Okay, another post in the tour of skipped over noteworthy things I’ve been a part of. Previously, I wrote about writing programs in other human languages (among other things). Here, I’m talking about the talk Tim and I gave last year at Clojure/conj 2023, which is about transpiling a program from one programming language to another (among other things). Ha! No, it’s not the same at all. And our talk is actually the important lessons that we learned from our work, and we crafted our presentation content & style to be accessible. Hopefully, you will come away with at least one useful insight, even if you don’t know programming, or scroll further down this post for my written “director’s cut commentary”:
Category: programming
I’ve accidentally skipped writing here about things that I’ve done here and there. It’s easy to to not follow up after someone puts up a post or a video that is easy to point to, in the thought that the content speaks for itself. But in reality, there’s usually more to say. Often times, you just have to dig under the surface, ask questions, and look for connections. Anyhoo, here’s one such set of things that are related to each other (and related by design!).
Here is a collection of more links to learn about internationalization, beyond the really good videos from the recent Unicode event and other links that I mentioned along with them. I might continually update this space to organize all of the links for learning about internationalization, organized by what might be most useful to total beginners.
- Getting Started with Internationalization – A quick, well-written intro to basic terms and concepts with illustrative pictures
- Unicode Demystified by Rich Gillam – a book written in simple language that explains the technical aspects of Unicode, gives a survey of writing systems / languages, and an overview of the higher level things. You should probably read this before reading the Unicode core specification, if you ever need to do that.
The Unicode Consortium had its online event last week entitled “Overview of Internationalization and Unicode Projects”. The 6 videos have an average runtime less than 15 minutes and create a nice, gradual explanation of the internationalization / Unicode ecosystem that nicely builds upon itself. The videos are also embedded below.
A colleague asked me a good way to get a background of internationalization. Here is what I told that person:
After I previously talked about problems of input methods for abugida scripts, and added more supporting details to the point, I finally started prototyping possible implementations of the idea (try it out!).
But there are quite a few constraints and tradeoffs that come up once you start thinking about the details. I think these issues apply generally to most abugida scripts. So I am documenting all of the details below. Also, getting a new input method adopted requires more than perfecting just the technical details and user experience — it also requires overcoming user inertia (or creating awareness), and it also requires educating industry experts and those implementing changes. If you have feedback, please send it my way so that I can continue to update this post with the latest information.
I think my understanding of programming languages — ex: what role do they serve in tech engineering work, what my favorite language is — is something that continues to evolve, and has done so once more recently. Here is where I started from and where I stand:
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Random Bits of Lisp/Clojure Hype
A friend sent me a link to Uncle Bob’s blog post on Clojure (2019), where he explains his road from hating Lisp to appreciating it to the point where its simplicity and power makes it his favorite language. He declared it a language for the ages, just as I did. Given that Uncle Bob is a co-founder of the influential Agile Manifesto and has used several different types of languages, his declaration has more reach, and he explained it more concisely than I could, anyways. And what about Paul Graham, whose ideas have a large audience and hasn’t stopped writing about Lisp’s secret superpowers? He’s been apparently creating a new language Bel, a version of Lisp that is defined in itself, and the premise’s challenge is like a math/logic puzzle that resonates with the history of Lisp as an unintended result of implementing math theorems in a computer. But he seemed to have liked Uncle Bob’s post, and in recent years, when asked, he also recommends Clojure as the flavor of Lisp to use for modern times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
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Learning Rust for Beginners
Rust is a new-ish language that is very compelling in certain contexts, but learning it has a really deceptive learning curve, so I wanted to provide the links that I have found most effective for slow learning beginners like myself, especially because the “official” Rust book(s) are to me paradoxically hard to learn from despite being thorough.
I presented at the Unicode Conference 2 weeks ago, on Oct. 16, on important yet overlooked issues that concern languages that use abugida scripts and have agglutinative morphology, using Thamil language as a case study. Although the talk was mainly about the issues around dictionary data sets, other issues included input methods, and the need for phoneme level segmentation for these use cases. See below for more details:
Slides:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EdNLgh8MyvSqDlm2I2_aXM-WgTINaZekXZWq0629ZLQ/edit
Pre-recorded talk:
The talk covered the following topics:
OmnICU is a new project to create Internationalization (i18n) functionality in multiple target languages and multiple resource-constrained runtimes. Two different approaches to solve that problem are wrapping a single common binary in multiple target language wrappers, and to write a source-to-source transpiler in a one-to-many fashion. Here are reasons why choosing Clojure (Lisp) would be a good decision for writing a transpiler.
Sequenced Thoughts from C/S 