[erlang-questions] Fwd: A proposal for Unicode variable and atom names in Erlang.

[Michael Turner]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 5:33 PM, Ivan Uemlianin <ivan@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 23/10/2012 09:25, Benoit Chesneau wrote:
>>
>>
>> Maybe chinese use hanzi, but how do they call whith others around the
>> world when it's about sharing their work or collaborate globally ?
>> They come back to the common syntax.
>
>
> This is political.  Just as the British, and then the Americans stopped
> learning foreign languages and expected everyone else to use English. The
> Chinese will increasingly expect to be able to use Mandarin whenever abroad.

Or not. One thing I've learned from living in a high-population
country with a language spoken nowhere else is that, for the most
part, it doesn't matter that most people can't use English to save
their lives. For the Dutch and the Finns, English might be mandatory.
For the Japanese? Not so much. I expect much the same to be true for
the Chinese. An economy's needs for interfacing linguistically with
the outside world do not grow linearly with its size. More like
according to the cube root of its size. This means there can be an
entire software industry for business apps that doesn't need
anything written in English at all.

-michael turner