> I probably wouldn't mind it if were the lingua franca in computing.
And in programming, I don’t! It’s more like a weird pidgin lignua celto-germano-franca with funky morphology, but I love it nevertheless. I’ve read the Unicode identifiers spec, and frankly, however much I like my Agda with that special Unicode maths sauce, I’m not sure I’d be better off with that in my compiler.
A old and grizzled plant worker who needs a new computer-operated lathe, though, will rightfully tell me to take a hike if I try to sell him a machine that only speaks and accepts a foreign language, and his boss will support him. (It depends on the country: a French person will look down on you if you don’t try to speak their native language to them, and a Norse one will think you’re looking down on them if you do.) I might be able to hold out for a couple of decades, but ultimately, my computer will speak the lingua franca to computing professionals and the native language to users, or somebody else will build one that does.
This means user-facing, user-specified identifiers such as file names will need to support at least these two languages—and given a requirement for exchanging data in a global network, essentially every other one as well. You might try to tell users they’re supposed to use some other kind of identifier, but given these are still going to need to be human-readable, integrity-critial, equality-supporting, globally-exchangeable identifiers, I don’t see how that does anything except rename the problem.
And in programming, I don’t! It’s more like a weird pidgin lignua celto-germano-franca with funky morphology, but I love it nevertheless. I’ve read the Unicode identifiers spec, and frankly, however much I like my Agda with that special Unicode maths sauce, I’m not sure I’d be better off with that in my compiler.
A old and grizzled plant worker who needs a new computer-operated lathe, though, will rightfully tell me to take a hike if I try to sell him a machine that only speaks and accepts a foreign language, and his boss will support him. (It depends on the country: a French person will look down on you if you don’t try to speak their native language to them, and a Norse one will think you’re looking down on them if you do.) I might be able to hold out for a couple of decades, but ultimately, my computer will speak the lingua franca to computing professionals and the native language to users, or somebody else will build one that does.
This means user-facing, user-specified identifiers such as file names will need to support at least these two languages—and given a requirement for exchanging data in a global network, essentially every other one as well. You might try to tell users they’re supposed to use some other kind of identifier, but given these are still going to need to be human-readable, integrity-critial, equality-supporting, globally-exchangeable identifiers, I don’t see how that does anything except rename the problem.