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Text editing hates you too (2019)

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#61

Post by slver »

crazygringo wrote: post #49
slver wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

That's the short-term analysis. But this is not a short-term impact change. And in the long-term, things turn around.

If as a species, we can't think long-term, we're basically doomed.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#62

Post by 7373737373 »

cocoa19 wrote: post #55
7373737373 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the ideal occasion to show off my latest pet project: https://icebergcharts.com

Pretty cool. It would be nice to have one entry for computer science.

Yeah, the Ultimate Minecraft Iceberg was already pretty surprising to me, I hope more subject matter experts will contribute

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#63

Post by enqk »

skrebbel wrote: post #26
geenew wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In practice, young folks write arabic with roman script when they chat. (with numbers to supplement the missing letters)

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#64

Post by KineticLensman »

dijit wrote: post #56
KineticLensman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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_...

I think if you’re reaching for _brainfuck_ as one of the solutions for the prevalence of English in programming; then you’ve probably failed. A few of the languages on the list are designed precisely to be unreadable.

my link contains programming languages based on Arabic, Chinese, etc, not just unreadable esolangs

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#65

Post by wdb »

These days I make sure I am away making a cup of tea when these kind of topics are discussed at work. After writing a syntax highlighting editor in Delphi and a rich text editor in Flash/AS3 I try to avoid it.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#66

Post by leoc »

colllectorof wrote: post #47
bombcar wrote: post #4

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.

More often than not a problem that looks simple and has insane complexity once you dig a bit deeper is based on some faulty assumptions. Assumptions that either changed over time or never made sense to begin with. The wast majority of software systems out there are significantly simplifiable. However, not all developers are willing to analyze and question fundamental assumptions about systems they deal with. Most, in…

Alan Perlis' old motivational-poster slogan "Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it." has a fair bit going for it.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#67

Post by qsort »

hannasanarion wrote: post #58
pcwalton wrote: post #50

> 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…

Especially since the text editor in question is `ed`, which is not exactly a pinnacle of utility. We're really comparing apples to moon rockets here.

`ed` was developed in 1969. That's a remarkably uncharitable take, considering `ed` itself and its derivatives (like `sed`) are still useful today.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#68

Post by megameter »

deckard1 wrote: post #39
crazygringo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, that's not a possible alternative behavior for a world where proportional fonts exist. It's for monospace only.

as I said > Of course, this is not universal and only works with monospace fonts in certain languages. But even then, monospace didn't go away. Most developers are working with code in monospace right now.

Monospace is the more sensible option as an editing medium for symbolic content. It's in having "WYSIWYG" editors that do everything in one modeless widget that we start getting this particular kind of feature creep.

And considering how awful it tends to be to navigate a complex word processing task in Word or LibreOffice even now - mystery-meat selections abound - I'm not sure this is the right feature to support all of the time.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#69

Post by crazygringo »

brulard wrote: post #53
crazygringo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see it the other way. It would be actually orders of magnitude less effort for the rest of the world to learn one standard system/language than to have every app/product/document adapted to every single language/script/whatever in existence

That's just factually untrue.

The percentage of the world population involved in script adaptation and language translation is really quite tiny. Consumers vastly, vastly, vastly outnumber producers.

Not to mention that we have things like automated translation that are "good enough" for many cases as well.

Whereas learning a new language to fluency, for most adults, takes about ten years.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#70

Post by benboughton1 »

7373737373 wrote: post #9
bombcar wrote: post #4

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

For someone not overly ear to the ground culturally this is a rabbit hole. The Youtube one fascinates me. I've not heard of most but imagine there are hundreds of interesting stories behind every item. Interesting work and concept. Well done.
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