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Comment by zmguy | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is a solution. We should work to defragment the technology world. A better option is for Arabic speakers to learn English as a second Language. And for English speakers to learn Arabic as a second language but ultimately program in English. There is a similar problem with Chinese and the Chinese web, they might have some great resources tutorials and libraries but we don't know about them. I'll trade someone English and Ruby if you teach me Arabic.

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I don't think this is intended to be a practical solution, but rather an intellectual pursuit and a piece of art.

Yes, the sample program is an infinite loop, and therefore impractical. I'd add that copying the Ruby syntax, based around Latin script, for programming in another script isn't practical. Programming language grammars tend to evolved from the lexical tokens used by them.

I think it's great that efforts like this accentuate how quickly tools degrade when they are fed input that falls outside of the ASCII-range. Efforts to build better, language-agnostic (or not English-specific) tools bubbles up the technology stack to the end users, to whom it's a unreasonable and unrealistic (and to my mind a bad idea) to demand that they should just learn English.

I also think that programmers should be able to have some support for their own languages when it comes to doing programming, but I guess that opinion won't win me any favors here.

Would not it be better to latinize Arabic, as the Taiwanese and Phillipines have done with their languages. For computer input a LTR language built around a relatively small alphabet is simply superior.

> built around a relatively small alphabet is simply superior.

How? With a smaller alphabet, words can tend to comprise of more letters; with a larger alphabet, words can tend to comprise of fewer letters. It might be that smaller is better in this case for storing text efficiently, but I don't see how it obviously follows.

Physical size of an input device to enter each character with a single press.

I have seen a video of - I can't seem to find it - someone using a sort of keyboard, only smaller. She would use fewer key presses to type in English than on a standard keyboard, because she was typing in one grapheme at a time, or something like that.

Do the Chinese really think of Mandarin as containing discrete characters? Or do they consider the signs as compositions of each other? I haven't tried writing Chinese or something like that with some input device. Have you?

You would find a lot of people would object to meddling with Arabic on religious grounds.

That segment of the population has essentially opted out of the modern world.

No, they've opted for a different modern world. The insistence on latinate scripts and learning english echo strongly colonialist rhetoric from past eras.

Fundamentalist Islam is not compatible with modern civilized society.

The present hegemonic doctrines of fundamentalist Islam are a product of "modern civilized society". The Iranian revolution was in 1979 (and Iran was a prosperous, modern industrial country at the time - it is not so prosperous these days what with sanctions and so forth).

Sayyid Qutb wrote Milestones in 1964, drawing inspiration from mass popular movements - religious and secular - of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is probably the single most influential text for Islamism (it was even, despite differences of sect, translated into Farsi by Khomeini, as I understand it). For Qutb, submission to Sharia law would unleash a new golden age of progress - it was secularism, rather, which was holding us back.

It's nonsense, yes. But it is modern nonsense. Separating modernity from the ongoing contestation of its meaning is the purest nonsense of all.

tl;dr - islamic fundamentalism is perfectly compatible with computers and stuff.

If you care to look, you'll notice that Arabic only has 28 letters in its alphabet, plus a few more vowel marks.

It's much more complex than that with all the various ligatures, combining forms, diacriticals, etc, not to mention another 50 or so characters that are used in other lanaguges that use the arabic script, but aren't arabic-the-language.

Latin has 26 lowercase AND 26 uppercase letters!

The written form of Gulf Arabic used for sending text messages (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet ) uses most of the 10 digits for extra vowels as well as the 26 Latin letters.

The written script has applications other than computer input. "Standardising" it into some variant of the latin alphabet would make it simpler and less rich. Suitable for a computer perhaps but that's not all languages are about. Other things too, Arabic calligraphy is arguably one of the most intricate forms of art out there and latinising the language would negatively impact that.

I agree with you, but if you want a really small and really intuitive alphabet check out Korean. It's so simple you can learn how to use to spell in 'english' phonetically in about 2 hours. It's -that- simple.

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