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Your language sucks

garrett.damore.org

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Re: Your language sucks

#41

Post by mrweasel »

packetized wrote: post #4

The points made may be salient, but the tone is so condescending as to be nearly unreadable without getting angry. A large number of his points around languages that are radically different from English could be summed up as: "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first." This fairly reeks of tone-deafness.

Interesting thought: It's possible that computers would inevitably be invented in the US/UK/Russia or some other country with a relative simple character set, because the doing something like Chinese, first would posse a hindrance.

If you need 32bit to do Chinese, just to store the characters then your first step into computing is going to be harder, compared to the American that can do with 8bit.

Re: Your language sucks

#43

Post by robzyb »

dotfish wrote: post #22
archagon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, I realize it's totally meant tongue-in-cheek. So I don't want to pick on the article, because it's useful and funny. On the other hand, I've been seeing this attitude in regards to other topics lately. "Why can't humans be perfect... like this machine?" Well, guess what, bub. We came first, and this stupid computer had better get used to it. Me, I like my clumsy, imperfect analog world.

Really? It just sounds condescending and arrogant in a very Anglo-centric way even if I try to read the satire between the lines. If that was the intention, the author isn't very good at it.

The author is someone who is trying to apply a simple and consistent set of rules to non-perfect systems.

The author of course gets 'angry' with the super-non-perfect systems.

Those languages are very difficult to deal with, and he is expressing his frustration. That doesn't mean he's being condescending nor arrogant.

Re: Your language sucks

#44

Post by rowyourboat »

Even if it's tongue-in-cheek, I take issue with the general sentiment. If supporting languages spoken in the real world sucks, then we need better approaches to dealing with text. Not more whining about how unicode is hard.

Re: Your language sucks

#45

Post by ekianjo »

robzyb wrote: post #43
dotfish wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? It just sounds condescending and arrogant in a very Anglo-centric way even if I try to read the satire between the lines. If that was the intention, the author isn't very good at it.

The author is someone who is trying to apply a simple and consistent set of rules to non-perfect systems. The author of course gets 'angry' with the super-non-perfect systems. Those languages are very difficult to deal with, and he is expressing his frustration. That doesn't mean he's being condescending nor arrogant.

You should replace "non-perfect" with "non-English" in your comment. That would fit just as well.

Re: Your language sucks

#46

Post by maximumoverload »

vesinisa wrote: post #30

As a Finnish speaker, I must disappoint you that both Russian and English do have broken alphabets (although this might not affect their character coding). English makes extensive use of silent letters and letters whose pronunciation is dependent on the context (word) they appear in (take e in "context" and "appear" as an out of hat example). I haven't studied much Russian, but I know that the letter ъ in their alpha…

This article is speaking clearly from the encoding and sorting view, not the easiness to learn or the logic of pronounciation.

Re: Your language sucks

#47

Post by arh68 »

vesinisa wrote: post #30

As a Finnish speaker, I must disappoint you that both Russian and English do have broken alphabets (although this might not affect their character coding). English makes extensive use of silent letters and letters whose pronunciation is dependent on the context (word) they appear in (take e in "context" and "appear" as an out of hat example). I haven't studied much Russian, but I know that the letter ъ in their alpha…

English pronunciation leads to algorithms like Soundex [1], which just wouldn't seem necessary if words were written purely phonetically. Hangul gets closer, in a way. It seems hard to make rhymes with words like 'reprise' and avoid 'despise'. Not all languages need to be so ambiguous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

Re: Your language sucks

#48

Post by pavel_lishin »

vesinisa wrote: post #30

As a Finnish speaker, I must disappoint you that both Russian and English do have broken alphabets (although this might not affect their character coding). English makes extensive use of silent letters and letters whose pronunciation is dependent on the context (word) they appear in (take e in "context" and "appear" as an out of hat example). I haven't studied much Russian, but I know that the letter ъ in their alpha…

Yup, both ъ and ь either modify the preceding constant (тварь) or insert a sort of separation between letters (подъезд).

There are also some non-phonetic aspects to the language, which I didn't really think about until taking Russian in college (sort of native speaker, took the class to make some friends.) For instance, "o" is frequently pronounced as "ah" (хорошо - horosho - is usually pronounced as 'harasho'.)

Every language has quirks.

Re: Your language sucks

#50

Post by alkonaut »

dsirijus wrote: post #29

I'll do my best to fix my language as soon as you fix your units. Your units suck.

Let's not forget the horrible mm/dd/yyyy format.

I need y'all to just use U.S English combined with ISO dates and metric units. Thanks.

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