Your language sucks...

As a result of work I've been doing for illumos, I've recently gotten re-engaged with internationalization, and the support for this in libc and localedef (I am the original author for our localedef.)

I've decided that human languages suck.  Some suck worse than others though, so I thought I'd write up a guide.  You can take this as "your language sucks if...", or perhaps a better view might be "your program sucks if you make assumptions this breaks..."

(Full disclosure, I'm spoiled.  I am a native speaker of English.  English is pretty awesome for data-processing, at least at the written level.  I'm not going to concern myself with questions about deeper issues like grammar, natural language recognition, speech synthesis, or recognition, automatic translation, etc.  Instead this is focused strictly on the most basic display and simple operations like collation (sorting), case conversion, and character classification.)

1. Too many code points. 

Some languages (from Eastern Asia) have way way too many code points.  There are so many that these languages can't actually fit into 16-bits all by themselves.  Yes, I'm saying that there are languages with over 65,000 characters in them!  This explosion means that generating data for languages results in intermediate lookup tables that are megabytes in size.  For Unicode, this impacts all languages.  The intermediate sources for the Unicode supported in illumos blow up to over 2GB when support for the additional code planes is included.

2. Your language requires me to write custom code for symbol names. 

Hangul Jamo, I'm looking at you.  Of all the languages in Unicode, only this one is so bizarre that it requires multiple lookup tables to determine the names of the characters, because the characters are made up of smaller bits of phonetic portions (vowels and consonants.)  It even has its own section in the basic conformance document for Unicode (section 3.12).  I don't speak Korean, but I had to learn about Jamo.

3. Your language's character set is continuing to evolve. 

Yes, that's Asia again (mostly China I think).   The rate at which new Asian characters are added rivals that of updates to the timezone database.  The approach your language uses is wrong!

4. Characters in your language are of multiple different cell widths. 

Again, this is mostly, but not exclusively, Asian languages.  Asian languages require 2 cells to display many of their characters.  But, to make matters far far worse, some times the number f code points used to represent a character is more than one, which means that the width of a character when displayed may be 0, 1, or 2 cells.   Worse, some languages have both half- and full-width forms for many common symbols.  Argh.

5. The width of the character depends on the context. 

Some widths depend on the encoding because of historical practice (Asia again!), but then you have composite characters as well.  For example, a Jamo vowel sound could in theory be displayed on its own.  But if it follows a leading consonant, then it changes the consonant character and they become a new character (at least to the human viewer).

6. Your language has unstable case conversions.

There are some evil ones here, and thankfully they are rare.  But some languages have case conversions which are not reversible!  Case itself is kind of silly, but this is just insane!  Armenian has a letter with this property, I believe.

7. Your language's collation order is context-dependent. 

(French, I'm looking at you!)  Some languages have sorting orders that depend not just on the character itself, but on the characters that precede or follow it.  Some of the rules are really hard.  The collation code required to deal with this generally is really really scary looking.

8. Your language has equivalent alternates (ligatures). 

German, your ß character, which stands in for "ss", is a poster child here.  This is a single code point, but for sorting it is equivalent to "ss".  This is just historical decoration, because it's "fancy".  Stop making my programming life hard.

9. Your language can't decide on a script. 

Some languages can be written in more than one script.  For example, Mongolian can be written using Mongolian script or Cyrillic.  But the winner (loser?) here is Serbian, which in some places uses both Latin and Cyrillic characters interchangeably! Pick a script already! I think the people who live like this are just schizophrenic.  (Given all the political nonsense surrounding language in these places, that's no real surprise.)

10. Your language has Titlecase. 

POSIX doesn't do Titlecase.  This happens because your language also uses ligatures instead of just allocating a separate cell and code point for each character.  Most people talk about titlecase used in a phrase or string of words.  But yes, titlecase can apply to a SINGLE CHARACTER.  For example, Dž is just such a character.

11. Your language doesn't use the same display / ordering we expect.

So some languages use right to left, which is backwards, but whatever.   Others, crazy ones (but maybe crazy smart, if you think about it) use back and forth bidirectional.  And still others use vertical ordering.  But the worst of them are those languages (Asia again, dammit!) where the orientation of text can change.  Worse, some cases even rotate individual characters, depending upon context (e.g. titles are rotated 90 degrees and placed on the right edge).  How did you ever figure out how to use a computer with this crazy stuff?

12. Your encoding collides control codes.

We use the first 32 or so character codes to mean special things for terminal control, etc.  If we can't use these, your language is going to suck over certain kinds of communication lines.

