Hacker News Reader

I mostly agree with your point, but note that the author is male (well, the name is a commonly male one).

It's a bit telling that folks in the software industry[1] seem to assume that techies are male (a priori), but those who write articles of this kind are female.

Not blaming you for it, but it's something you should try to be conscious about and fix.

[1] I've been guilty of this myself, though usually in cases where I use terms like "guys" where I shouldn't be.

I had a female coworker by that name, so your assumption that I just assume that people who write articles like this are female and need to have my consciousness raised to "fix" my unconscious sexism is something you should try to be more conscious of and try to fix.

However, I clearly do need to question my assumption that since this was a female name before, it's a female name now, so I should change it to "he/she".

Or they.

> I had a female coworker by that name

Oh, sorry about that. Not sure if you're joking about the assumption of assumptions, but asking people to take note of their behavior based on something that they _might_ have assumed is not dangerous. Assuming gender roles is. Apologies for making that assumption, but IMO it's a rather harmless one so I don't see anything to fix about it :P

> The complaint in this silly article about tiny Klingon being included before a complete Bengali is precisely because getting Bengali right was more complex and far more important.

This is factually incorrect. It seems you missed both the factual point about the Klingon script in the article as well as the broader point which that detail was meant to illustrate.

> although you prefer to follow the orthodox pattern of blaming white racism for your grievance du jour, the policy of the Unicode Technical Committee for years has been to use the national standards created by the national standards bodies where these scripts are most used as their most important input.

There's a huge difference between piggybacking off of a decades-old proposed scheme which was never widely adopted even in its country of origin, and which was created under a very different set of constraints than Unicode, and which was created to address a very different set of goals than Unicode, versus making native speakers an active and equal part of the actual decision-making process.

Rather than trying to shoehorn the article into a familiar pattern which doesn't actually fit ("orthodox pattern of blaming white racism for your grievance du jour"), please take note that the argument in the article is more nuanced than you're giving it credit for.

versus making native speakers an active and equal part of the actual decision-making process.

As I explained, native speakers are the primary decision makers, and not just any native speakers but whoever the native speakers choose as their own top, native experts when they establish their own national standard. For living, natural languages, you don't get characters into Unicode by buying a seat on the committee and voting for them. You do it by getting those characters into a national standard created by the native-speaking authorities.

So, I repeat: What national standard have your native-speaking authorities created that reflects the choices you claim all native speakers would naturally make if only the foreign oppressors would listen to them? If your answer is that the national standards differ from what you want, then you are blaming the Unicode Technical Committee for refusing to override the native speakers' chosen authorities and claiming this constitutes abuse of native Bengali speakers by a bunch of "mostly white men".

> As I explained, native speakers are the primary decision makers

No, the ultimate decision makers of Unicode are the voting members of the Unicode Consortium (and its committees).

> For living, natural languages, you don't get characters into Unicode by buying a seat on the committee and voting for them. You do it by getting those characters into a national standard created by the native-speaking authorities

As referenced elsewhere in the comments, there are plenty of decisions that the Unicode Consortium (and its committees) take themselves. Some of these (though not all) take "native-speaking authorities" as an input, but the final decision is ultimately theirs.

There's a very important difference between being made an adviser (having "input") and being a decision-maker, and however much the decision-makers may value the advisers, we can't pretend that those are the same thing.

You claim that native Bengali speakers on the UTC would have designed the character set your way, the real native speaker way, instead of the bad design produced by these "mostly white men".

But the character set WAS designed by native speakers, by experts chosen not by the UTC but by the native speaking authorities themselves. The UTC merely verified that these native speaking experts were still satisfied with their own standard after using it for a while, and when they said they were, the UTC adopted it.

You go on about how the real issue is the authority of these white men and how the native speakers are restricted to a minor role as mere advisers, and yet the native speakers, as is usually the case, had all the authority they needed to create the exact character set that THEY wanted and get it adopted into Unicode. That's the way the UTC wants to use its authority in almost all cases of living languages.

Unfortunately for your argument, these native speakers didn't need any more authority to get the character set they wanted into Unicode. They got it. You just don't like their choices, but you prefer to blame it on white men with authority.