Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

Post by nsajko » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

lucsky wrote: post #33

ggm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels a bit gratuitously rude. He has strong opinions, and literally decades of experience. He is said to dislike time wasters. As one of a very small set of people who built much of the modern development stack from the ground up, it would be tedious in the extreme to have to deal with every headstrong tyro determined to make their (likely highly pedestrian, repetitive) point. Never met him, never really dealt…

> This feels a bit gratuitously rude Agreed, and I 100% believe that meeting him in person would most likely change my mind. I also 100% believe that he has every right to be an "arrogant prick" for all his contributions and achievements to the field. But that doesn't make him any less insufferable, unfortunately.

Post by Symbiote » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

sharikous wrote: post #21

eterevsky wrote: post #16

The best thing about using only ASCII for the main syntax is that everyone can type it with their keyboard. I think the recent fad of supporting Unicode identifiers is misguided. Of course, Unicode should be permitted in string literals, but not in the code itself. *Also I don't think Go is better than modern C++, though it might be better than C++99 which was the main standard when the article was written.

Having to do math and physics heavy work, I very much support the "fad" of having Unicode literals. "omega_0" is much worse than "ω_0" especially if you have tons of these variables. If you don't do math it's difficult to understand, but try writing without the alphabet and expressing the same concepts. Possible but clunky

Post by attractivechaos » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #74

eterevsky wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is not my first language and my native language doesn't use Latin script, still all the keyboards that I ever saw supported entering ASCII characters. As far as I know all the keyboards that are in active use support English layout. We shouldn't dismiss this as "cultural imperialism". Instead we should use this to our advantage. Currently source code written in China or in Russia can be read by developers in…

The availability of alternative commercial keyboards is possibly not the best metric to use to judge actual need/desire. There are a large number of non-ASCII layouts that can be mapped on top of a standard QWERTY[0] which show that ASCII is not a valid assumption for a modern general purpose programming language. The idea that we should all be grateful for the unification that using one language brings is a sentimen…

Post by euffs » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

Avamander wrote: post #103

slver wrote: post #88

The article's argument in a nutshell: We need to break free from the tyranny of the characters on our keyboard, and express ourselves using characters not on our keyboard. So I hope you see why that argument keeps failing.

Your keyboard is not my keyboard, nor everybody else's. So I hope you see how US-centric your view is.

Post by kaba0 » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

zelphirkalt wrote: post #37

sharikous wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to do math and physics heavy work, I very much support the "fad" of having Unicode literals. "omega_0" is much worse than "ω_0" especially if you have tons of these variables. If you don't do math it's difficult to understand, but try writing without the alphabet and expressing the same concepts. Possible but clunky

I disagree. Instead of writing one letter variable names, one could do the hard work of naming things properly, which software developers often do. Instead of going with one letter or the name of that letter as variable name, which tells your fellow non-mathematicians exactly nothing about what it contains, one could put in the effort and make the code readable. Using these one letter variables forces the reader of t…