13. Your encoding uses conflicting values at ASCII code points.

ASCII is universal.  Why did you fight it?  But that's probably just me being mostly Anglo-centric / bigoted.

14. Your language encoding uses shift characters. 

(Code page, etc.)  Some East Asian languages used this hack in the old days.  Stateful encodings are JUST HORRIBLY BROKEN.   A given sequence of characters should not depend on some state value that was sent a long time earlier.

15. Your language encoding uses zero values in the middle of valid characters. 

Thankfully this doesn't happen with modern encodings in common use anymore.  (Or maybe I just have decided that I won't support any encoding system this busted.  Such an encoding is so broken that I just flat out refuse to work with it.)

Non-Broken Languages

So, there are some good examples of languages that are famously not broken.

a. English.  Written English has simple sorting rules, and a very simple character set.  Dipthongs are never ligatures.  This is so useful for data processing that I think it has had a great deal to do with why English is the common language for computer scientists around the world.  US-ASCII -- and English character set, is the "base" character set for Unicode, and pretty much all other encodings use ASCII encodings in the lower 7 bits.

b. Russian.  (And likely others that use Cyrillic, but not all of them!)  Russian has a very simple alphabet, strictly phonetic.  The number of characters is small, there are no composite characters, and no special sorting rules.  Hmm... I seem to recall that Russia (Soviet era) had a pretty robust computing industry.  And these days Russians mostly own the Internet, right?  Coincidence?  Or maybe they just don't have to waste a lot of time fighting with the language just to get stuff done?

I think there are probably others.  (At a glance, Geoergian looks pretty straight-forward.   I suspect that there are languages using both Cyrillic and Latin character sets that are sane.  Ethiopic actually looks pretty simple and sane too.  (Again, just from a text processing standpoint.)

But sadly, the vast majority of natural languages have written forms & rules that completely and utterly suck for text processing.

My Problem with Feminism

I'm going to say some things here that may be controversial.  Certainly that headline is.  But please, bear with me, and read this before you judge too harshly.

As another writer said, 2014 has been a terrible year for women in tech.  (Whether in the industry, or in gaming.)  Arguably, this is not a new thing, but rather events are reaching a head.  Women (some at any rate) are being more vocal, and awareness of women's issues is up.  On the face of it, this should be a good thing.

And yet, we have incredible conflict between women and men.  And this is at the heart of my problem with "Feminism".

The F-Word

Don't get me wrong.  I strongly believe that women should be treated fairly and with respect; in the professional place they should receive the same level of professional respect -- and compensation! -- as their male counterparts can expect.  I believe this passionately -- as a nerd, I prefer to judge people on the merits of their work, rather than on their race, creed, gender, or sexual preference.  A similar principle applies to gaming -- after all, how do you really know the gender of the player on the other side of the MMO?  Does it even matter?  When did gaming become a venue for channeling hate instead of fun?

The problem with "feminism" is that instead of repairing inequality and trying to bring men and women closer together, so much of it seems to be divisive.  The very word itself basically suggests a gender based conflict, and I think this, as well as much of the recent approach, is counterproductive.

Instead of calling attention to inequalities and improper behaviors (lets face it, nobody wants to deal with sexual harassment, discrimination, or some of the very much worse behavior that a few terribly bad actors are guilty of), we've become focused on gender bias and "fixing" gender bias as a goal in and of itself, rather than instead focusing on fair and equal treatment for all.

Every day I'm inundated with tweets and Facebook postings extolling the terrible plight of women at the expense of men.  Many of these posts seem intended to make me either angry at men, or ashamed of being one.  This basically drives a wedge between people, even unconsciously, to the point that it has become impossible to avoid being a soldier on one side or the other of this war.  And don't get me wrong, it has indeed degenerated to a total war.

I don't think this is what most feminists or their advocates really want.  (Though, I think it is what some of them want.  The side of feminism has its bad actors who thrive on conflict just as much as the other side has.  Extremism is gender and color and religion blind, as we've ample evidence of.)

I think one thing that advocates for women in tech can do, is to pick a different term, and a different way of stating their goals, and perhaps a different approach.  I think we've reached the critical mass necessary for awareness, so the constant tweets about how terrible it is to be a woman are no longer helpful.

I'm not sure what "term" should replace feminism -- in the workplace I'd suggest "professionalism".  After all everyone wants to be treated professionally, not just women.  (Btw, I'd say that in the gaming community, the value should be "sportsmanship".  Sadly some will see that word is gender biased, but I don't ascribe to the notion that we have to completely change our language in order to be more politically correct.  You know what I mean.)

