One thing that disturbs me is how difficult it is for an elegant new language to replace the old hairballs that no longer resemble anything that any sensible person would have designed and are no longer used for what they were originally designed for.
New languages require extraordinary advantages outside the language itself for them to stand a chance at significant popularity. C# is the first since Java to have enough "outside" advantages to make it a realistic candidate to replace C++ for GUI apps.
I'd love to see some of the best functional languages get enough attention that maybe one of them could be in the right place at the right time to also join the exclusive club of Languages That Employers Actually Care About. More attention on Slashdot couldn't hurt.
PHP because er...um..(sheesh, it must suck somehow).
Right you are, and indeed it does. Not Unicode based, so it's too hard to create global Web apps. (Not impossible, just not worth the extra effort.) Most serious organizations are waking up to the fact that if it's not fundamentally Unicode-based, it's not acceptable as a standard mission-critical platform.
(And yes, of course there are exceptions, depending on other constraints and available resources. Plain ol' C comes to mind, when you are willing to pay for complete customization on every axis. That doesn't invalidate the general rule.)
Interesting you should say that. I agree with everything you say until your final sentence, which I'd like to comment on.
I work for an American company that's quite interested in making more money from the Chinese. As a result, we're putting a lot of effort into sinicizing our products and Web apps.
I know many other US companies doing likewise. As you said, speak the customer's language.
"Color" came from Latin. That's how it's spelled in Latin. All Latin-based languages spell it that way...except one: French. The Brits have always been culturally cowed by the French. Not so the Americans, to the outrage of both Brits and French.
As for why American standards are replacing British standards far more than the reverse, it's not some sort of cheating. It's the natural result of greater economic, technological, and cultural significance. It may not please you to hear that, but it's a process that has driven linguistic change for millennia.
"I see similarities between Chinese people who read the People's Daily and westerners who watch CNN"
What a foolish statement. Sometimes people actually believe things like this. Other times, they resort to it thinking they can fool others.
It's really just another example of "for every number you can find between zero and a million I can find a number between zero and one, so one and a million are essentially equal" reasoning that is all the rage on the political left. There's good and bad on both sides, so therefore both sides are *equally* good and bad. If you counter with "well, what about..?", I'll match you with a counter example. So there. Equal.
It's utter nonsense to claim that a publicly-owned commercial news broadcast that knows its audience regularly listens to its competitors and compares stories is essentially equal to the official voice of a single party regime that uses violence to suppress contradictory reporting.
Ah, but you didn't say the news organizations were equal, you protest, you said you saw "similarities" between the viewers. Yeah, and I can find "similarities" between any two things, so either your statement is content-free or it meant what it implied but didn't say, so I'll react to the implication.
I'm in a clear minority, but I almost always reject claims of the basic form: I can come up with minor complaints about X to match every major complaint you have about Y, so we have to conclude that one is no better than the other.
Do you ever get the feeling that electronic paper is going to be just around the corner for a long, long time?
I saw a presentation of this at Stanford about ten years ago by some MIT guys. Like the "revolutionary new flat screen technology" of one sort or another that keeps threatening to obsolete LCDs every year or two, this e-paper stuff is like watching summer reruns of the same tired episodes.
Unicode is a method of storing string data using 16 bit rather than 8 bit indexes
No it's not. Unicode is a system for representing all of the world's languages via a single character set and three alternative encodings of those characters: utf-8, utf-16, and utf-32. You're probably referring to UCS-2, the predecessor of UTF-16, but that is one of Unicode's (old) encodings, not "Unicode" itself.
I am not aware of any system capable of outputing it
You should become more aware. Almost everytime you output text using a truetype font, you are using a Unicode-indexed font.
If you've ever seen Internet Explorer, you've seen Unicode output. In order to make it the "universal browser", MS made IE's rendering engine 100% Unicode-based, even on non-Unicode platforms like Win95. As long as you have installed the fonts, you can display almost any combination of languages with IE -- and send the page to most modern printers.
If you've ever printed a Word2000 document, you've seen Unicode output.
I routinely work with mixtures of Asian languages, output on screen and on paper, courtesy of the Unicode-based (NT-based) Win32. I use both Linux and Solaris for other things, and I'm extremely fond of them, but not for multilingual client-side work, for which they are ill suited.
Unicode has always appeared to me as being more about marketing than real life
You clearly haven't had to create any global solutions lately. If you want to create a *global* solution, you almost have to use Unicode. The alternative is to create multiple national solutions, each with their own local maintainers, integration headaches (or no integration), and so on. Very poor engineering practice these days, now that we have Unicode, and Unicode-based tools and platforms.
[Java identifier example]
It appears you never noticed that the compiler has an encoding switch. You write your source in any encoding you want, tell the compiler what encoding you used, and the compiler will take it from there.
The only way to achieve good i18n is for a lot of people to sit down and write a lot of strings in a lot of different languages...
This whole paragraph is mistaking localization for internationalization. What you describe is localization. Internationalization is an architectural approach that, among other things, allows for easy localization by being language neutral and locale parameterized by design. Unicode is fundamental to real internationalization, though it's not required for simple, old-fashioned localization.
