How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions? • Hacker News Board

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#61

Post by teknopaul » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

aikinai wrote: post #42

rhizome31 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take Japanese for an example, when you have hiragana, katakana, and kanji to express the same idea I'm sure you know this, but for readers who aren't familiar with Japanese, it might be worth saying that hiragana, katakana and kanji aren't strictly interchangeable. Sure you can use hiragana and katakana as a fallback when you cannot or don't want to use the kanji for various reasons, but normally in every situation…

I think the idea is to think about what would have happened if programming started in another language. If it were Japanese, it’s easy to imagine that you’d have the same issue with different styles in different contexts. Some contexts might call for all hiragana variables, some all katakana, and some using the most likely/appropriate form of the word, including kanji. And in the third case, you’re still going to end…

Without capitalization you would not able to have a class Thing with an instance thing.

It's a short article but maybe capitals have been useful overall

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#62

Post by teknopaul » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #10

If this is really a major pain point in some project, there are probably solutions - macros, reflection, code generation, custom build steps and probably more. Or just change your naming convention.

You need to define the _translation_ from conventions in a way that does not introduce issues. Not just the one convention but how to get to the other and back. HASHTABLE to Hashtable HASH_TABLE to HashTable.

Then codgen tools work properly.

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#63

Post by Arnavion » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 8:29 PM UTC

shakow wrote: post #53

Arnavion wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they were mandatory, they're just ligatures. There's no context about them.

The very concept of a ligature is to alter the letter depending on its surrounding context.

Okay, guess we disagree about what "context" means.

You can't write adam, you have to write Adam. This is because the letters don't carry enough information; you need to know the context that names are capitalized, which is information that is extrinsic to the text itself.

Similarly, you can't render a unified Han glyph without knowing the context of which language the text is in. This information is again extrinsic to the text itself - it is metadata about the text.

In comparison, when you can't write Hindi ru as r and u as you usually would but instead you have to write the letter ru as its own glyph, there is no extrinsic information needed. The letters are right there, so all the information for knowing how to render the letters is right there. There is no context needed.

But yes, if you define context to include surrounding letters, then yes you need "context" to render Hindi letters. But since the original context of this was the difficulty of supporting this context for programming identifiers, I'd say that this kind of "adjacent codepoints context" would not be something special to worry about anyway, because text renderers today already have to deal with this kind of "adjacent codepoints context" for emojis, etc.

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#64

Post by DiogenesKynikos » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 8:25 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #5

Isn't the real problem here that people unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet will have to learn the Latin alphabet? I suppose they could design programming languages using the Chinese alphabet (maybe they already have? I wouldn't know) that use different conventions[0]. [0] Convention is with a 't', by the way.

Chinese kids already learn the Latin alphabet, even before they learn how to write Chinese characters.

The Latin alphabet is used as a stepping stone towards learning how to write, and as an input method for computers and phones (you type the pronunciation of the character you want to write, and then select from a list of characters that are homophones).