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?"

Comments

Re:Learn2code

[Noughmad]

I don't know about you, but I have a pile-of-shit key on my keyboard, right between the left Ctrl and Alt.

Re:The thing with ASCII

[Z34107]

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.