[the burden is with app developers, not the underlying system]
First half is true, second half is false. What a burden it is if the underlying API gives you no help. The API is the app developer's toolbox. If it provides a solid global foundation, it's dramatically easier to build globalized apps than if you have to reinvent the wheel with every app. Unfortunately, that's what open source developers are mostly required to do: reinvent the internationalization support already in the toolbox of any Win2K or WinXP developer.
The old Win9x platform was almost as bad as the average Linux disti because MS backed out of Unicode on the eve of shipping Win95. (It was already the foundation of NT.) That foolish choice caused them and their developers years of code page pain -- forcing MS to build Unicode support into all of their major apps app by app, since it was lacking in the OS.
That has now changed. The current versions of Windows, Macintosh, and Java are all based on Unicode, but the open source OSes are still back in the Stone Age **in this respect** (certainly not in every respect). That's not because its creators are stupid, it's because of the extreme fragmentation of the platform -- the focus on customization instead of generalization.
Well, I've patented the use of the letter "e". Not in general, obviously. It's really a very narrow patent, only covering the use of the letter "e" in any DVR on-screen message. I make no claim on any other letter. The plethora of letter options available means manufacturers are still able to create DVRs without a license from me. They just can't use the "e" without a license. I'm not unreasonable about it.
In addition to wanting to proofread what I'd written so far, I wanted to add that there are a few real i18n heroes in the open source community, and I admire them and their great work.
The challenge they face is again in the nature of the platform: they are in no position to set policies for or to rearchitect the whole platform. It's far too fragmented for that.
Microsoft is striving for a one-size-fits-all consistent solution that everyone can use. Everyone means virtually everyone, and since they can't customize for everyone, they try to globalize for everyone. (Which should get much easier now that they've *finally* discontinued their Win9x series.)
Something like Linux is obviously a very different sort of platform. It's at best hyperlocalized rather than globalized.
I realize this is going to come off like a troll, but I can't let the supposition in the lead article go unchallenged: "the Free/Open software communities pay an awful lot of attention to i18n, but...."
This is certainly not true. The current version of Windows is fully Unicode-based as is the current version of MacOS.
The "open source" OSes aren't even close, and the reason is the same as the reason for the lack of accessibility support: the patchwork nature of the platform and its ragtag gang of personal itch scratching developers.
Very few open source developers make it a priority that their software be usable by all possible users, regardless of locale or physical challenges. The mantra of open source isn't "I'll build a global system," but rather "I'll build a highly customized system, then I'll give you my source and you can customize it for yourself if you're different from me.
This makes open source platforms extremely useful for some things and some users, but it's not a solid, consistent multilingual client platform.
Wow, if anyone tells me that open source is better because it doesn't have the hype of commercial products, I'm going to hand him a copy of that article. That should clear up that little delusion REAL fast.
"features that strike fear in the hearts of our competitors...have made us the darling of serious development shops....the rest of the industry is still scratching their heads to figure out what this really means. Some follow suit, (BEA/IBM), others just give up. But we keep on trail blazing tech-wise...we are going orbital..."
If Microsoft talked like that, you guys would roast 'em.
"Odds are the product with the greatest market penetration will always have the greatest stability...."
There never seems to be any shortage of Chinese programmers available to immediately crack any form of copy protection put on legitimate products.
If your explanation -- not enough developers to be able to make a contribution to the world -- is valid, how do they find the developers needed to illegally sell (illegal by China's own laws) cracked versions of almost every copy-protected commercial product ever made?
Programmers in China are like chemists in Colombia.
This isn't meant as a troll. It's a genuine observation. A lot of my family still lives in China and, frankly, I don't hear "help make the world a better place" expressed very often by the Chinese as an important personal or national goal. This is true even among those whose incomes would put them solidly in the middle class in the Western world.
Go find out what the schools actually use. Then post links to the Linux version / equivalent of each.
I don't think you can do it, but I'm not just being negative. Even if you don't succeed, the results of any such attempt should be publicized, because they could eventually lead to success.
The two big problems schools face are funding and expertise. Schools don't have enough money to buy fancy commercial hardware and software and keep it up to date, and teachers are rarely above the level of the most naive consumer user, but they're on their own.
The Linux suggestion does a great job at dealing with the funding problem. That just leaves the problem of making these free systems do what schools need to do and completely admin'able by a very naive consumer-level user.
Making Linux systems easy enough for schoolteachers to use has never been any kind of priority for the Linux community.
"How foolish to be impressed by C# the language, since it's largely a blatant clone of Java"
Almost everything about Java was taken from some prior language, yet that doesn't bother me. I was impressed by Java. It put a lot of useful features into a single language. Much appreciated.
C# is a better Java (as a language). An improvement on something that was already impressive is more impressive. They copied the things I liked, and added some more things I like. Woohoo.
I've experienced lots of companies. I've seen a wide variety of people, not just one sort. Treating them all as enemies is shooting yourself in the foot. *You* become the enemy.
In my current job I've had mostly good bosses. I had one boss who tried to smear my reputation and get me fired, though. I'm still here, but she got laid off. Later, the new CIO tried to lay me off. An executive VP blocked it and brought me into his group instead.
Sounds like a lot of backstabbing, right? Well, it's lots of everything, good, bad, and even odd. Paying attention only to the bad parts is missing the big picture.
Neither my boss nor the new CIO had any idea how many people I had helped in one way or another, accumulating friends, or at least allies, as I went.
I didn't kiss up to anybody, either. That's not necessary. I just noticed when people needed a hand with something and gave them a hand, if I was able. Any halfway decent technical guy has the skills necessary to help a lot of people. So do it.
The real benefit is the fun of seeing how happy people are when you help them out. Often that's all you get, but it's still worth it. There are often side effects, though, such as having allies defending you in battles you aren't even aware of, going on behind closed doors.
People will still stab you in the back, from time to time and sure it hurts. But that's about all you'll get if you don't have some friends. With friends, occasionally the knife-wielding assailant will be stopped by a defender who, unbeknownst to you, is watching your back.
In the alpha days of Java, I suggested to Sun that they incorporate some very popular Perl features, such as a foreach and containers that allowed for such things as "foreach char ch in myString" or "foreach int i in myIntVector" or "foreach int i in 30..1", etc.
The senior designers repeatedly treated such suggestions with contempt. Arthur van Hoff told me, "If you want to use Perl, just use Perl!"
The MS people I spoke to in the early stages of C# were very interested in input like this. Where Sun's attitude toward "why can't we have X?" was "because we said so", MS's was "hmm, that would be popular, I wonder if we could find a way...."
Say what you will about MS, one of their standard techniques for locking you in is to try to make what people are asking for. Contrast this to Apple and Sun ("we're your superiors, so use what we tell you to use"), and Linux ("make it yourself, luser!").
I've been a fan of Java since it was still in alpha, in early '95. I even wrote a piece of the Swing API. I'm still a Java fan (and developer), but sadly not for GUI apps. MS ("we own the client") and Sun ("we're not going to let this become just a better way to write Windows apps") collaborated to kill Java as a viable way to produce commercial-grade consumer GUI apps.
We need a modern, productive system for producing new high-performance GUI apps: apps that look and feel as if they'd been written in C++ -- without the crashes and slow dev cycle. I'd give up some of the flexibility of C++ (you can write drivers, create an OS, build a browser, it's a dessert topping AND a floor wax) for something truly optimized for what matters most in creating superb GUI apps quickly and well.
I've had high hopes for Eiffel and some others to evolve into the successor to C++ for GUI apps, but it never happens. The inertia of programming languages is immense.
The next to step up to bat is C#. I like the language a lot and think it lends itself to great dev systems. I'm suspicious of the bytecode aspect, though. ("Faster than compiled!", "It actually is compiled!", etc. Yeah, so why isn't Solaris written in Java?) I'm afraid that aspect will still require that "serious" apps be written in C/C++.
I like even less that it may remain Windows-only. If it does remain Windows only (for all practical purposes), I suspect the blame will belong just as much to MS haters dismissing it primarily out of bigotry as to MS for optimizing it for their own platforms.
I'd like to see the open source community look at it with the same eyes as if it had come out of some smelly hacker's basement.
xml-rpc is limited to ASCII. You couldn't even use it for French or Spanish, much less use it for all languages. No company with any sense would use a text-based system limited to ASCII in the 21st Century. Even DOS 1.0 was more advanced than that.
I used the just-released HP3000 as a kid, thanks to some very generous people. I became a real "computer programmer" on that machine, before PCs even existed. A handful of geeky kids, long hair, bell bottoms, Vietnam on TV, first dates, and "60's" music.
I don't think I've heard the HP3000 mentioned since the Vietnam War. Like hearing of the death of an actor you thought probably died decades ago....
Okay, since many of my relatives are still in Shanghai, let's talk about "Red China". I figured a comparison of two countries of roughly equal size would be clearer than the lopsided China and Taiwan, but fine. China is a great illustration.
Yes, they have an oppressive one-party political system: a leftist political system built on a platform of stamping out corporate greed. All anti-corporate regimes are oppressive. As the oppression and anticorporatism slowly lift, so does the average standard of living, but decades of leftist economics have left China in poverty. It's not enough to get the government off the backs of corporations. If the government doesn't actively protect the interests of corporations through the rule of law, then corrupt officials will strangle them -- and with them the economy -- with corruption and red tape, as is the case in Indonesia.
Unemployment in China is so severe that there are seas of unemployed laborers encamped around the major railway stations, desperate for a shot at one of those oppressive corporate jobs. There just aren't enough to go around. The best standard of living in China is where there is the most "Corporate America". Those places become people magnets. The worst is where there is the least.
If there were enough "corporations" in China, my family might not have left. Though the freedoms of America are precious, the number one reason my family came over here was the unparalleled opportunities created by Corporate America.
Leftists go on endlessly about corporations, and reality takes a back seat to political theory.
As for your theory that corporations just shop around for low-wage, oppressive countries: well I guess that's why North Koreans get all the jobs instead of the South Koreans. It's the reason that back when Germany was still divided, all the jobs tended to gravitate to the East German side of the line. East Germany was just so much more attractive to "corporations" than West Germany.
All we need in America to save us from our massive endemic unemployment, caused by greedy corporations smuggling our jobs away to those tight labor markets of Central America, is for a strong Leftist regime to crush the power of those nasty private corporations that have made life in America such hell, and restore to us the standard of living enjoyed by countries relatively free of big corporations: say the People's Republic of Congo, or Vietnam, or Kampuchea in its left-most glory. Now those folks could teach us a thing or two about stamping out corporate greed.
"Final result -- lower wages, longer hours, and less rights for everyone around the world, higher profits for corporations."
Yeah, that's what I see. The last 50 years, with more corporations than ever in history, have witnessed the steady descent of America and Europe into grinding poverty, Asia has lost that spark it had back in rickshaw days, and dictatorship has relentlessly followed. Democracy is on its last legs, thanks to the rise of corporations.
Yep. That's the view from the Left.
"Short of revolution, we won't know." Uh-huh. With reasoning like this, you must be one of those "intelligentsia" fellas I keep hearin' about.
People who put a large percentage of their lives into creating some big software project without getting paid in money frequently value adulation even more highly. There are other reasons (solving your own problem, for example), but ego is a major driver of open source.
This isn't a complaint, but then I have no beef with people who do it for money, either. My only beef is with those who do it for ego disparaging those who do it for money as somehow less noble. Both are hoping to get paid, just in different currency.
It's amazing to hear all the clueless Slashdotters calling execs clueless. Execs with a responsibility for billions of dollars of investor money and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people just don't have the same priorities as a pimply adolescent hacker who can't handle the responsibility to pick up his own socks.
What execs want is to learn from others' mistakes to avoid making their own. They're willing to pay a high price for products incorporating others' lessons learned. Offering them the standard "it's open source, so if there's anything you want, you can just get in and write it yourself" is just an offer to go back to making their own mistakes. They see that option as at best a Plan B strategy.
The guy who can't manage his own socks probably has plenty of time to hack away, and whatever he comes up with, well that's kewl.
The real exec has a lot more riding on it and is willing to pay dearly for proven solutions -- the more proven, the more they're worth.
We all know that there are newer technologies that are superior to older, more popular technologies. Execs know that, too, but they are more willing to wait and let a large consensus emerge externally before adopting a new technology. Smart execs also do internal pilot projects, and hope for a consensus between external and internal opinions. Consensus among hackers and hobbyists isn't good enough.
A bunch of hackers with little to lose if they're wrong aren't seen as the oracles they think they are. Execs look to see if a lot of other companies similar to their own are *already doing* something similar to what they want to do, and doing it successfully. Products with that kind of "proof" are worth a lot more than "free" products with no guarantees, even when those "proven" products have well-known problems.
He's made his reasons for outrage quite clear for years. He believes he is serving Allah in the promotion of a brutal, medieval, fundamentalist utopian vision of pure Islam everywhere in the entire Muslim world. The purer, the more pleasing to Allah. Going to extremes of brutality toward and oppression of all that is impure is merely striving for excellence.
He believes that the Muslim world is in such shambles because it is not yet purified, and he intends to rectify that. He originally felt that the problem was just corrupt (meaning non-fundamentalist Muslim) local governments, but he has since been convinced that the larger problem is the corrupting influence the West exerts on the Muslim world.
This "corruption" -- meaning open, tolerant, science-based, diverse society in which not just men (bad enough), but even women (unspeakable) are free to do, dress, speak, and otherwise behave as they please -- is the ultimate evil and must be fought. He sees the US as the most powerful vector of all of the above, qualifying us as the root of all evil. I take that as a compliment.
Only in the last few years has he begun including all the various Muslim vs. non-Muslim regional turf wars in his list of "grievances", as he has begun to see the political expediency of uniting all Muslims behind him in his real agenda of driving out impurity and "purifying" the Muslim world.
Superficial analysts like you look down his growing laundry list, pick out your favorites and say, "yeah, I can see why he's outraged at the US". You don't see it at all.
"When you occasionally travel abroad, bother to learn a few phrases...."
I'd guess you're a continental European from the regularity in which I hear that from continental Europeans. They must teach that in school to help defend against natural feelings of cultural insignificance. Your superficial analysis (perhaps intentionally) mistakes simple economic expediency in Europe for cultural sophistication. You find similar "sophistication" in places like the Himalayas and the Golden Triangle region of the Mekong.
My small software company knows a lot more about giant Microsoft than MS knows about us. If I were European, perhaps I would credit that to our company's obvious cultural superiority to MS.
If *you* ever bother go to Asia -- where I worked as an interpreter for years -- you'll see that the vast majority of Westerners who speak the local Asian language well are, surprisingly to most Europeans, Americans. I know who my competitors were, and though there were many skilled Europeans, they were outnumbered by skilled Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
*And* not enough functional language articles.
One thing that disturbs me is how difficult it is for an elegant new language to replace the old hairballs that no longer resemble anything that any sensible person would have designed and are no longer used for what they were originally designed for.
