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: tamil
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!).
I’m happy that Unicode’s first Unicode Technology Workshop a month ago went well. The video recordings from the event are still being processed, but should be up soon. I’m looking forward to sending out my presentation to people, and working on a prototype for Malayalam next (and who knows what’s after, Devanagari? Balinese?) The event was so good that I defied my instincts and posted something on a social media platform (LinkedIn) after it was over:
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 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:
Categories
VS Code supports abugida scripts
Finding text editors that properly support the input and navigation of various scripts’ Unicode-encoded text is no longer as rare as it used to be. Unicode has been well-established for a long time as the standard for encoding all of the world’s languages. However, when it comes to text editors specifically for programmers (IDEs), ironically, the situation is pretty bad. It looks like in Visual Studio Code’s most recent update, they finally have proper support for input and navigation of abugida scripts, or as they’re alternatively called, alphasyllabaries. The animated picture in the VS Code update page shows someone typing and navigating Tamil text, but the change should actually apply to several languages across East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
A friend of mine has just finished a novel / book of interlinked stories in which the Tamil experience is an important factor. It begins with an Eelam Tamil family grieving about the end of the war in Jersey and connects stories across time/place. There’s also a chapter/story called “The Office of Missing Persons,” which directly deals with disappearances. The book has gotten really positive reviews from some well-known writers in the literary world. It’s coming out in a month, available on pre-order (links below).
By now, I have visited enough Tamil & other South Indian restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area to have some favorites (and not-so-favorites). Here are my favorites, “honorable mentions”, footnotes, and disclaimers. Enjoy!
Categories
Updates from the last 20 months
The last 18 months have been eventful even if my updates have been sparse. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the things that I’ve been up to:
- Published a blog post on the Google Open Source blog regarding clj-thamil (Thamil NLP and macros for “multi-lingual” Clojure) and clojure-turtle (Logo in Clojure) (Mar. 2016)
- Attended Clojure/West 2016 in Seattle and gave an Unsession presentation called “Keeping Simple Things Simple”. The conference was as rewarding for the people I got to meet as it was for the talks and ideas that I learned, which is saying something for a Clojure conference. (Apr. 2016)
- Volunteered with other people from Nest at the Brothers Code event in Oakland by the Hidden Genius Project to get Black male youth in the Bay Area interested in tech. (Dec. 2016)
- Attended the GCP Next conference in SF (Mar. 2017). I enjoyed the conference, especially the festive exhibits and some of the conversations with Google employees.
- Attended Clojure/West 2017 in Portland. The conference was great, and it was probably the first time where I attended the “hallway track” for a majority of the time. (Apr. 2017)
- I got quoted in a GCP Dataflow blog post on Dataflow Shuffle. (June 2017)
- Presented (via paper and slides) about prefix trees and other topics for Tamil / Indic Unicode at the Tamil Internet Conference in Toronto (Aug. 2017)
- Attended Clojure/conj 2017 in Baltimore and co-presented with Tim Pratley “Learning Clojure through Logo”. I also manned the booth for Nest. It was a great time talking with people, old friends and new, and seeing a great Rich Hickey talk in person for once. The talk introduced Power Turtle (github proj page), lein-cban, and cban. More work to be done on Power Turtle. (Oct. 2017)
- Volunteered again with the Nest team at the Brothers Code event by Hidden Genius Project. Displayed Power Turtle along with copies of this handout. (Dec. 2017)
Happy New Year, and hoping that 2018 is a good year!
The Tamil Internet Conference for 2017 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada just concluded. I presented a more in-depth explanation of my previous post on prefix trees along with specific examples of how I have used them.
Here is the full paper that I submitted for the conference proceedings, entitled “Prefix Trees (Tries) for Tamil Language Processing”. Here is the slide deck for the presentation I gave in the conference.
The following is the full text of the paper from the link above:
Sequenced Thoughts from C/S 