Text-mode apps (Was :Who are the "spacists"?)

[Mikhail V]

On 30 March 2017 at 07:43, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 3:21 PM, Rick Johnson
> <rantingrickjohnson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sunday, March 26, 2017 at 2:53:49 PM UTC-5, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 6:25 AM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > On 26 March 2017 at 20:10, Steve D'Aprano <steve+python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>>> >> On Mon, 27 Mar 2017 03:57 am, Mikhail V wrote:
>>

>>> """
>>> I, the undersigned, acknowledge that my program is
>>> intentionally excluding everyone who does not fit the
>>> following requirements: [choose all applicable]
>>>
>>> [ ] Speaks English exclusively
>>
>> Of course, your comment presupposing that every programmer
>> is fluent in every natural language. Which is not only
>> impractical, it's impossible.
>
> Nope. I can't speak Mandarin, but I can make absolutely sure that all
> my programs can accept Chinese characters. A friend of mine sent me an
> audio file with a name that included some Chinese, and I was able to
> handle it no problem.
>

Naming files is another point. Generally if I can't speak Mandarin,
I have no right to make support for it since I know nothing about this
language nor do I know their symbols.

>>> [ ] Uses no diacritical marks
>>
>> Why is it my responsibiliy to encode my text with
>> pronuciation tutorials? Are we adults here or what?
>>
>>> [ ] Writes all text top-to-bottom, left-to-right
>>
>> Not my problem. Learn the King's English or go wait for
>> extinction to arrive.
>
> And these two cement your parochialism thoroughly in everyone's minds.
> "Pronunciation tutorials", eh? Sure. Tell that to everyone who speaks
> Spanish, Turkish, Norwegian, German, or Vietnamese, all of which use
> diacritical marks to distinguish between letters. English is the weird
> language in that it uses letter pairs instead of adorned letters (eg
> "ch" and "sh" instead of "ç" and "ş").

Because "Pronunciation tutorials" is one of rare excuses to use those
special characters at all. Now do you know how many phonetical
systems linguist have invented over past 200 years? Will you find
all them in Unicode? And why you need them today, if you can
learn pronunciation by audio tutorials?

And letter pair usage is not for fun there, I think we've discussed this
some time ago on python-ideas, it is merely a political problem,
since every 'king' in each land suddenly thinks that he is a genius
typographer and adds few custom characters to Latin after he realizes
that there is no sense in forcing everyone to use some outdated system,
or even rolls his own bizzare system (e.g. Hangul).

>> What don't you add these:
>>
>> [ ] Has the ability to read and comprehend at a high
>>     school level.
>> [ ] Has functioning visual receptors.
>> [ ] Has a functioning brain.
>> [ ] Is not currently in a vegetative state
>
> Nah. If I did, I'd have to say "[ ] Is not trolling python-list" as well.

Call me a bigot, but I would say:
[x]  people, become adult finally and stop playing with your funny
hieroglyphs, use Latin set, and concentrate on real problems.

If I produce an arcade game or an IDE, would it lose much if
I don't include Unicode support? I personally would not do it
even in the fear of punishment.


Mikhail