51–60 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.
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Imagine if Europe was pre-metric system today. Merely proposing unification I'd be instantly downvoted, and called a bigotted racist who doesn't respect the cultural heritage of every nation. Unfortunately those are the times right now. We, the most adaptable and intelligent species on the planet, have become used to bragging about not having to adapt or know a lot. We sure do have really strong opinions about everyt…
I think that's the dividing line - each person decides if it's worth it to learn something new. For example, some people love foreign media so much that they trade fansubs of said media or even learn the language so they can watch. Someone who wants to program computers will most likely learn functional English, just because of how much content on that subject is in English (the "lingua franca" of computers). But som…
This is why I mentioned the metric system, and what not. Every time throughout history when we decided to unify, the advantages VASTLY, and I mean VASTLY have outweighed the short-term drawbacks.
In fact I'd say, one of the biggest test for us as species is that we can fully understand, internalize and implement this concept. Because we always reach for the short term. Short term profits over long-term strategy in the enterprise. Short term economy benefits over long-term climate impact. And so on and so on.
Someone in Mongolia won't have to switch overnight. Someone in Mongolia may gain the option to have it both ways until they're used to it, and eventually there will be unification. That's basic change management.
Change management is a necessary art to survive and to thrive.
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> 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…
Pride doesn't even matter here. It's simple economics. 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.
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
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.
This seems to be the ideal occasion to show off my latest pet project: https://icebergcharts.com
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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!).
> I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...
A few of the languages on the list are designed precisely to be unreadable.
> Jonathan Blow, in a talk about how software is getting worse, points to the example of Ken Thompson's text editor, which Ken built in a single week. 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 su…
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…
> Jonathan Blow, in a talk about how software is getting worse, points to the example of Ken Thompson's text editor, which Ken built in a single week. 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 su…
This is a ridiculous mischaracterization of what Jonathan Blow was talking about.
Here is the full presentation. Very much worth watching in its entirety and thinking about: