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

They tried this once.

[FooAtWFU]

It was called APL. It never really caught on all that well.

Re:Would it be less tedious to have 10,000+ keys?

[arminw]

I was thinking more in terms of a computer that you could talk to in order to tell it verbally to do a trend analysis on the million data points and possibly where to find those data points. The computer that would have a vocabulary of a two-year-old along with the ability to understand commands wouldn't be bad now would it?

Programming a computer is almost as tedious as it was when computers had a set of binary switches on the front panel. Speech to text programs, if they are trained to a particular speaker, are not bad, but they are still making a lot of mistakes. Computers are still a long ways off that will understand any human spoken language spoken by anyone. The dream of a telephone, where a person can speak English into at one end and flawless Chinese or French comes out at the other, is still a distant dream.