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I don't think this is a solution. We should work to defragment the technology world. A better option is for Arabic speakers to learn English as a second Languag
by zmguy 12y ago
I don't think this is a solution. We should work to defragment the technology world. A better option is for Arabic speakers to learn English as a second Language. And for English speakers to learn Arabic as a second language but ultimately program in English. There is a similar problem with Chinese and the Chinese web, they might have some great resources tutorials and libraries but we don't know about them. I'll trade someone English and Ruby if you teach me Arabic.
- sctb 12y agoI don't think this is intended to be a practical solution, but rather an intellectual pursuit and a piece of art.
- vorg 12y agoYes, the sample program is an infinite loop, and therefore impractical. I'd add that copying the Ruby syntax, based around Latin script, for programming in another script isn't practical. Programming language grammars tend to evolved from the lexical tokens used by them.
- Dewie 12y agoI think it's great that efforts like this accentuate how quickly tools degrade when they are fed input that falls outside of the ASCII-range. Efforts to build better, language-agnostic (or not English-specific) tools bubbles up the technology stack to the end users, to whom it's a unreasonable and unrealistic (and to my mind a bad idea) to demand that they should just learn English. I also think that programmers should be able to have some support for their own languages when it comes to doing programming, but I guess that opinion won't win me any favors here.
- TylerE 12y agoWould not it be better to latinize Arabic, as the Taiwanese and Phillipines have done with their languages. For computer input a LTR language built around a relatively small alphabet is simply superior.
- Dewie 12y ago> built around a relatively small alphabet is simply superior. How? With a smaller alphabet, words can tend to comprise of more letters; with a larger alphabet, words can tend to comprise of fewer letters. It might be that smaller is better in this case for storing text efficiently, but I don't see how it obviously follows.
- TylerE 12y agoPhysical size of an input device to enter each character with a single press.
- Dewie 12y agoI have seen a video of - I can't seem to find it - someone using a sort of keyboard, only smaller. She would use fewer key presses to type in English than on a standard keyboard, because she was typing in one grapheme at a time, or something like that. Do the Chinese really think of Mandarin as containing discrete characters? Or do they consider the signs as compositions of each other? I haven't tried writing Chinese or something like that with some input device. Have you?
- Kaizyn 12y agoYou would find a lot of people would object to meddling with Arabic on religious grounds.