Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall! 728
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?"
If you can't express yourself in ASCII... (Score:5, Funny)
...the character set isn't the problem.
And I say this as an old APL coder.
(There aren't many new APL coders.)
Re:Examples? (Score:4, Funny)
So, what are his ideas?
EBCDIC?
It all winds up as binary anyway. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Not only no, (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Re:Learn2code (Score:4, Funny)
You mean "@"? Looks like a pile of shit to me.
Wingdings of Disease (Score:3, Funny)
Wired: Wingdings of Disease [wired.com]
Re:Learn2code (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:The thing with ASCII (Score:1, Funny)
You must be new here
Re:Would it be less tedious to have 10,000+ keys? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The thing with ASCII (Score:5, Funny)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [slashdot.jp] manages to display non-ASCII characters.
Re:The thing with ASCII (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:visual GUI-based programming (Score:3, Funny)
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....
Re:The thing with ASCII (Score:2, Funny)
One Glyph to find them.
One Glyph to bring them all...
ah, never mind...
I wouldn't consider Mr. Pike an authority on (Score:3, Funny)
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 [googleusercontent.com]) - 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.
If ASCII was good enough for Jesus Christ (Score:2, Funny)
Just use assembly (Score:1, Funny)
You can assemble it to binary and then diassemble it to any mnemonic set you like.
Re:Would it be less tedious to have 10,000+ keys? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:The thing with ASCII (Score:3, Funny)
Wasn't there already a seminal paper on this topic?
http://public.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf [att.com]
Re:The thing with ASCII (Score:1, Funny)
Except for the Germans. I don't think their language uses spaces.
Of Kurs wir usen der Spacetasten in der Deutschenlanguage, you Insensitivklod!