[erlang-questions] Atom Unicode Support

[Fred Hebert]

On 02/02, José Valim wrote:
>> Are you ready to edit chineese or thai?
>
>I can already write atoms in Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Breton, Corsican,
>Danish, English, Faroese, Galician, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian,
>Kurdish, Leonese, Luxembourgish, Malay, Manx, Norwegian, Occitan,
>Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish,
>Walloon.
>
>Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1
>
>And I can only effectively speak 3 of those. There are already a lot of
>programmers who can write in their own language and I don't expect to edit
>their code.
>
>Not only that, there are other programming languages which have already
>adopted Unicode Support and the amount of times I had to read code in a
>language I don't understand has been exactly 0.
>

I want to also voice my support for Unicode support.

I don't know why everytime unicode is brought up in this mailing list a 
bunch of people suddenly fear having to edit code in a language they 
don't understand.  This has been possible already for a long time (as 
pointed out by the list of languages José added there). I think last 
time someone was being preemptively angry because they could be buying a 
business where code was in a different language and then they would be 
screwed! The horror.

I've given presentations in a local user group where I used French for 
my programs. Nobody here has had to suffer through a non-english 
language when working or communicating with me though. It turns out 
people tend to be reasonable when it comes to communicating with various 
communities and preparing for that.

I can vow to try to keep it so everyone's eyes don't get to suffer the 
view of my native language. There's plenty of other ways to make code 
unreadable anyway[1].

If the objective of refusing unicode would be to avoid making code 
unreadable, I'd suggest we also ban one-letter variables and atoms 
because they are clearly not English words (aside from 'A' and 'I', and 
maybe 'O' if you're feeling poetic in your interjections) and therefore 
would be too confusing.

Regards,
Fred.

[1]: http://ferd.ca/obfuscation.html