I came in expecting to read an article bemoaning some niche language and playing the diversity card. I was not disappointed, but as I kept reading, the author made some very good points.

I don't really care that the organization is run by white men who speak English, because frankly the entire computing industry and telecommunications industry is based on that. I'm not going to argue about the original sin there, because the facts speak for themselves: they got shit done.

What I do find really disturbing, though, is that somehow both Linear A and Linear B are included, in their (as known) entirety, while Bengali is not--two languages spoken and written by nobody for over a millenia are included whereas a language spoken and written by millions of people is not. That's bad.

The discussion of somehow creating a CJK superset and then deviations to support each of those languages is worse, and the author's remark about trying to "unify" Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, and Swedish struck home.

Personally, I think that it's nice to have an ever-decreasing number of languages to support, preferably English. The first part of that is because it's annoying enough to unambiguously parse one human language much less dozens, and the second part is pure convenience and small-mindedness on my part.

That said, we don't have to buy into diversity or identity or anything else to note that something here is amiss. This is bad allocation of engineering resources.

EDIT:

And yes, one could make the argument that the computer/teleco industry is being produced in Shenzhen, to which I would respond that the intellectual capital was handled by the West. Nintendo hired SGI, Sony IBM. There is certainly a wonderful and burgeoning domestic talent, but the paths were set elsewhere, to the best of my knowledge.