Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Scott" == Scott Stone <sstone@example.com> writes:

    Scott> On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, Matt Gushee wrote:

    >> Extending the same logic, I suppose that instead of trying to
    >> cope with human differences (and, dare I say, growing in the
    >> process), we should try to eliminate those differences in the
    >> interest of efficiency. But I'm sure nobody believes that ...

"Oh, brave new world, that has such people in it!"  (Correct me if
I've misquoted.)  Maybe not any more.  But Lenin believed it; Mao
believed it.  Something like that position is (unjustly) attributed to
Stallman.

That last is an interesting example.  I know what he says; I know some
of what he does.  He believes in diversity, but seems (I would guess
unintentionally) to stifle it within the GNU project.  He does that in
the name of efficiency (and sometimes in the name of strengthening the
GPL).  GCC/egcs is duplication of effort.  So is Emacs/XEmacs.  (WTF
he came up with Guile I'm baffled, there were plenty of reasonable
existing Scheme implementations.)  But there was not enough room
inside of GNU, so Cygnus and Lucid left it.  (But look at who
administers, maybe even owns, the copyrights on both egcs and XEmacs.
This is only partly a matter of the existing copyrights; in XEmacs and 
I presume egcs there is a strong feeling that the copyrights on the
main code _should_ be vested in the FSF.))

    Scott> I think that this is what someone once meant by the 'babel'
    Scott> concept - human languages tend to diverge into more and
    Scott> more fragmented languages instead of converging on one
    Scott> language.

I don't see this.  Definitely so, in programming languages.  But in
human languages we're converging.  To the extreme displeasure of
anti-Unicode fanatics and the French Academy, I might add.

-- 
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