Your language sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Your language sucks

#91

Post by lambda » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:02 PM UTC

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 may be true from a pronunciation standpoint, but he's mostly writing from a text processing standpoint. From a text processing standpoint, Russian and English are pretty easy to deal with.

On the other hand, it's a bit funny to point those out as easy to deal with, because they are bicameral alphabets, with notions of upper and lower case, case mappings, title casing rules, and the like. That's a complex system, that if you didn't grow up with it and already have had to deal with and come to terms with it, you would probably include it in a rant like this.

Re: Your language sucks

#92

Post by jeffreyrogers » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:06 PM UTC

nnq wrote: post #34

OP should be thankful to the Greek, Roman and Arab ancient civilizations for sane-to-compute-with languages. Basically all other languages are so fucked up and mind-fucking that it's no wonder modern mathematics, science, engineering and then computer science developed so fast in particular regions of the world... not to be a cultural bigot, but Sapir-Whorf ftw :)

Sapir-Whorf is largely discredited in modern linguistics (especially so for the strong form that your comment seems to suggest).

The general consensus is that human languages are more or less equivalent in their expressive power. (Note that doesn't mean certain writing systems aren't easier to learn/use than others. It's important to distinguish reading/writing from language).

Re: Your language sucks

#93

Post by asveikau » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:10 PM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #63

No mention of Arabic anywhere. Has OP not worked with it? In any case, how easy/hard is it to work with in data processing?

The article does mention RTL languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi?) They are kind of annoying to deal with especially when you have multilingual text. (Google "Unicode bidi") And UIs have to be mirrored.

Re: Your language sucks

#94

Post by _deh » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:12 PM UTC

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.

'Au contraire, mon ami, it is you and your programs that suck' retorted some languages. Though in fairness I think there was as much comic hyperbole as grating condescension.

Re: Your language sucks

#95

Post by sho_hn » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:14 PM UTC

jkrems wrote: post #88

sho_hn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and informative. 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 morphem…

I think the author makes it pretty obvious that he's only speaking about "your writing systems sucks for me while doing my job". Sure, the title is hyperbolic - but with a title like "Your language sucks" nobody should expect it to be anything else. That's like saying the title "Dependency Injection will be the death of me" is flawed because it's highly unlikely the author will actually die because of it.

Sure, but I think it's fair to be just as unforgiving in a critique then. My concern here is that we hackers love it when (seemingly) low-hanging fruit are pointed out and react with "well this sucks - let's drop it" very easily, and if this happens to someone as a result of reading this blog, it's bad. That said, I don't think eye-for-an-eye discourse is nice, either, and would certainly prefer it if this was a more rigorously fact-checked article.

Re: Your language sucks

#96

Post by gurkendoktor » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:15 PM UTC

nz wrote: post #25

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.

Yes, the tone is a far cry from the cool-headed, neutral, sterile aesthetic one would expect from technical or academic writing. However, the article is very informative, and should probably be bookmarked for later reference --- in case one ever has to do this kind of work. The article may have been written in anger, and thus it provokes anger. Good! Programmers who don't get angry while solving hard, inconvenient, u…

> However, the article is very informative

I can only speak with confidence about the section on the German ss/ß, and it is dead wrong. (This has been explained a few times in sibling-of-a-sibling comments.) So it's not informative unless you fact-check every single paragraph of it.

I also don't remember anger being part of any successful learning experience.

Re: Your language sucks

#97

Post by sho_hn » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:17 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #75

sho_hn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanizing Korean: The Evolution of Korean Typewriters is interesting thought-fodder along those lines. This LWN comment thread touched a little bit on the effect of printing on scripts, as well how different means of input, such as cellphone keyboards, interact with different scripts: http://lwn.net/Articles/607599/

I'd be really interested in reading that, but my google-fu can't seem to turn it up (I can find the author, Dr. Kim) but not the book. Any ideas where I can find it?

This was originally a presentation in English at a conference in the Netherlands, but it was also published in a Korean academic journal, and there used to be a PDF of the English version floating about ... but I can't turn it up anymore, either :/. I've fired off a mail to the author asking for help; if I get a response I'll edit/reply.

Re: Your language sucks

#98

Post by backdraw_ » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:21 PM UTC

Regarding point 7, that the collation order is context-dependent: does a title that starts with T come before or after a word that starts with U? What if it starts with "The"?

Re: Your language sucks

#99

Post by mjw » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:25 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #58

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…

> As a Finnish speaker So how does Finnish compare up? Do you not have silent letters? In Dutch we have some useless things like combined letters: "c" and "h" are both used (like in "cake" or "hotel") but when combined to "ch" they sound like a "g". There are even duplicate ones: "au" and "ou" are both the same sound, and "ij" and "ei" too. You can't mix them though, "ijs" is ice and "eis" is a demand even though the…

Interesting to see Dutch mentioned. From what little I know about Dutch, its orthography does seem more similar to English than any other non-english-derived language I've seen.

I seem to remember that some (clearly not all!) of the horrible mess of English orthography originates from Dutch in fact, since some of the first people to run printing presses in England (or to print books which were distributed in England) were Dutch.

Wikipedia seems to back me up slightly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refor...

Any linguists fancy putting me straight on this?

Re: Your language sucks

#100

Post by efesak » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

lomnakkus wrote: post #80

arh68 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You really don't want a writing system which is too tied to pronunciation. If you go too far in that direction you'll end up with people with different dialects of the same language not being able to communicate clearly, even in writing! That would be a very undesirable state of affairs. Yet you still want some correlation between spelling and pronunciation, otherwise the writing system essentially becomes completely…

I am from country with strongly phonetical language and you are just plainly wrong. There are minor dialects but it is considered rather as slang in compare to language taught in schools or comunicate with officials or even broader audience.

(On the other side, it is much more difficult for us to learn English and get used to that disconection between alphabet and said words. And we don't have spelling competitions :).)