Because English is already well suited to it, is it incredibly ethnocentric of me to believe that instead of trying to shoehorn the complexities and eccentricities of existing written text into the digital medium we should have instead adapted the writing systems to the medium so they'd be simpler to both represent and input? Because every time I look at what it takes to properly support unicode I'm pretty damn thankful ASCII is more than sufficient to represent my language.

The point of our machines is to help humans, not the other way around.

I was saddened when Spain changed Spanish sorting to make life easier for PC programmers in the 90s. Within only a couple of years that effort became pointless, but was now encoded in law.

> The point of our machines is to help humans, not the other way around.

While this is true, significant amounts of friction are caused by being unwilling to adapt to the medium's nature. What would writing look like if we had tried to encode sound waves directly onto paper? Instead we adapted our communication to the medium.

With such a pliable device I consider every adaptation a person must make to be a deficiency. Perhaps a not-yet-addressable deficiency, but a negative nonetheless.

What did they change?

I guess this refers to this:

”Spanish treated (until 1994) "CH" and "LL" as single letters, giving an ordering of cinco, credo, chispa and lomo, luz, llama. This is not true any more since in 1994 the RAE adopted the more conventional usage, and now LL is collated between LK and LM, and CH between CG and CI. The six characters with diacritics Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú, Ü are treated as the original letters A, E, I, O, U, for example: radio, ráfaga, rana, rápido, rastrillo. The only Spanish-specific collating question is Ñ (eñe) as a different letter collated after N.”

(Copied from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order#Language-sp...)

Indeed, and the justification at the time was because contemporary software got it wrong. I remember it well.

It's not ethnocentric, it's programmer-centric. If you consider supporting Unicode hard, imagine the effort required to get everyone to learn a new writing system and transliterate all existing works into it. At least Unicode support only requires a handful of specialists to create the necessary tooling, rather than some global uprooting of existing traditions.

Emoji work because they're optional. If people were forced to communicate exclusively in emoji to use some particular software, most potential users aren't going to bother with the effort and will choose a competitor instead.

I think I've expressed my point unclearly: emoji are an adaptation of our communication patterns to the medium. Real time textural communication could not express things we were used to expressing in other real time media via tone of voice or body language, so we adapted how we communicate those things to the media. Indeed writing itself is an adaptation of language to a new medium.

I suggested some falsehoods that programmers believe about telephones a while back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215636). There is a case for falsehoods that programmers believe about ASCII, starting with:

* It's 8-bit. (It's 7-bit.)

* It is sufficient for English. (Ð ð Þ þ)

* It is sufficient for Modern English. (zoölogy coöperate £ née resumé)

* It at least has everything that one could type on a typewriter. (½ ¼ ¢ , and that's just starting with some contemporary 20th century U.S. typewriters from IBM such as the Selectric)

* It is sufficient for the U.S., at least. (Not for the U.S. Library of Congress in 1969 it wasn't. It needed 174 characters for catalogue cards, per https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02404378 .)

* It was used by Multics. (Multics used a modified version, padded out with leading zero bits and replacing DEL with PAD. See http://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/multics/bc-2-01.... .)

* It does not have broken vertical bar. (It was in the 1968 standard at 124, a broken bar because the PL/I language people did not want their unbroken vertical bar to be in the then "national variant" range. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.infosystems.www.authori... http://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C )

* It does have broken vertical bar. (It was replaced in the 1977 standard by an unbroken vertical bar at 124. Then some subsequent 8-bit character sets in the 1980s re-introduced a broken vertical bar in a second position, with much ensuing hilarity.)

* It did not have arrows. (In the original standard ↑ and ← were where ^ and _ now are, for some consequences of which see https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/9201/1932 .)

* It is the same as ECMA-6. (ECMA-6:1991 allows national-language variants in several code positions. The standard ASCII characters in those positions are merely the "International Reference Version" and one possibility from amongst several in ECMA-6. See https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec... .)

So in actual fact English was adapted to the medium, albeit minimally.

The end result of adapting our language to the medium is to lose in expressibility and gain in portability. Forcing technology to catch up is a more coherent option in the long run

That's the exact same trade off we made for writing in the first place. Yet here we are still conversing with text despite the technology to record and send each other video having been widely available for a decade or more.

That's specious reasoning.

If you mean, body language is the main or majority channel for communication, well, how much body lanuage matters to communication is contested and differs based on context anyway (see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-words/201109/...).

If you mean, there is a loss of expressibility going from the spoken word to the written word. Is there? You would have to prove that that loss is as significant as the symbolic/representational destruction you are advocating. Much of the imperfect synonyms we have developed in english are used to signal tone and intent -- things that are usually signalled in body language. So, just because we are using the written word does not mean we cannot express those things. You have something in a larger space, you can represent it in a smaller space using longer and more complex series of glyphs.

> Yet here we are still conversing with text despite the technology to record and send each other video having been widely available for a decade or more.

Yes, for the very reason that it erases the extra data. you not being able to see me means that you have to go on my words alone, rather than making extra-contextual judgements about me as a whole based on my physical appearance. That seems only to cement my point, though.

Several of these points can be boiled down to "When people say ASCII, they really mean ISO 8859-1 or CP 1252".