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Your language sucks

garrett.damore.org

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Re: Your language sucks

#81

Post by TillE »

archagon wrote: post #8
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.

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.

Yeah, I've seen unironic suggestions on HN that languages should change to better accommodate computer processing. Besides the obvious absurdity, that completely ignores the problem of handling the huge amount of existing text.

Re: Your language sucks

#82

Post by bane »

benbreen wrote: post #73
bane wrote: post #52

This makes me wonder what effect printing had on English. English used to be chock full of ligatures and special forms for letters (s and ſ for example). I can only imagine as a typesetter and type maker this was all very annoying and people simply started to drop them. However, WP claims [1] ligatures made typesetting easier and it was the introduction of Sans serif fonts in the 20th century that finally drove them…

Ligatures and letterforms like the "long S" (ſ) actually arose as a result of printing, interestingly. If you look at 13th century manuscripts created in Norman England, they're extremely legible and regularized. The very earliest printed texts ("incunabula") produced in England tried to mimic this medieval blackletter script, and are actually quite easy to read if you get used to them. By the Elizabethan era, many t…

This is a great post, I'm really enjoying reading it.

I remember first seeing the long S as a child on a field trip to a local colonial village and being truly confused by it. It seemed so weird and unnecessary. It wasn't until many years later I even learned the rule for when it was used (middle of a word).

Re: Your language sucks

#83

Post by rndgermandude »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #42
stannol wrote: post #17

ß is not equivalent to ss, that's just plain wrong. Simple example: "In Maßen" means "in moderation" while "In Massen" means "en masse".

ß is equivalent to ss for the purpose of determining alphabetic order, same as ä is equivalent to ae, etc.

Actually, it's more messed up than this. In Germany, the DIN 5007 defines two variants: 1) ä and a are equivalent (normal order, e.g. in an encyclopedia) 2) ä and ae are equivalent (to be used in "name lists", e.g. telephone books)

But Germany is not the only place where German is one of the official languages. E.g. there is an "Austrian order", where a is followed by ä, except for name lists where often DIN 5007 variant 2 is used as well (ä equivalent to ae).

Then again, Swedish also knows the letter "ä", but there ä is (usually) sorted after z (well, after å which comes after z).

Now, imagine you run an English-language service but need to sort surnames such as "Ährlich". What sort order would be the right one? DIN 5007/1, 5007/2, Austrian, Swedish, something else entirely? Imagine you run a German-language service that is frequented by Germans and Austrians...

Re: Your language sucks

#85

Post by waxjar »

This article could be summed up with "My tools are built with (primarily) english in mind and that's a problem for me when dealing with languages other than english".

Re: Your language sucks

#86

Post by lambda »

So, this is actually more about "your writing system, and legacy encodings of it, suck."

While we do still have to support legacy encodings, increasingly we should just be using a universal encoding that doesn't have all of these problems he mentions. UTF-8 is such an encoding; it is ASCII compatible, contains no nulls, has the usual ASCII control characters encoded the same, no shift sequences, if you jump to an arbitrary byte in the middle of a text there is a maximum number of bytes you need to go forward or backwards to find a character boundary and you can do so with no ambiguity, etc.

And a large portion of the writing system suck rant has to do with Chinese (hanzi/kanji/hanja) characters, because there are just so many of them and standardizing them is a fairly difficult process. And it's true; that writing system does suck. It may have some good points, but it's amazing that it's still in use, it would be enormously economically beneficial to move to a simpler, easier to learn writing system.

Of course, if you did that and people no longer learned the older, much more cumbersome and complicated system, they would lose access to a large number of older cultural works which do use it, so it's a pretty tough sell.

Just to note, Korea actually does use a much simpler, more efficient writing system for the bulk of their text, but they do have a few words that they still use Chinese characters for. One of the reforms in North Korea was to abolish the use of Chinese characters entirely, using only the much simpler hangul writing system. His complaint about Korean is more due to how hangul is encoded in Unicode, which could be considered complex or clever depending on how you look at it; in any other sense, though, hangul is a great, very efficient and easy to deal with writing system.

Re: Your language sucks

#88

Post by jkrems »

sho_hn wrote: post #21
jng wrote: post #15

Clearly tongue-in-cheek, and informative. So nice somehow. But still: the fact that English phonology and orthography are only lightly related, and hardly anyone is willing to do the effort to fix this, should give the author second thoughts on complaining about others' artifacts and not complaining about the ones in English. Many languages have pure or nearly-pure phonetic orthographies, which are a pleasure to use.…

> 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.

Re: Your language sucks

#89

Post by vesinisa »

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…

No silent letters in Finnish and it's pretty much 100% phonetical (1:1 mapping between letters and sounds.)

Re: Your language sucks

#90

Post by jeffreyrogers »

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.

I think you're taking the article a bit too seriously.
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