41–50 of 187 posts
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This seems to be the ideal occasion to show off my latest pet project: https://icebergcharts.com
This is fantastic. My only wish is to be able to export them as a PNG... maybe add a small watermark so people can find you.
I'll try to create an unobtrusive watermark
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> ?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS So you just said all non-English speakers use right-to-left? No, the direction isn't what's confusing me, rather the fact you're trying to score a cheap outrage comment, but actually wrote non-sense no matter which direction you read it. How about maybe educate yourself a little, and rephrase your question to reflect reality, and we can ha…
I'm not who you're responding to, and obviously the commenter should have said "some" non-English speakers rather than "all". But the main point is still obvious and true: how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers? No need to get snarky about it. Comments like "maybe educate yourself a…
I'd actually like it.
You know, thanks to this we have Murican Internet that's the same stack everywhere. How would YOU like it if "Internet" was just your country?
We gotta disentangle this obsession with encodings as some kind of national cause for pride. Encodings are INCIDENTAL. Encodings are LEARNED. You weren't born reading right-to-left or left-to-right and you can switch both in surprisingly short amount of time, if you bothered.
A good article, which shows that even plain text editing (without any formatty) is already way more complex than a layperson may appreciate. For the developer, there are some gems to be discovered when writing a text editor; recall that using regular expressions coverted to finite state machines saw the light as part of editing, and I remember being given a very cool paper (from the 1960s!) by my undergrad compiler c…
There's a new(ish) editor called Xi that's built on the rope data structure: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor
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Didn’t extended ASCII cover that and make text terminals usable with non-English character sets? Genuinely curious.
How would you use extended-ascii to write Arabic?
https://www.charset.org/charsets/iso-8859-6
There’s no single byte encoding for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean though.
On the emoji color (skintone) modifier... A normal person wants to select their emoji from a set. Only a programmer would allow the user to input a tiny program with a symbol and a color modifier and then interpret it. If you want to make text editing a little easier, treat every character along with any style applied to it as a single entity. This way you avoid a lot of potential problems like in TFA as well as thin…
I mean, the example is pretty contrived in the first place:
> Whoops, I didn't mean to put the a there.
How in the world are you typing emoji such that you have to add the skin color modifier separately that would even afford an opportunity for an errant character to get inserted between? Windows numpad alt codes?
Regarding the vertical cursor movement, back in the day there was an alternative behavior. You can see this in QuickBASIC/QBasic[1]. Here, Microsoft treated the entire screen as a grid. I always thought that was a great UI. It hides the fact that there are line endings (\n on Unix or \r\n for DOS). And why shouldn't it? That's an implementation detail. And as evident by DOS using CR+LF it goes back to the days where…
If you move the cursor to an empty area and start typing, should the missing characters be tabs or spaces then? Or NULs?
Also, how do you insert spaces/newlines/tabs in between other text? Everything would be implicitly modal.
It's good UI for some things, but it's not as good for a general editor like vim. I'm not looking forward to write Python with it, for example :)
IIRC the Commodore 64 did something similar with its built-in Basic prompt.
For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.
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?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS
It's not the last time major portions of the world fundamentally changed how they did things to align with the major powers at the time. Even WITH all the Unicode support that currently exists in the computing world I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII. I guess you could count APL there (or perl!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...
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I'm not who you're responding to, and obviously the commenter should have said "some" non-English speakers rather than "all". But the main point is still obvious and true: how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers? No need to get snarky about it. Comments like "maybe educate yourself a…
> how would you like it if another country was a dominant technological power and we all had to re-learn to read and write English backwards precisely like that to use computers? I'd actually like it. You know, thanks to this we have Murican Internet that's the same stack everywhere. How would YOU like it if "Internet" was just your country? We gotta disentangle this obsession with encodings as some kind of national…
It's far less effort and cost for developers to accomodate the world's existing scripts, than it is for the vast majority of the world's population to re-learn how to read and write a new script.
By orders of magnitude.
And obviously, it's not just direction that differs from English but a whole host of other aspects as well.
This kind of sentiment drives me crazy. Yes, internationalization makes things harder and more complex than they were in the old days. But, back then, only people who lived in one small part of the world were able to usefully use computers in their language. (Simply supporting the Unicode character set is not enough.) Nostalgia for the simplicity of the past ends up having ugly cultural implications. It's easy to say "let's go back to the time when things were simple"; it's a lot harder to say "folks in (e.g.) Israel shouldn't be able to type in their native language".