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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder if English dominated programming and the Internet partly because it doesn't use accents or special characters. You have limited space on a keyboard, and as a native Arabic/French speaker, typing in those languages is a real hassle. French requires é, à, ç and other accents, while Arabic is even more complex with right-to-left text and changing letter forms. English just flows naturally. Maybe the Internet's language wasn't just shaped by politics or economics, but by something as simple as which language was more convenient to type.

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Tangential: Ùù has always seemed immensely silly to me. It’s given an entire key on the CSA keyboard despite only being officially used in 1 non-proper-noun word: où. It’s there solely to disambiguate with ou, the actual phonetics are not affected. Whenever I look down at my MacBook’s keyboard I think it seems a bit out of place haha

I mean that might be part of it, but also because the internet developed out of the ARPAnet which was a United States Department of Defense project, at a time when the United States was one of two superpowers (right as the other superpower stopped being a superpower or for that matter a state), in a world that already gave pretty heavy weight towards English as the lingua franca in international institutions after World War II or simply because it was the lowest-common denominator in a lot of the world post-the British Empire.

English had a lot of wind beneath its wings. Still does.

A much more simpler answer is the fact that much of the tech and ecosystem for computers was developed and commercialized in the US.

If Silicon Valley was in France, we'd all be using AZERTY and Minitel.

Yes, this is the pragmatic answer.

Apple's HyperCard had a French dialect, and AppleScript followed with one too. It was short-lived but did provide a window as to how these programming languages might have looked like had they originated in a non-English world.

A fun factoid I just discovered: on March 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order mandating that ASCII be adopted as a federal information processing standard for electronic data interchange between federal agencies. This order was known as... Executive Order 11110 :)

Do you have a source for the executive order claim? I can't find it on this list of executive orders signed by Lydon Johnson, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_actions_by... . And as far as I can tell the claim originates on ascii-code.com and spread from there?

Googling executive order 11110 gives no primary information.

Edit: found it https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-approvi...

It's just not an executive order as far as I can tell. Not an expert on US governance by any means though.

Edit 2: I mixed up Executive orders and Actions it seems?

From a quick search it seems this was a Presidential Memorandum not an Executive Action.

“Executive orders are generally more formal, require publication in the Federal Register, and must cite the President's legal authority, while memoranda are less formal, may not be published, and do not always require a justification of authority.”

These sometimes get called executive orders, like some memos that trump has signed in the last few months were called executive orders by the news and online.

They are essentially the same though. Memos carry legal weight and can direct agencies to carry out specific actions.

The 11110 thing is a myth, though. The closest that we get to that is that it is number 127 in the NARA's catalogue of the Johnson's public papers for 1968.

* https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PPP-1968-book1

Thank you for the correction.

Well, there's this story about how printing failed Arabic. Allegedly, in Italy, they tried to print a Koran, but because the printers didn't speak Arabic, and were trained on Latin scripts, they messed it up so much that the Arab world came to believe printing is not going to work for them. Even though most scientific books of the day were written in Arabic and the best schools spoke the language, it quickly fell out of favor, being replaced by Latin in Europe.

In turn, the Caliphate made a point of standardizing the script and creating libraries which fueled research science for a good few centuries.

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Even before Internet, languages with diacritics (eg. Russian Ё) were deprecating their use. I believe something similar is happening in German (with ß). Also, languages with long history seen incremental thinning out of the alphabet to remove duplication and rare special cases. Sometimes, the opposite happened, but it was usually brought by reactionary politics, especially inspired by local nationalism which looked for validation in ancient history. So, for example, in the 90s Ukrainians brought back the letter Ґ that was used in only a handful of words, and was happily forgotten during the Soviet times.

So, convenience and suitability for new technology can be a meaningful factor in adoption.

You don't even have to leave English to find examples of printing shifting script. The printing press killed the thorn "Þ" character which made the the "th" sound. It got replaced with either a "y" (which looked sorta-kinda like a thorn) as in "Ye Olde" or a "th", which is how a speaker not accustomed to the sound might approximate it "tuh-huh".

And that would have failed. Because rest of world doesn't use accents. Remember that first typewriters were actually german but English ones have succeeded.

Maybe that makes sense for french vs english, but there are plenty of languages that avoid accents in transcription (despite being just as tonal or more so than english) because they don't have the analytic diction required to discuss the abstract concepts all over programming, computer science, and even just "business".

I think that's underselling the west's post-WW2 influence and the amount of innovation that was fueled by a booming capitalist society that the entire world wanted to take part in.

I'd say English's simple, non-accented latin characters being easy to represent mathematically was a happy coincidence.

> booming capitalist society that the entire world wanted to take part in.

You can't be that naive. Not every country wanted and a lot of them were forced into.

I came here to say the same, I remember the days when some systems only had upper case characters and the character set was limited.

That may have allowed for more control characters they would be allowed in other European Languages.

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