New languages require extraordinary advantages outside the language itself for them to stand a chance at significant popularity. C# is the first since Java to have enough "outside" advantages to make it a realistic candidate to replace C++ for GUI apps.
I'd love to see some of the best functional languages get enough attention that maybe one of them could be in the right place at the right time to also join the exclusive club of Languages That Employers Actually Care About. More attention on Slashdot couldn't hurt.
PHP because er...um..(sheesh, it must suck somehow).
Right you are, and indeed it does. Not Unicode based, so it's too hard to create global Web apps. (Not impossible, just not worth the extra effort.) Most serious organizations are waking up to the fact that if it's not fundamentally Unicode-based, it's not acceptable as a standard mission-critical platform.
(And yes, of course there are exceptions, depending on other constraints and available resources. Plain ol' C comes to mind, when you are willing to pay for complete customization on every axis. That doesn't invalidate the general rule.)
Interesting you should say that. I agree with everything you say until your final sentence, which I'd like to comment on.
I work for an American company that's quite interested in making more money from the Chinese. As a result, we're putting a lot of effort into sinicizing our products and Web apps.
I know many other US companies doing likewise. As you said, speak the customer's language.
"Color" came from Latin. That's how it's spelled in Latin. All Latin-based languages spell it that way...except one: French. The Brits have always been culturally cowed by the French. Not so the Americans, to the outrage of both Brits and French.
As for why American standards are replacing British standards far more than the reverse, it's not some sort of cheating. It's the natural result of greater economic, technological, and cultural significance. It may not please you to hear that, but it's a process that has driven linguistic change for millennia.
"I see similarities between Chinese people who read the People's Daily and westerners who watch CNN"
What a foolish statement. Sometimes people actually believe things like this. Other times, they resort to it thinking they can fool others.
It's really just another example of "for every number you can find between zero and a million I can find a number between zero and one, so one and a million are essentially equal" reasoning that is all the rage on the political left. There's good and bad on both sides, so therefore both sides are *equally* good and bad. If you counter with "well, what about..?", I'll match you with a counter example. So there. Equal.
It's utter nonsense to claim that a publicly-owned commercial news broadcast that knows its audience regularly listens to its competitors and compares stories is essentially equal to the official voice of a single party regime that uses violence to suppress contradictory reporting.
Ah, but you didn't say the news organizations were equal, you protest, you said you saw "similarities" between the viewers. Yeah, and I can find "similarities" between any two things, so either your statement is content-free or it meant what it implied but didn't say, so I'll react to the implication.
I'm in a clear minority, but I almost always reject claims of the basic form: I can come up with minor complaints about X to match every major complaint you have about Y, so we have to conclude that one is no better than the other.
That's nonsense.
Do you ever get the feeling that electronic paper is going to be just around the corner for a long, long time?
I saw a presentation of this at Stanford about ten years ago by some MIT guys. Like the "revolutionary new flat screen technology" of one sort or another that keeps threatening to obsolete LCDs every year or two, this e-paper stuff is like watching summer reruns of the same tired episodes.
Unicode is a method of storing string data using 16 bit rather than 8 bit indexes
No it's not. Unicode is a system for representing all of the world's languages via a single character set and three alternative encodings of those characters: utf-8, utf-16, and utf-32. You're probably referring to UCS-2, the predecessor of UTF-16, but that is one of Unicode's (old) encodings, not "Unicode" itself.
I am not aware of any system capable of outputing it
You should become more aware. Almost everytime you output text using a truetype font, you are using a Unicode-indexed font.
If you've ever seen Internet Explorer, you've seen Unicode output. In order to make it the "universal browser", MS made IE's rendering engine 100% Unicode-based, even on non-Unicode platforms like Win95. As long as you have installed the fonts, you can display almost any combination of languages with IE -- and send the page to most modern printers.
If you've ever printed a Word2000 document, you've seen Unicode output.
I routinely work with mixtures of Asian languages, output on screen and on paper, courtesy of the Unicode-based (NT-based) Win32. I use both Linux and Solaris for other things, and I'm extremely fond of them, but not for multilingual client-side work, for which they are ill suited.
Unicode has always appeared to me as being more about marketing than real life
You clearly haven't had to create any global solutions lately. If you want to create a *global* solution, you almost have to use Unicode. The alternative is to create multiple national solutions, each with their own local maintainers, integration headaches (or no integration), and so on. Very poor engineering practice these days, now that we have Unicode, and Unicode-based tools and platforms.
[Java identifier example]
It appears you never noticed that the compiler has an encoding switch. You write your source in any encoding you want, tell the compiler what encoding you used, and the compiler will take it from there.
The only way to achieve good i18n is for a lot of people to sit down and write a lot of strings in a lot of different languages...
This whole paragraph is mistaking localization for internationalization. What you describe is localization. Internationalization is an architectural approach that, among other things, allows for easy localization by being language neutral and locale parameterized by design. Unicode is fundamental to real internationalization, though it's not required for simple, old-fashioned localization.