Likewise, instead of dog piling on the one person (as I'm sure will happen in response to this post) on someone who doesn't immediately appear to support the feminist agenda, perhaps a little more tolerance, and education should be used in the approach.  Focus should, IMO, be on public praise for the parties who are working to make conditions better.

Educate instead of punish.  Make allies instead of enemies.

Salary Gap

The salary gap issue that was raised recently by Microsoft is another case in point.

I don't agree with Satya Nadella's comments saying that women should not ask for raises, but I think many women are nearly as likely to get a raise upon requesting one as a man of similar accomplishments.  (Yes, it would be better if this statement could have been said without "nearly".)   Far too few women feel comfortable asking for a merit based raise in the first place -- that is something that should change. But using race or gender as a bias to demand pay increases is a recipe for further division.  Indeed, men may begin to wonder if women are being compensated unfairly because they are women, but in the reverse direction. 

Likewise, bringing up discrimination in a salary discussion puts the other party on the defensive.  It presumes to imply prior wrong-doing.  This may be the case, but it may well not be.  After all, I've known many men that were under compensated simply because they sold themselves short, or were not comfortable asking for more money.   Why look for a fight when there isn't one?  (I suspect this is what Satya was really trying to get at.)

None of this helps the cause of "professionalism", and probably not the cause of "feminism".

Average tech salary figures are easily obtainable.  If a worker, man or woman, feels under compensated -- for any reason -- then they should take it to his employer and ask for a correction.  But to presume that the reason is gender, starts the conversation from a point of conflict.

Far far better is to demand far pay based on work performance and merit, relative to industry norms as appropriate.   If an employer won't compensate fairly, just leave.  There is no shortage of tech jobs in the industry.  If you're a woman, maybe look for jobs at companies that employ (and successfully retain) women.  Ask the people who work at a prospective employer about conditions, etc.  That's true for minorities too!  Ultimately, an employer who discriminates will find itself at a severe competitive advantage, as both the discriminated-against parties, and their allies refuse to do business with them.

An employer is not obligated to pay you "more" because of your gender.  But they must also not pay you less because of gender.  And yet every company will generally try to pay as little as they think they can get away with.  So don't let them -- but keep discrimination out of the conversation unless there is really compelling proof of wrong doing.  (And if there is such evidence, I'd recommend looking elsewhere, and possibly explore stronger legal measures.)

And yes, I strongly strongly believe that most men feel as I do.  They support the notion that everyone should be treated equally and professionally, and would like to stamp out sexism in the workplace, but many of us are starting to show symptoms of battle fatigue, and even more of us just don't want to be involved in a conflict at all.   Frankly, I think a lot of us are annoyed at feminist attempts to draw us into the conflict, even though we do support many of the stated goals of equal pay, fair treatment, etc. etc.

Closing Thoughts

As for me, I support the plight of women who find themselves discriminated against based on their gender, and I would like to see more women in my industry.  And I've put my money where my mouth is. 

But at the same time, you won't find me supporting "feminism".  I want to heal the rift, and work with awesome people -- and I happen to believe at least half of the awesome people in the world are of a different gender than I am.  Why would I want to alienate them?

I happen to believe that many well meaning people of many causes damage their cause by basically forcing people to deal with their "diversity" first, instead of of being able to deal with people as people on their own merit.  Its so much harder to appreciate a person on her own merits, when at least half of what she is saying is that she's unfairly treated because of gender, race, sexual preference, etc.  This true for everyone.  Show me how you're excellent, and I promise to appreciate you for your awesomeness, and to treat you fairly and with the same respect I would for anyone of my own gender/race/sexual preference.

You are awesome because of your accomplishments/innovations/contributions, not because of your gender or race or sexual preference.

But, if you won't let me look past your race/gender/etc. identity, then please don't be offended if I don't see anything else.  If you want to be treated like a "person", then let me see the person instead of just some classification in an equal opportunity survey.

Supporting Women in Open Source

Please have a look at Sage Weil's blog post on supporting the Ada Initiative, which supports women in open source development.

Sage is sponsoring an $8192 matching grant, to support women in open source development of open storage technology.

You may have heard my talk recently, where I expressed that there have been no female contributions to illumos (that includes ZFS by the way!)  This is kind of a tragedy; intelligence and creativity of at least half the population are simply not represented here, and we are worser for it.

If you want to try to do something about it, heres a small thing.  There's a week remaining to do so, so I encourage folks to step up.  ($3392 has already been granted.)

I'm making a donation myself, if you think supporting more women in open source is a worthwhile cause, please join me!