> People only think that because we've been conditioned by computers to value answers more than how we got to them.
By computers? My dude, it's not computers that condition us that way. It's exams in school. Give the right answers or you're officially labeled a failure. It's waaay older than computers.
I'm not the one you replied to, but I think I get their point. If you have a machine that can solve math problems at the push of a button, you don't really need to amass discoveries anymore just in case someone might need it years down the line.
Someone in the thread mentioned Minkowski’s math work being instrumental to Einstein’s physics. If Einstein had had a math machine that can spit out the result at will, he wouldn't have needed Minkowski.
Nevertheless, I also see the opposing point: if Minkowski hadn't already published his results, it's possible Einstein would not have even had the inspiration to derive general relativity from it. I think this is the human aspect most critics are worried about.
It could be argued that Turkish and simplified Chinese succeeded simply because they were supported by, you could even say imposed by, a government that controls > 90% of the population speaking the language. Neither was the case for Arabic: there is no single government spanning that proportion of Arabic speakers, and from how I read the article, it seems no government really supported Unified Arabic to any extent even remotely comparable to Turkish and simplified Chinese.
Your comment could be read as implying that Unified Arabic, the subject of this post, must have been useless as an idea because it wasn't widely adopted.
In reality, there are many factors, not only pure practicality, that lead people to reject reforms like these. In the case of Arabic, it was deeply held traditional values; in the case of Hong Kong and Taiwan, well, I imagine it's simply an unwillingness to appear to be aligning with a regime one politically disagrees with.
Computers do not “have that mostly covered now”. Typesetting and font rendering technology is so Western-centric and so entrenched that support for writing systems with slightly different base assumptions, such as Arabic, Devanagari and many others, is always an afterthought.
It's so weird for me to live through software evolution to the point where this no longer goes without saying.
In the Windows 3.1 days, it was nearly impossible to make a program that wasn't fully keyboard-usable. Even if you left out all the hotkeys in the menus and messed up the tab order, it was still possible (even if annoying) to get through it with the keyboard, and adding the hotkeys (as well as actual shortcuts) and setting a sensible tab order was super easy and straightforward.
Nowadays more than half of all software is made using non-native GUI toolkits (or sometimes no toolkits at all) that refuse to implement any of the typical keyboard navigation that would previously have come for free.
The keyboard makes computers a joy to use for me. Seeing it disappear makes me very sad. Seeing how the vast majority of people don't care that it disappeared makes me feel like an alien from another planet.
My favorite example of keyboard power is qutebrowser¹ which turns any website keyboard navigable as well as all browser functionality too. It's a really fast and comfortable work flow.
Same. I think part of the problem is that keyboard shortcuts are often not very discoverable. For example on Macos, pop-up dialogs often have keyboard shortcuts for their non-default buttons, but I'm not sure where you're supposed to learn this. Lack of discoverability leads to many people not using them which leads to devs not implementing them.
I wouldn't care to read manual for my microwave, as long as basic functions work. Similarly, people don't seem to bother to use their software to its full potential.
By computers? My dude, it's not computers that condition us that way. It's exams in school. Give the right answers or you're officially labeled a failure. It's waaay older than computers.
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