[the burden is with app developers, not the underlying system]
First half is true, second half is false. What a burden it is if the underlying API gives you no help. The API is the app developer's toolbox. If it provides a solid global foundation, it's dramatically easier to build globalized apps than if you have to reinvent the wheel with every app. Unfortunately, that's what open source developers are mostly required to do: reinvent the internationalization support already in the toolbox of any Win2K or WinXP developer.
The old Win9x platform was almost as bad as the average Linux disti because MS backed out of Unicode on the eve of shipping Win95. (It was already the foundation of NT.) That foolish choice caused them and their developers years of code page pain -- forcing MS to build Unicode support into all of their major apps app by app, since it was lacking in the OS.
That has now changed. The current versions of Windows, Macintosh, and Java are all based on Unicode, but the open source OSes are still back in the Stone Age **in this respect** (certainly not in every respect). That's not because its creators are stupid, it's because of the extreme fragmentation of the platform -- the focus on customization instead of generalization.
Well, I've patented the use of the letter "e". Not in general, obviously. It's really a very narrow patent, only covering the use of the letter "e" in any DVR on-screen message. I make no claim on any other letter. The plethora of letter options available means manufacturers are still able to create DVRs without a license from me. They just can't use the "e" without a license. I'm not unreasonable about it.
Oops. I hit "submit" when I meant "preview".
In addition to wanting to proofread what I'd written so far, I wanted to add that there are a few real i18n heroes in the open source community, and I admire them and their great work.
The challenge they face is again in the nature of the platform: they are in no position to set policies for or to rearchitect the whole platform. It's far too fragmented for that.
Microsoft is striving for a one-size-fits-all consistent solution that everyone can use. Everyone means virtually everyone, and since they can't customize for everyone, they try to globalize for everyone. (Which should get much easier now that they've *finally* discontinued their Win9x series.)
Something like Linux is obviously a very different sort of platform. It's at best hyperlocalized rather than globalized.
I realize this is going to come off like a troll, but I can't let the supposition in the lead article go unchallenged: "the Free/Open software communities pay an awful lot of attention to i18n, but...."
This is certainly not true. The current version of Windows is fully Unicode-based as is the current version of MacOS.
The "open source" OSes aren't even close, and the reason is the same as the reason for the lack of accessibility support: the patchwork nature of the platform and its ragtag gang of personal itch scratching developers.
Very few open source developers make it a priority that their software be usable by all possible users, regardless of locale or physical challenges. The mantra of open source isn't "I'll build a global system," but rather "I'll build a highly customized system, then I'll give you my source and you can customize it for yourself if you're different from me.
This makes open source platforms extremely useful for some things and some users, but it's not a solid, consistent multilingual client platform.
Wow, if anyone tells me that open source is better because it doesn't have the hype of commercial products, I'm going to hand him a copy of that article. That should clear up that little delusion REAL fast.
...the rest of the industry is still scratching their heads to figure out what this really means. Some follow suit, (BEA/IBM), others just give up. But we keep on trail blazing tech-wise...we are going orbital..."
"features that strike fear in the hearts of our competitors...have made us the darling of serious development shops.
If Microsoft talked like that, you guys would roast 'em.
"Odds are the product with the greatest market penetration will always have the greatest stability...."
Hoo, Mama!
...the one with a lot of mirrors.
There never seems to be any shortage of Chinese programmers available to immediately crack any form of copy protection put on legitimate products.
If your explanation -- not enough developers to be able to make a contribution to the world -- is valid, how do they find the developers needed to illegally sell (illegal by China's own laws) cracked versions of almost every copy-protected commercial product ever made?
Programmers in China are like chemists in Colombia.
This isn't meant as a troll. It's a genuine observation. A lot of my family still lives in China and, frankly, I don't hear "help make the world a better place" expressed very often by the Chinese as an important personal or national goal. This is true even among those whose incomes would put them solidly in the middle class in the Western world.
Go find out what the schools actually use. Then post links to the Linux version / equivalent of each.
I don't think you can do it, but I'm not just being negative. Even if you don't succeed, the results of any such attempt should be publicized, because they could eventually lead to success.
The two big problems schools face are funding and expertise. Schools don't have enough money to buy fancy commercial hardware and software and keep it up to date, and teachers are rarely above the level of the most naive consumer user, but they're on their own.
The Linux suggestion does a great job at dealing with the funding problem. That just leaves the problem of making these free systems do what schools need to do and completely admin'able by a very naive consumer-level user.
Making Linux systems easy enough for schoolteachers to use has never been any kind of priority for the Linux community.
"How foolish to be impressed by C# the language, since it's largely a blatant clone of Java"
Almost everything about Java was taken from some prior language, yet that doesn't bother me. I was impressed by Java. It put a lot of useful features into a single language. Much appreciated.
C# is a better Java (as a language). An improvement on something that was already impressive is more impressive. They copied the things I liked, and added some more things I like. Woohoo.
I've experienced lots of companies. I've seen a wide variety of people, not just one sort. Treating them all as enemies is shooting yourself in the foot. *You* become the enemy.
