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The curious case of disappearing Polish S

medium.com

31–40 of 118 posts

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#31
post #15

I do not have sufficient profanity in my verbal arsenal for websites that override basic, fundamental browser behaviour because they think they know better than I do what I actually meant to do. I have noticed Medium being a regular perpetrator of this sort of broken behaviour before. That one of the developers at Medium could run into such a glowing example of one of the many reasons it's nasty to override browser b…

Thats why some people disable javascript.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#32
"While France, Germany, and other countries got their early PC with customized keyboards whose layouts mirrored closely the typewriters that came before… [...] …in Poland, we had to find another way of inputting the extra 9 diacritics unique to our language."

Did we? I dare to say that your historical account is inaccurate. We stuck to our traditional layout for a while. What does it matter if the keyboard wasn't customized in physical sense anyway? You should be looking at the screen, not at the keys. If I recall well, Polish typewriter layout (PN-87) was still available on Windows 95/98. The now prevalent >Alt + somethingDomestic software certainly used the typewriter layout - for instance http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAG_%28edytor_tekstu%29, once a very popular word processor for PC, last version released in 1996.

The typewriter layout finally got extinct, but what spelled its ultimate demise was the internet, I believe.

Early netiquette actually forbid using Polish diacritics, because of encoding issues - in that era you could never be sure whether the other person would read "gwóźdź" or "gw░¶d¶", so it was considered good practice to stick to Latin characters only.

Meaning that users didn't get to feel the pain of having to press Alt + whatever all the time, and so they got hooked on default QWERTY.

As the last of Mohicans, I use the typewriter layout to this very day (for typing in Polish; I alternate), only I had to recreate it myself (using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Editor)*

It allows for much faster typing in compare to these inconvenient right-Alt shortcuts. Swapping Y with Z by itself is a win for a Polish speaker (writer), given that Z is much more common in Polish. While its frequency is at mere 0.07% in English, it reaches 4.9% in Polish, placing it in the top 10. Thus putting it under the weakest finger of all - your left pinky - isn't very considerate.

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* Funnily enough - I'm not flame baiting - when I decided to try Linux, hailed for its customizability, I found out that recreating my favorite layout wasn't as easy. I got lots of advice on various forums, but noone had a simple receipt for me. Admittedly this was few years back.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#33
post #32

"While France, Germany, and other countries got their early PC with customized keyboards whose layouts mirrored closely the typewriters that came before… [...] …in Poland, we had to find another way of inputting the extra 9 diacritics unique to our language." Did we? I dare to say that your historical account is inaccurate. We stuck to our traditional layout for a while. What does it matter if the keyboard wasn't cus…

I just checked, and it appears PN-87 is included in the default Ubuntu install as "Polish (qwertz)". For whatever reason many distributions include far fewer keyboard layouts than Ubuntu.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you have all my votes. Words cannot describe the ire which consumes me when cute webdevs reinvent everything because it works on their industrial-grade computers with perfect internet. I agree. So. Much. But. It pains me to say this: what else would you want to have happen when a user presses Ctrl+S? Are they really wrong, here? Wouldn't a user expect a "save blog" on Ctrl+S? How would I explain to a non-tech us…

Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when w…

I've lost too much data to trust to autosave. When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time (I write Scala, I don't have the RAM to do that) - I want it to wait for an explicit Ctrl-S to tell it that I've finished a meaningful section and it should compile now. I have exactly the same thing on prose.io (which I write on a lot, and which looks very similar to medium), where "saving" means creating a git commit - I don't want an automatic commit for every letter I type, but I do want to commit very frequently, after each paragraph or similar unit. Rather like when programming.

It becomes a mental tic, an "I've finished the paragraph" instinct. And I'm very glad medium handles it.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#35
post #33
post #32

"While France, Germany, and other countries got their early PC with customized keyboards whose layouts mirrored closely the typewriters that came before… [...] …in Poland, we had to find another way of inputting the extra 9 diacritics unique to our language." Did we? I dare to say that your historical account is inaccurate. We stuck to our traditional layout for a while. What does it matter if the keyboard wasn't cus…

I just checked, and it appears PN-87 is included in the default Ubuntu install as "Polish (qwertz)". For whatever reason many distributions include far fewer keyboard layouts than Ubuntu.

Thanks for the tip. I think it was Linux Mint that I was checking out, but as I said, it's been a while.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poland has more than double the number of people than Serbia + Croatia + Bosnia + Montenegro.

You're certainly right, third then.

Fourth. While Ukraine is a bilingual country, it still much bigger than former Yugoslavia. Most people there consider it their native language and a majority know it. So if you are strongly biased for a small number you'll get 30 million speakers, if you are biased for a big number it might be 50 million.

And on top of that you must use the same criterion for the S-C language, not counting Slovenians, Albanians, Macedonians, etc who know the language but don't use it much anymore.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#37
post #34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when w…

I've lost too much data to trust to autosave. When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time (I write Scala, I don't have the RAM to do that) - I want it to wait for an explicit Ctrl-S to tell it that I've finished a meaningful section and it should compile now. I have exactly the same thing on prose.io (which I write on a lot, and which looks very similar to…

What do you use actually that doesn't have "undo"? I can "undo" the whole day of my work on the file until I close it in the IDE. Whatever is "lost" I can return to the previous point.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#38
post #4

I initially planned to put a TL;DR here, but it's the best bug analysis I've seen in months - a pleasure to read! - so I'm leaving it for others to savour. The very same bug used to be present in early Windows mobile GPU drivers - with global hotkeys making it impossible to enter Ł (with Intel GMA 950) and Ć (with ATI Catalyst). Being a Polish geek, I used to earn lots of free dinners from frustrated friends who were…

"The very same bug used to be present in early Windows mobile GPU drivers"

Not just the early ones, no :)

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#39
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you have all my votes. Words cannot describe the ire which consumes me when cute webdevs reinvent everything because it works on their industrial-grade computers with perfect internet. I agree. So. Much. But. It pains me to say this: what else would you want to have happen when a user presses Ctrl+S? Are they really wrong, here? Wouldn't a user expect a "save blog" on Ctrl+S? How would I explain to a non-tech us…

Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when w…

> I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when writing documents. I don't know actually anybody who does

I, for one, used to have this habit. The notion of "not knowing anyone who uses Ctrl + S" is a bit funny - are you really aware whether people around you do this or not? How does it come up?

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#40
post #39
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when w…

> I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when writing documents. I don't know actually anybody who does I, for one, used to have this habit. The notion of "not knowing anyone who uses Ctrl + S" is a bit funny - are you really aware whether people around you do this or not? How does it come up?

By watching normal non-programmers people like my girlfriends and programmers people like my colleagues with whom I worked closely. Former just don't do any Ctrl-anything during the writing. The later simply never needed Ctrl-S, just like I. Autosave really works in the most common tool, Word. When my girlfriend lost her work, it was never for the autosave, but for manually saving over something she did before or Word corrupting the file during the save (the corrupted file was still luckily readable by OpenOffice).
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