How timely. I was reading the Unicode Standard the other day, and realized how this seemingly simple project of "modelling a character with a number" has become a huge, sprawling behemoth over years because they tried to cover every aspect of human language; I'm sure it's going to be even more convoluted and politicized in future, and it will never be complete. And this brings me two sides of the argument: should sof…
Wait, are there really people who think humans should change their lives to fit a software framework?
Software Is Hard (2007)
11–20 of 54 posts
Re: Software Is Hard (2007)
#12Re: Software Is Hard (2007)
#13How timely. I was reading the Unicode Standard the other day, and realized how this seemingly simple project of "modelling a character with a number" has become a huge, sprawling behemoth over years because they tried to cover every aspect of human language; I'm sure it's going to be even more convoluted and politicized in future, and it will never be complete. And this brings me two sides of the argument: should sof…
Unicode exists because people all over the world want to represent their written language on computers, and that seems like a reasonable thing to want. Software needs to serve reasonable human needs such as writing systems.
Re: Software Is Hard (2007)
#14How timely. I was reading the Unicode Standard the other day, and realized how this seemingly simple project of "modelling a character with a number" has become a huge, sprawling behemoth over years because they tried to cover every aspect of human language; I'm sure it's going to be even more convoluted and politicized in future, and it will never be complete. And this brings me two sides of the argument: should sof…
What lifestyle change do you suggest? That people in China (as one example of many) switch to ASCII and stop using Chinese characters when they use computers? Unicode exists because people all over the world want to represent their written language on computers, and that seems like a reasonable thing to want. Software needs to serve reasonable human needs such as writing systems.
Re: Software Is Hard (2007)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
What lifestyle change do you suggest? That people in China (as one example of many) switch to ASCII and stop using Chinese characters when they use computers? Unicode exists because people all over the world want to represent their written language on computers, and that seems like a reasonable thing to want. Software needs to serve reasonable human needs such as writing systems.
Unicode is terrible. They can use Chinese character coding when writing in Chinese on the computer (perhaps cangjie encoding), and use ASCII when dealing with computer codes which are based on ASCII.
ASCII doesn't even cover all of the characters and symbols that are normally used by English speakers.
Re: Software Is Hard (2007)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unicode is terrible. They can use Chinese character coding when writing in Chinese on the computer (perhaps cangjie encoding), and use ASCII when dealing with computer codes which are based on ASCII.
Unicode was invented to avoid the kind of thing you are suggesting, and that's why it is popular. ASCII doesn't even cover all of the characters and symbols that are normally used by English speakers.
Re: Software Is Hard (2007)
#17> No decision is ever final. Time and again, the Chandler team hashes out compromises on complex issues, only to hit reset when someone new joins the project with new ideas or when it turns out that someone wasn't really satisfied with the compromise.
God, this whole process happens within my own head on most of my projects, especially games. It's infuriating.
Re: Software Is Hard (2007)
#18How timely. I was reading the Unicode Standard the other day, and realized how this seemingly simple project of "modelling a character with a number" has become a huge, sprawling behemoth over years because they tried to cover every aspect of human language; I'm sure it's going to be even more convoluted and politicized in future, and it will never be complete. And this brings me two sides of the argument: should sof…
Wait, are there really people who think humans should change their lives to fit a software framework?
Re: Software Is Hard (2007)
#19So, yes, software is complex. And it will always remain complex. It is doing monstrously complex things under the hood, all abstractions are leaky, and we are definitely past the point at which one person can even reasonably understand the entire stack from transistors all the way up through OS, compiler, language, etc. We must accept this fact of complexity and formulate ways to deal with it, to contain it and reduce it when we can, but it will always be with us.
Re: Software Is Hard (2007)
#20How timely. I was reading the Unicode Standard the other day, and realized how this seemingly simple project of "modelling a character with a number" has become a huge, sprawling behemoth over years because they tried to cover every aspect of human language; I'm sure it's going to be even more convoluted and politicized in future, and it will never be complete. And this brings me two sides of the argument: should sof…