IDEs, LSP, dev containers, static analysis and a slew of related technologies. It's exhausting, but it seems a little more fair than the URL debate. Of course there will be human auditing and approval advancements there that are exploitable. But it is what it is.

I've used at least one programming language whose keywords and supporting library function names were not in English. There exist more than one.

Programming language is for programmers (and there are some non-English lang for education, and you can create any lang) but domain name is for everyone so not good example.

Alright, then let’s switch to Egyptian hieroglyphs for domain names and the other critical technologies you identify.