Your language sucks

There's a lot of half-knowledge and misdirection in this blog post, though.

* Languages aren't writing systems, and vice-versa.

* There are often decent reasons and upsides to the things he calls out as sucking. His rant on Hangul, for example - for human users, the morpho-syllabic grouping of letters into blocks in Korean writing tends to be beneficial, because they make the orthography of morphemes in different contexts more regular and morpheme reuse smoother. I also tend to consider the way Hangul is implemented in Unicode actually quite clever (you can use a formula to map from the code points of the individual letters to the code points of the pre-composed blocks). (I've contrasted Chinese and Hangul a little in this LWN comment: http://lwn.net/Articles/608260/)

* The German ß isn't a simple ligature for 'ss'. It has a different history, an orthographic dimension and also serves as a useful prounciation hint.

* Point 5, "The width of a character depends on context", is full of half-knowledge. First of, it's not "Jamo vowel" - 자모 (ja-mo) is the Korean word for "letter", so it's "vowel jamo" if anything. The alphabet is called 한글 (han-gul). Second, combining characters aren't in any way unique to Asian scripts in Unicode. Unicode contains separate code points for the individual Hangul letters and the blocks they can be combined into. Unicode also contains separate code points for Latin letters and the various diacritics and accents they combine with in Latin-derived Western scripts, along with code points for those combinations. For human users, these sort of consistent combinatorics in a script are a boon, and that Unicode chooses to represent both primitive elements and combined versions is a general trait of Unicode.

In general, the thrust here is "your writing systems sucks for me while doing my job", which is subject to this guy's performance and qualifications. It's not the same as "writing system sucks for its users". I find the specter of stuff like this catching on as memes among linguistically and culturally ignorant hackers (because hey, we write English, so we're in the doing-it-right camp, right?) frightening, because programmer convenience is only one factor among many, and most likely not the most important one.

The article may have been written in anger, and thus it provokes anger. Good! Programmers who don't get angry while solving hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable problems are, in my experience, unlikely to truly solve those problems --- sweeping issues under the rug, or passing the problem to someone else is more likely. Anger is a very powerful motivational force if honed correctly, whereas contentment often leads to docility, complacency, and quitting.

I find that problems that make you angry or enraged are simultaneously: important and instructive. Most performance problems (or even multi-threading problems), for example, fall into this category.

So that's an example of why your language sucks, not why POSIX sucks? Sure thing, guy.

Your units suck.