Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Diverse Societies

Rephrasing the long post. I think we are better off having a diversity of character sets than to pretend that we have one character set that encompasses the diversity of all possible languages.

What programmers need is a multidimensional system that allows for a short readable character set for interfacing with the computer. We can they use translation tables for communicating with other cultures.

There is a place for efforts like UTF8 that incorporate a translation table at the character level itself; However, I think that there is more fundamental diversity when we allow people to develop systems optimized for their culture than we are when we try to create monolythic systems that try to encapsulate the full diversity of all human language.

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