Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall!
theodp writes "To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?"
...the character set isn't the problem.
And I say this as an old APL coder.
(There aren't many new APL coders.)
-=Maggie Leber=-
So, what are his ideas?
EBCDIC?
How silly of us to be compiling to binary all this time!
We've been relegating ourselves to only two different options for decades!
I reckon that a memory cell and single bit of a processor opcode should have --at least-- 7000 different possibilities. Think of everything a computer could accomplish *then*!
Seriously, someone tell this guy you're allowed to use more than one character to represent a concept or action, and that these groups of characters represent things rather well.
but fuck no.
I eagerly await comments saying how anglo-centric, racist, bigoted, culturally-imperialist the insistence of using ASCII is.
The nuanced indignation is salve for my frantic masturbation.
(If my post is the only one that mentions this, all the better)
You mean "@"? Looks like a pile of shit to me.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wired: Wingdings of Disease
I don't know about you, but I have a pile-of-shit key on my keyboard, right between the left Ctrl and Alt.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I find the act of reading your descriptions laborious, and have decided to never bother learning Japanese just so I don't have to put up with that kind of thing EVER.
If I could, I'd probably go about eliminating the whole language just as a gift to humanity.
But I'm still working on my ultimate plan for destruction of English, and that has priority.
You must be new here
Why bother? We already have machines that are good at that: two year olds. Two year olds aren't good at doing trend analysis on a million data points, which is why we have computers. We'd gain pretty much nothing from making a silicon-based two year old. It'd probably be just as slow and would cost considerably more than a two year old.
Typing Japanese is exactly like typing in English - you press the "space" key between words. The IMEs are pretty smart, and usually the first kanji is the one you want. If it's not you might have to press "space" a second or third time, but it's rare to have to dig through a giant list of kanji to get what you want.
So, you might have to hit the space key more often if you're typing Japanese. Or, you might not - you can space-to-kanji entire sentences at once, whilst the romance languages are stuck hitting space between every word like shmucks. Except for the Germans. I don't think their language uses spaces.
The Japanese keyboard layout also types produces kana (most of which are romanized with two latin characters) rather than individual letters. Instead of typing w-a-t-a-s-h-i-space, you type wa-ta-shi-space.
So, it's really not that bad. What's worse is the irony of seeing an article on slashdot complain about the persistence of ASCII. I mean, really now, slashdot.jp manages to display non-ASCII characters.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Typing Japanese is exactly like typing in English - you press the "space" key between words. The IMEs are pretty smart, and usually the first kanji is the one you want. If it's not you might have to press "space" a second or third time, but it's rare to have to dig through a giant list of kanji to get what you want.
So, you might have to hit the space key more often if you're typing Japanese. Or, you might not - you can space-to-kanji entire sentences at once, whilst the romance languages are stuck hitting space between every word like shmucks. Except for the Germans. I don't think their language uses spaces.
NatürlichhabenwirLeerzeichen!
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
visual programming has stagnated because it produces crap. Exhibit A, Microsoft Windows. Exhibit B, all Microsoft Applications not acquired by Microsoft.
GUI code wizard 'tards, hated to have them on my coding teams....
So, will we be able to "print" the print symbol, or will we just fall into some recursion hell until the paper tray is empty?
One Glyph to find them.
One Glyph to bring them all...
ah, never mind...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I wouldn't consider Mr. Pike an authority on programming language design. At Google, he's known for designing Sawzall (described here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/externIal_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/sawzall-sciprog.pdf) - a language that's so feature poor, esoteric, and ass-backwards, that Google engineers curse at length every time they have to use it. And use it they have, since it's darn near impossible, for various reasons, to do certain things without it. Try as I may, I don't see anything in Go that would make it better than half a dozen existing alternatives. It's like reinventing the bicycle again, but this time with square wheels and without the saddle. Yes, you guessed it right, that's where that pipe goes on this particular bicycle.
... it should be good enough for anyone. Just sayin'...
garethw
You can assemble it to binary and then diassemble it to any mnemonic set you like.
You do not have kids do you? I can assure you that the cumulative cost of a two year old, starting from the first pre-natal medical costs, including lost work and productivity, food, drink, accommodation, etc. is considerable.
Unlike computers, kids get more expensive every year, and there are laws about getting them to do useful work.
Wasn't there already a seminal paper on this topic?
http://public.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Except for the Germans. I don't think their language uses spaces.
Of Kurs wir usen der Spacetasten in der Deutschenlanguage, you Insensitivklod!