Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010) • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by layer8 » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #36

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "everyone" doesn't have the same keyboard nor does everyone speak the same language. ASCII is not a universal character set and treating it as such is nothing short of cultural imperialism: "If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for everyone". Artificial limits on language and characters sets might sound simple to you but it introduces a lot of complexity for others. Unicode code solves that problem with n…

Not sure why you're downvoted; it's simply true that ASCII is not universal. The "A" in ASCII stands for American. I am a monolingual English speaker but I think I should be able to write ÷, ≤ and ≥ in my Go code, and I think I should be able to do maths using π.

> The "A" in ASCII stands for American.

Just call it ISO 646-IRV instead. ;)

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

#162

Post by ht_th » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #44

ht_th wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year, when I suddenly had to teach symbol-heavy stuff over the internet, I put together a tool for this because my handwriting is just too bad with a mouse or even a tablet. I wanted to be able to "live" calculate with symbols while I talked over it with my students. I called this tool √𝚎𝚍, the rich Unicode text editing suite (RUTED, pronounced ˈruːtɪd) and I use it in vim: https://gitlab.com/ruted/ruted-vim .…

I'm surprised you didn't go the xcompose route! Was this an explicit choice or just didn't know about it?

Yes, I wanted to build something that my students using Windows or Mac OS also could easily use. And I wanted to build a web extension for Firefox and Chrome using the same format. And maybe integrate it in some other tools we're using here as well. Of course, that was too ambitious and the only thing I ended up with was an integration in vim. And that could have been done easier, as your sibling posters have pointed out.

Anyway, it was fun to build and very useful the past year.

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

#163

Post by xienze » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

slx26 wrote: post #143

>> For some reason computer people are so conservative [...] Well, one of the underlying reasons for the lack of imagination might be... keyboards . If keyboard keys were small e-ink displays, easily configurable and accessible by programs, programmers would have come up with a lot of interesting stuff already. We do it with function icons in regular interfaces. If we could intergrate with keyboards, we'd definitely…

> Well, one of the underlying reasons for the lack of imagination might be... keyboards.

That and the fact that it would probably take me longer to search for whatever obscure mathematical symbol is supposed to represent than it would take to just type out its name.

And ASCII is just easier to deal with.

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

#164

Post by layer8 » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

afr0ck wrote: post #87

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "everyone" doesn't have the same keyboard nor does everyone speak the same language. ASCII is not a universal character set and treating it as such is nothing short of cultural imperialism: "If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for everyone". Artificial limits on language and characters sets might sound simple to you but it introduces a lot of complexity for others. Unicode code solves that problem with n…

What's the purpose of supporting other character sets in a language's syntax? Good luck finding contributors from all over the world for a software written in Turkish characters. I mean for hobbyists or very special purpose cases where such a thing is really needed (writing code in Turkish or Chinese or Arabic or whatever), people can add language support for that (after all it's just a bunch of keywords). It needs s…

Non-ASCII characters make sense in national application domains, e.g. tax software, where you don’t want be forced to transliterate (or worse: try to translate) the non-English terminology.

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

#165

Post by bradrn » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

slx26 wrote: post #143

>> For some reason computer people are so conservative [...] Well, one of the underlying reasons for the lack of imagination might be... keyboards . If keyboard keys were small e-ink displays, easily configurable and accessible by programs, programmers would have come up with a lot of interesting stuff already. We do it with function icons in regular interfaces. If we could intergrate with keyboards, we'd definitely…

> If we could intergrate with keyboards, we'd definitely take advantage of it.

From my own personal experience this is extremely true. A while back I made myself a custom keyboard [0] which can enter lots of characters, mostly for linguistic tasks. I didn’t intend to start using it for things outside linguistics, but before long I was using it everywhere — and my inventory of available characters expanded correspondingly. I started to use curvy quotes and em/en-dashes in all my writings (even in this post!), and — more topically — I started using Unicode symbols in my programming, when possible. I don’t use them too much, mostly because there’s little need for them, but in scientific tasks it’s really useful to be able to type e.g. ‘λ’ instead of ‘wavelength’. I predict that as Unicode symbols become easier to input, programming languages will indeed start to utilise them more — the limiting factor is keyboard layout. (Indeed we can already see the start of this process in Julia, Raku and Haskell.)

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

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

#166

Post by cletus » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

Yeah, this couldn’t be more misguided. It would be the very definition of a boondoggle.

The key point here is chunking. Mentally you can process the + as a plus sign. It’s been single concept. It’s association with addition probably means the reader can make useful inferences about what it does.

Now consider the Greek letter ζ (zeta). For anyone unfamiliar with that it would be more than one chunk as you would probably try to remember the shape.

Worse, you may have no idea how to input it.

And to get any of this we’d have to deal with encodings. For what, exactly?

And sure, not everyone is familiar with the Latin script that dominates ASCII but you have to pick something and for better or for worse English is the lingua franca of programming.

And don’t even get me started on the insanity that is Unicode attempting to assign a code point to every symbol ever imagined and then extending that with compound code points and modifiers.

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

#167

Post by Zababa » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

nmz wrote: post #157

Zababa wrote: post #139

> And need I remind anybody that you cannot buy a monochrome screen anymore? Syntax-coloring editors are the default. Why not make color part of the syntax? Why not tell the compiler about protected code regions by putting them on a framed light gray background? Or provide hints about likely and unlikely code paths with a green or red background tint? I'm colorblind, please never do that. Syntax highlighting is fine…

Colorforth not only does this but solved the colorblind problem by switching fonts.

I don't think colorforth "solved the colorblind problem" considering it has almost no adoption. Does anyone except Chuck Moore uses it? It has a fallback for colorblind people, which is better than nothing but is still terrible.

The current way, plain text with everyone free to use syntax highlighters that change the color, font, or anything of the text is fine and works very well. I've heard about AST-based source of truth, and I think this could fix syntax mistakes while still allowing people to edit plain text as they wish (and could also simplify visual programming tools. Maybe unlock a smooth transition from low-code tools to regular code?).

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

#168

Post by foxes » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

Emoji symbols for some funky new Haskell function, why not.

type (@@@#@$$$)

Could definitely be made more compact :).

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

#169

Post by mseepgood » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

Go was designed by Ken Thompson, Robert Griesemer and Rob Pike. The article makes it sound as if Go was designed by a single person.

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

#170

Post by Chris_Newton » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #77

If it's not on the keyboard, nobody is going to type it. Solutions: a) only use characters in the intersection of the top N most popular keyboard layouts b) issue programmers' keyboards with an agreed character set c) issue programmers' keypads with supplementary characters d) add on-screen supplementary keypads

This seems to be a solved problem, if we want it to be. We can easily enough teach our programming editors either that typing < followed by = should convert to ≤ automatically unless you press some sort of literal key first (say Esc), or that typing some sort of compose key (say Alt Gr) followed by < and then = should convert to ≤.