In my current job I've had mostly good bosses. I had one boss who tried to smear my reputation and get me fired, though. I'm still here, but she got laid off. Later, the new CIO tried to lay me off. An executive VP blocked it and brought me into his group instead.
Sounds like a lot of backstabbing, right? Well, it's lots of everything, good, bad, and even odd. Paying attention only to the bad parts is missing the big picture.
Neither my boss nor the new CIO had any idea how many people I had helped in one way or another, accumulating friends, or at least allies, as I went.
I didn't kiss up to anybody, either. That's not necessary. I just noticed when people needed a hand with something and gave them a hand, if I was able. Any halfway decent technical guy has the skills necessary to help a lot of people. So do it.
The real benefit is the fun of seeing how happy people are when you help them out. Often that's all you get, but it's still worth it. There are often side effects, though, such as having allies defending you in battles you aren't even aware of, going on behind closed doors.
People will still stab you in the back, from time to time and sure it hurts. But that's about all you'll get if you don't have some friends. With friends, occasionally the knife-wielding assailant will be stopped by a defender who, unbeknownst to you, is watching your back.
In the alpha days of Java, I suggested to Sun that they incorporate some very popular Perl features, such as a foreach and containers that allowed for such things as "foreach char ch in myString" or "foreach int i in myIntVector" or "foreach int i in 30..1", etc.
The senior designers repeatedly treated such suggestions with contempt. Arthur van Hoff told me, "If you want to use Perl, just use Perl!"
The MS people I spoke to in the early stages of C# were very interested in input like this. Where Sun's attitude toward "why can't we have X?" was "because we said so", MS's was "hmm, that would be popular, I wonder if we could find a way...."
Say what you will about MS, one of their standard techniques for locking you in is to try to make what people are asking for. Contrast this to Apple and Sun ("we're your superiors, so use what we tell you to use"), and Linux ("make it yourself, luser!").
I've been a fan of Java since it was still in alpha, in early '95. I even wrote a piece of the Swing API. I'm still a Java fan (and developer), but sadly not for GUI apps. MS ("we own the client") and Sun ("we're not going to let this become just a better way to write Windows apps") collaborated to kill Java as a viable way to produce commercial-grade consumer GUI apps.
We need a modern, productive system for producing new high-performance GUI apps: apps that look and feel as if they'd been written in C++ -- without the crashes and slow dev cycle. I'd give up some of the flexibility of C++ (you can write drivers, create an OS, build a browser, it's a dessert topping AND a floor wax) for something truly optimized for what matters most in creating superb GUI apps quickly and well.
I've had high hopes for Eiffel and some others to evolve into the successor to C++ for GUI apps, but it never happens. The inertia of programming languages is immense.
The next to step up to bat is C#. I like the language a lot and think it lends itself to great dev systems. I'm suspicious of the bytecode aspect, though. ("Faster than compiled!", "It actually is compiled!", etc. Yeah, so why isn't Solaris written in Java?) I'm afraid that aspect will still require that "serious" apps be written in C/C++.
I like even less that it may remain Windows-only. If it does remain Windows only (for all practical purposes), I suspect the blame will belong just as much to MS haters dismissing it primarily out of bigotry as to MS for optimizing it for their own platforms.
I'd like to see the open source community look at it with the same eyes as if it had come out of some smelly hacker's basement.
xml-rpc is limited to ASCII. You couldn't even use it for French or Spanish, much less use it for all languages. No company with any sense would use a text-based system limited to ASCII in the 21st Century. Even DOS 1.0 was more advanced than that.
I used the just-released HP3000 as a kid, thanks to some very generous people. I became a real "computer programmer" on that machine, before PCs even existed. A handful of geeky kids, long hair, bell bottoms, Vietnam on TV, first dates, and "60's" music.
I don't think I've heard the HP3000 mentioned since the Vietnam War. Like hearing of the death of an actor you thought probably died decades ago....
It's still sad to hear.
Okay, since many of my relatives are still in Shanghai, let's talk about "Red China". I figured a comparison of two countries of roughly equal size would be clearer than the lopsided China and Taiwan, but fine. China is a great illustration.
Yes, they have an oppressive one-party political system: a leftist political system built on a platform of stamping out corporate greed. All anti-corporate regimes are oppressive. As the oppression and anticorporatism slowly lift, so does the average standard of living, but decades of leftist economics have left China in poverty. It's not enough to get the government off the backs of corporations. If the government doesn't actively protect the interests of corporations through the rule of law, then corrupt officials will strangle them -- and with them the economy -- with corruption and red tape, as is the case in Indonesia.
Unemployment in China is so severe that there are seas of unemployed laborers encamped around the major railway stations, desperate for a shot at one of those oppressive corporate jobs. There just aren't enough to go around. The best standard of living in China is where there is the most "Corporate America". Those places become people magnets. The worst is where there is the least.
If there were enough "corporations" in China, my family might not have left. Though the freedoms of America are precious, the number one reason my family came over here was the unparalleled opportunities created by Corporate America.
Leftists go on endlessly about corporations, and reality takes a back seat to political theory.
