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Text editing hates you too (2019)

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#141

Post by microtherion »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #132
maccard wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number 1 assumption is that all text will meet the format you're expecting it in. Be that an encoding (everyone in the US speaks English, but utf-8 is dangerously compatible with ASCII), or a character range (do we block input of certain characters?) Presentatuon is huge too, How do we render a pasted newline into a single line block? Where do you put the cursor if someone pastes a block of Arabic text into your…

> utf-8 is dangerously compatible with ASCII This. My name is Kayodé Lycaon. Note the é... how many places don’t support it? Some people consider names to be sacred and changing the spelling is more than a little offensive. Even UTF-8 can’t represent all characters in use. I believe there are Japanese names that can’t be represented by its character set. I get it’s technically difficult but so many places treat peopl…

One of the most ridiculous places to insist on ASCII recently was... the Unicode consortium: https://twitter.com/Laserhedvig/status/1395338394713079810

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#142

Post by crazygringo »

slver wrote: post #52
bombcar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You PoV is understandable, but still do you believe the ongoing long-term pain of this fragmentation is LESS than the short-term pain of unifying? 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 ful…

> the advantages VASTLY, and I mean VASTLY have outweighed the short-term drawbacks.

Except you're not even including the value of diversity in your argument.

"Unity" also leads to groupthink and monocultures which are less resistant to new challenges. Unity comes with costs you're ignoring.

Languages aren't just an encoding, but an entire paradigm of thinking. Eradicating linguistic differences eradicates entire perspectives.

Languages aren't just measuring systems. Culture is embedded in them too.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#143

Post by bombcar »

titzer wrote: post #121
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…

> 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". Is writing a text editor literally so hard that we can't do it twice (or three, or five times)? There are literally trillions of lines of code in existence now. Instead of making a five hundred thousand line text editor because are terrified of w…

This is what was done with codepages before the advent of the internet, basically. The problem that arose was transferring information between systems - even without the internet it was needed at areas that were near borders, etc.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#146

Post by rudnevr »

leoc wrote: post #66
colllectorof wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...and managers get their pride in it.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#147

Post by p2t2p »

That kind of post brings philosophical questions as well. Do we need to support 7000 languages? Should we? If we take a vision of United Earth a-la Star Trek, should there be support for any script other than “United Earth script?” Is in reasonable or unreasonable to expect countries/languages/people to upgrade their script to more simple/efficient things? Russian alphabet has had some number of simplifications and reductions throughout the history, can the same happen to Mandarin? Bunch of my Indian friends are more comfortable typing Hindi using Latin script rather than the native one. Not because of technical hurdles but because it’s cumbersome to apply all correct modifiers.

In other words, should computers adapt to people here or should people adapt to computers or some kind of mutual movement towards each other with finding a middle ground?

There’s a phonetic alphabet that contains all sounds from all languages (I don’t remember the name). It would be interesting to exercise a thought of a keyboard built to accommodate it and that alphabet serving as universal alphabet for the planet.

Edit: typos

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#148

Post by GekkePrutser »

crazygringo wrote: post #18
slver wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

No, things are as hard as they need to be. Fixed-width ASCII terminals didn't work for virtually anyone except English-speaking users. Turns out the entire world needs to use computers. That's a "need". Not "allowing".

I'm not a native English speaker and have always used computers in English. Early computers simply didn't come with language options and still people were able to use them. In fact I find the localized Windows versions odd and contrived.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#149

Post by GekkePrutser »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #30
slver wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

Only if you didn't leave the US. Over in Europe (and I assume Asia) it was a constant source of problems.

I thought it was fine really. It forced us to drop some of the quirkier characters sooner. Nobody in the Netherlands uses things like the paragraph sign anymore, or the 'ij' glyph. And accents on words are now pretty much optional.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#150

Post by dmitrygr »

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.

In college we had a professor in software engineering class who had this wonderful saying: "no matter how complex a problem looks, if you look at it just right, you will see that it is in fact even more complex."

It took years of working as a software engineer to begin to appreciate just how deep that is.

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