On Saturday 29 March 2003 07:38 am, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote: > Hi, > > From: Glenn Maynard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: supporting XIM > Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 16:49:31 -0500 > > > Stop using the word "racist". It's like saying "if you > > don't support a feature I want, you're supporting > > terrorism"; it makes people groan and stop paying attention. > > It's inflammatory, doesn't help your case at all, and > > injures your credibility. > > I see. I didn't know subtle nuance of the word. > (Dictionaries never teach us about such nuances.) > > However, I am often annoyed by people who think supporting > European languages is more important than supporting Asian > languages even when there are no technical problem to achieve > such support. They never have racist ideas. They just feel > non-European languages are somewhat exotic and support of such > languages is a "special" feature of softwares.
I don't encounter people who say that literally. I do know a lot of people who consider I18n to be "someone else's problem". And to a considerable extent they are right. It's our problem. Programmers can't possible learn enough to implement their own I18n solutions. They want it done once per platform, and standardized, and then they want somebody to write a simple-minded textbook or HOWTO with a recipe to follow to avoid the more egregious problems we have in software now. "Use this string type; use these string functions; don't try to calculate glyph counts or text display widths yourself from the character data, ask the renderer; segregate string data from code; structure strings in this way so that the translator's job is manageable." > For fair, I should mention that usual Japanese developers and > users don't think about non-Japanese/English language support. > I don't think they are racists. They just forget there are > languages other than Japanese and English. > > How should I call such people? I know they are never > "racists" in its original meaning. > > Note that even if they are not "racists", the result (that > there are few internationalized softwares) is as almost same > as they are really racists. Not at all. If we were really battling racists with influence in the software industry, progress would be much harder and much slower. The nearest we have to an enemy is the bean-counter who wants to see a few million likely users in the business case for supporting a writing system or language before authorizing any R&D on it. In the past, Micro$oft was known to turn down an offer of cash from a national government for national locale support. So India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Tibet, and Mongolia are still considered by M$ and Apple not to have sufficiently compelling business cases. (I don't see it that way. A financially modest implementation effort for these scripts will have an incredible ROI over several decades, although not for the organization that does it. I'm in.) There is presently sufficient multilingual Unicode software for database, text editing, publishing, programming and other functions to get on with in most modern languages. As soon as support is extended to the missing writing systems of South and Central Asia, and standardized, the amount of internationalized software will increase. Growth will accelerate rapidly as it becomes easier to use that support. In a decade we can expect standards for the most-used programming languages to include I18n, not just Unicode. > The difference is -- I have a > little hope to persuade these developers not to forget about > non-European-language speakers. On the other hand, Real > racists are those who explicitly know about non- > European-language speakers and who think they should be > discriminated. I definitely don't know anybody like that in the computer industry, although I have met a few elsewhere. > --- > Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