As for your theory that corporations just shop around for low-wage, oppressive countries: well I guess that's why North Koreans get all the jobs instead of the South Koreans. It's the reason that back when Germany was still divided, all the jobs tended to gravitate to the East German side of the line. East Germany was just so much more attractive to "corporations" than West Germany.
All we need in America to save us from our massive endemic unemployment, caused by greedy corporations smuggling our jobs away to those tight labor markets of Central America, is for a strong Leftist regime to crush the power of those nasty private corporations that have made life in America such hell, and restore to us the standard of living enjoyed by countries relatively free of big corporations: say the People's Republic of Congo, or Vietnam, or Kampuchea in its left-most glory. Now those folks could teach us a thing or two about stamping out corporate greed.
"Final result -- lower wages, longer hours, and less rights for everyone around the world, higher profits for corporations."
Yeah, that's what I see. The last 50 years, with more corporations than ever in history, have witnessed the steady descent of America and Europe into grinding poverty, Asia has lost that spark it had back in rickshaw days, and dictatorship has relentlessly followed. Democracy is on its last legs, thanks to the rise of corporations.
Yep. That's the view from the Left.
"Short of revolution, we won't know." Uh-huh. With reasoning like this, you must be one of those "intelligentsia" fellas I keep hearin' about.
People who put a large percentage of their lives into creating some big software project without getting paid in money frequently value adulation even more highly. There are other reasons (solving your own problem, for example), but ego is a major driver of open source.
;-)
This isn't a complaint, but then I have no beef with people who do it for money, either. My only beef is with those who do it for ego disparaging those who do it for money as somehow less noble. Both are hoping to get paid, just in different currency.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
It's amazing to hear all the clueless Slashdotters calling execs clueless. Execs with a responsibility for billions of dollars of investor money and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people just don't have the same priorities as a pimply adolescent hacker who can't handle the responsibility to pick up his own socks.
What execs want is to learn from others' mistakes to avoid making their own. They're willing to pay a high price for products incorporating others' lessons learned. Offering them the standard "it's open source, so if there's anything you want, you can just get in and write it yourself" is just an offer to go back to making their own mistakes. They see that option as at best a Plan B strategy.
The guy who can't manage his own socks probably has plenty of time to hack away, and whatever he comes up with, well that's kewl.
The real exec has a lot more riding on it and is willing to pay dearly for proven solutions -- the more proven, the more they're worth.
We all know that there are newer technologies that are superior to older, more popular technologies. Execs know that, too, but they are more willing to wait and let a large consensus emerge externally before adopting a new technology. Smart execs also do internal pilot projects, and hope for a consensus between external and internal opinions. Consensus among hackers and hobbyists isn't good enough.
A bunch of hackers with little to lose if they're wrong aren't seen as the oracles they think they are. Execs look to see if a lot of other companies similar to their own are *already doing* something similar to what they want to do, and doing it successfully. Products with that kind of "proof" are worth a lot more than "free" products with no guarantees, even when those "proven" products have well-known problems.
"bin Laden arguably has reason to be outraged"
He's made his reasons for outrage quite clear for years. He believes he is serving Allah in the promotion of a brutal, medieval, fundamentalist utopian vision of pure Islam everywhere in the entire Muslim world. The purer, the more pleasing to Allah. Going to extremes of brutality toward and oppression of all that is impure is merely striving for excellence.
He believes that the Muslim world is in such shambles because it is not yet purified, and he intends to rectify that. He originally felt that the problem was just corrupt (meaning non-fundamentalist Muslim) local governments, but he has since been convinced that the larger problem is the corrupting influence the West exerts on the Muslim world.
This "corruption" -- meaning open, tolerant, science-based, diverse society in which not just men (bad enough), but even women (unspeakable) are free to do, dress, speak, and otherwise behave as they please -- is the ultimate evil and must be fought. He sees the US as the most powerful vector of all of the above, qualifying us as the root of all evil. I take that as a compliment.
Only in the last few years has he begun including all the various Muslim vs. non-Muslim regional turf wars in his list of "grievances", as he has begun to see the political expediency of uniting all Muslims behind him in his real agenda of driving out impurity and "purifying" the Muslim world.
Superficial analysts like you look down his growing laundry list, pick out your favorites and say, "yeah, I can see why he's outraged at the US". You don't see it at all.
"When you occasionally travel abroad, bother to learn a few phrases...."
I'd guess you're a continental European from the regularity in which I hear that from continental Europeans. They must teach that in school to help defend against natural feelings of cultural insignificance. Your superficial analysis (perhaps intentionally) mistakes simple economic expediency in Europe for cultural sophistication. You find similar "sophistication" in places like the Himalayas and the Golden Triangle region of the Mekong.
My small software company knows a lot more about giant Microsoft than MS knows about us. If I were European, perhaps I would credit that to our company's obvious cultural superiority to MS.
If *you* ever bother go to Asia -- where I worked as an interpreter for years -- you'll see that the vast majority of Westerners who speak the local Asian language well are, surprisingly to most Europeans, Americans. I know who my competitors were, and though there were many skilled Europeans, they were outnumbered by skilled Americans.