This fairly reeks of tone-deafness.
Secondly, I'm not a native English speaker and I always had this sentiment; "why isn't all computing in English", "why do we have i18n", etc. For one, I don't think everyone studying a standard foreign language is bad, and while English is probably not the best option (Spanish is reportedly easier), it's there, it's as close or closer to being lingua franca as any other, and it's certainly easier than the language with the largest number of native speakers (Chinese). And then even someone with bad English might benefit from at least having File and Edit menus instead of often crazy translations of these things. A little bit of English and a little bit of standardization can't hurt.
Of course ultimately computers ought to display text in all those languages - if not in menus, etc. then certainly in the content itself - so this sentiment of mine isn't very helpful at all. But I wasn't offended by the article in the slightest.
The article may have been written in anger, and thus it provokes anger. Good! Programmers who don't get angry while solving hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable problems are, in my experience, unlikely to truly solve those problems --- sweeping issues under the rug, or passing the problem to someone else is more likely. Anger is a very powerful motivational force if honed correctly, whereas contentment often leads to docility, complacency, and quitting.
I find that problems that make you angry or enraged are simultaneously: important and instructive. Most performance problems (or even multi-threading problems), for example, fall into this category.
That's a really interesting point and it makes me think of a developer that I've worked with (in a company of non-developers) who cared more about 'inconveniences' than I did.
It occurs to me that he did a much better job of engaging with these 'inconveniences' and fixing them.
Perhaps I should get a bit angrier?
I can only speak with confidence about the section on the German ss/ß, and it is dead wrong. (This has been explained a few times in sibling-of-a-sibling comments.) So it's not informative unless you fact-check every single paragraph of it.
I also don't remember anger being part of any successful learning experience.
What nonsense, the article says the complete opposite of that. All of the article deals with examples of why other writing systems (misnamed "languages") have specific properties that make it hard to deal with on computers. Latin and Cyrillic alphabets just so happen to be easier because of their regular properties, not because they were the first to be implemented. Lucky us.
Summarizing the article as being rooted in politically incorrectness is disingenious. Or do you really want to suggest the Chinese would have had an easy time implementing their writing system on computers if only they had invented them first?
English+ASCII is simple because the rules are simple, not because the US invented the standard first.
Nobody studding sociology has came out and claimed they couldn't do it only because of their language, but nearly nobody questions that the language was an important factor, and they were very diverse groups, with little else in common.
Hangeul has very simple rules, and is generally simple, but if you want Hangul Jamo (i.e., archaic letters that don't compose neatly into "standardized" syllables), you'll be in a similar place as if you want to produce mediaeval ligatures or thorn letters. Þis is hardly ever neſceſʒary in modern text.
On the other hand, I've been seeing this attitude in regards to other topics lately. "Why can't humans be perfect... like this machine?" Well, guess what, bub. We came first, and this stupid computer had better get used to it. Me, I like my clumsy, imperfect analog world.
Sincerely, Christophe
If that was the intention, the author isn't very good at it.
The author of course gets 'angry' with the super-non-perfect systems.
Those languages are very difficult to deal with, and he is expressing his frustration. That doesn't mean he's being condescending nor arrogant.
It seems to me like english is "more perfect" if you are trying to build a straightforward model of a language like a software developer might.
The article suggests that there are some convoluted rules in other languages which make it much more difficult to model the language.
It's a language. No one can help what language they learned when they were a child. It wasn't up to them. Of course some of them are going to suck overall more than others, and of course there are different reasons for the suckage, and of course all languages suck in different ways.
It seems like if someone is getting offended about someone else saying their language sucks, they're probably going to get offended about pretty much anything.
Since language is a core component of human culture, many people become offended when their language is insulted or threatened. Countries have gone to war over language. Provinces succeed over language. Language is a very, very sensitive topic in many places, such as Quebec, Catalonia, the nations of former Yugoslavia, and so on and so forth.
You may think that people shouldn't be sensitive if their language is denigrated or insulted, but that is demonstrably not the case now. Some of us may not care, but many people -- maybe even most people -- would become angry or annoyed if their native language is open ridiculed.
But I can't get being offended even if criticizing the language itself. English certainly has a lot of strange and arbitrary rules. What is with "be", "are", "am" for example? Why should languages be above criticism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian
>In the 20th century, Serbo-Croatian served as the official language of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (when it was called "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian"),[9] and later as one of the official languages of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The dissolution of Yugoslavia affected language attitudes, so that social conceptions of the language separated on ethnic and political lines. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnian has likewise been established as an official standard in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and there is an ongoing movement to codify a separate Montenegrin standard. Serbo-Croatian thus generally goes by the ethnic names Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and sometimes Montenegrin.[10]
This is also a great article on the topic
http://www.rferl.mobi/a/Serbian_Croatian_Bosnian_or_Monteneg...
Yet article 1 of the United Nations Charter states that one of the four purposed of the UN is "To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion".
Language politics are in fact really complicated. I myself am from a country that less than a decade ago went without a federal government for 20 months because the different language groups couldn't get along.
> It's a language. No one can help what language they learned when they were a child.
And while we're at it, why would anyone be sensitive about skin color or nationality?
Leaving aside the idea that you are the one to decide what others should be sensitive on: Because it makes the signal-to-noise ratio of this blog post _crap_. I'm not sure if particular things are a serious grief or just a bewildered look at new things. I'm not sure of the intention. Should it educate or just rant? It's unclear and wastes a lot of time on things that don't add anything.
If you need 32bit to do Chinese, just to store the characters then your first step into computing is going to be harder, compared to the American that can do with 8bit.
I was thinking the same.