Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

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I am unsure why the hostility is needed. I am also unclear on the incorrect assumptions you made about me.

I do not live in America and the country I live in has it's own set of special characters to deal with.

I can perhaps agree that American cultural imperialism in computer science as with many other fields

This post was primarily directed at GitHub. It has users from all over the world.

Having a common Lingua franca for the various public rep is inclusive and productive

I want here there to be a low threshold to use and contribute to my projects.

Lastly, Github is an American company located in the US. With repositories primarily using American created and optimized for Americans keyboard layout programming languages.

Certainly, some programming languages originated in other countries. As far as I can recall they all stick to English for keywords.

A couple of decades ago there was much more variety, and it was more common for countries to have native originated programming languages that did not use English.

Linux started in Finland but it kept the US created standard UNIX names and conventions.

Most if not all documentation is in English many have now been translated to other languages.

With all that in mind. Sticking to the most compatible common denominator is the best standard on Gigahub.

You said that you question utf-8. I do not. That's it.

It is not about imperialism, but computer science is not all about problems that could be expressed in english either. What I'm supposed to do if I need to write a program for manipulating cyrillic texts? Transcribe everything in latin? Be serious and imagine that though english is useful, it is not sufficient.

The contexts remains ReadMe files on Github. Remember that.

If you wish to write a program to do Y then write the code your tests etc using whatever encoding makes you happy.

Nowhere have I said no Unicodein any repositories which is the strawman you are reachinging for.

You can still write Readme files without Unicode so that the great majority of user of public Github can see what your project is about.

Now there are many close editors today that do not support full unicode

Presumably advocating unicode should not discriminate against languages with Arabic.

Most code editors can not do that right out of the box. More and more can.

> the great majority of use

The great majority of users has editors that can handle unicode. What editor common today doesn't do UTF-8?

Let's imagine that I'm writing a cyrillic program. The users are most likely not english, the stakeholders are not english, the examples that the program works with are not ascii. Yet, you insist that in the readme I'm not using anything cyrillic related and use ascii instead.

If I happen to find an arabic readme, then I'll know that either I'm not the target audience, or that the author does not know english and might loose my contributions. Neither of those gives me the right to open a PR and insist that the readme is adjusted for my use case only and degrades the user experience of others.

What I strongly disagree with you is that from the principal of "be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept" you choose to take only the first part and forget the latter. Ascii is nice when it is applicable for the use case, but it is not universally applicable and assuming so should be a personal mistake, not tax on everyone. Maybe the disagreement between us is in how we define target audience. You imagine that if it is published in Github, then it must be readable to anyone there. I think that if the project is ment to help certain type of people, then it it must be optimized for them, not for people who would never bother using it anyways.

> I do not live in America and the country I live in has it's own set of special characters to deal with.

Yes. I’ve noticed that programmers from all over the world are narrow-minded and view things like international, inclusive standards to be “bloat”, preferring a monoculture since that would make things simpler (technically simpler, which is all that matters if you have no sense of aesthetics or culture).

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