Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[Alex Martelli]

On Thursday 09 May 2002 01:44 am, François Pinard wrote:
	...
> But people are not all alike!  I worked in many areas and teams in my life,
> and wrote a lot of code in English when meant to be widely available.
> At other times and circumstances, this just does not apply.  Besides, I
> know and work with people doing humble jobs in close shops, some have done
> this for a lot of years, and they are good, nice and intelligent people.

In 1989 I left IBM Research to join a small, obscure programming shop in
a tiny town close to my hometown, Bologna.  I wanted to come back home
and maybe I liked the idea of being the relatively big fish in a small pond,
technically speaking, rather than working in the sort of places where good
parking spaces are marked "reserved for Nobel Prize Winners only":-).

One of the things I started nagging people about in my new position as
the senior software consultant was to *use English* in code and docs.
Some of those of my colleagues who saw themselves as "doing humble
jobs in a close shop" and had been doing this for a lot of years didn't like
that, and we had interminable debates.  I just kept nagging.

Then one day we had a request for a job interview from a brilliant Chilean
guy who was still an exile from his country.  His command of Italian was
close to mine of Spanish -- i.e., close to none, except what comes from
the two languages' similarities.  Yet he WAS brilliant.  He got in, to the
advantage both of himself and the firm, even though he was only able to
work on the parts of the software where enough English had been used
to let him follow his way around.  I didn't fail to take advantage of this to
keep shaming those colleagues who wanted to stick to Italian -- "see,
what you're doing is, *deliberately keeping out of your software wonderful
people such as him, taking advantage of the fact he can't speak Italian*".

Where will the next brilliant political refugee come from?  Do you want to
HELP his oppressive government keep him poor and on the run?  (I was
of course playing also on the instinctive left-leaning sympathies that are
so prevalent in the professional classes in Bologna and environs:-).

Unfair, sure, but it helped, even though soon enough Chile moved back
towards freedom and the guy eventually decided to go back home (I was
glad for him, even though it was a loss for the firm).  Gradually more of
our software moved to being almost-usable/maintainable/etc for people
knowing little or no Italian.

And you know what -- it was GOOD software.  Good enough that a
few years after that we decided we HAD to go international, or perish.

Suddenly Alex's silly quirk of wanting stuff in English "to help refugees"
became one key issue in the firm's success.  When I recently left (to
go full-time-Python) the firm's headquarters were in Santa Clara, CA;
a little but crucial development lab in Aix-en-Provence; the largest lab
after the main near-Bologna location, in Bangalore, India.  None of that
would be possible if Italian had been a requirement to be able to work
on our software.


> > Long live a world where ONE natural language (don't care which one: ONE,
> > I can learn) opens to me the doors of the (programming) world.
>
> If you feel happy in the Borg collective, I'm glad you are happy. :-)

I'm proud of my cultural heritage and gladly use my language *when
appropriate*.  But I don't try to impose it where it's NOT appropriate:
that would be as silly as people wanting to translate, say, "piano" or
"pizza" into their own languages because they can't stand Italian in
fields of endeavour where Italian is or was prominent enough, just as
English is today in computing.

> Seriously, however, many of us do not aspire to assimilation, and would

Neither do I.  I choose to leave the US and come back to Italy, not
because of language issues, but of other cultural aspects that made
me happier to live here (even though I love many parts of the US and
many US characteristics, still, in the end, "there's no place like home").

But I still say "allegretto ma non troppo" in the field of music,
"ils sont fous ces Romains" when I read Asterix comics (in the original --
why use translations when I'm lucky enough to be able to enjoy the
original French), and "flip-flop" (rather than "multioscillatore bistabile")
in electronic circuits.

I understand many Francophones feel very differently about this.  No
doubt historical accidents play a part.  In Italy, the only serious attempt
to enforce (even by law) use of "pure Italian language" came from a
dictatorship, so such nationalistic urges feel highly dictatorial to Italians.

Even closer to home, the most prominent electric engineer born in my
town, Bologna, had an English mother -- so, his invention, "radio", has
forever an Italian name, but mostly-English technical terminology.  

Or further back in history, Bologna's main claim to fame is the concept
of "Universitas" -- culture open to ALL (as long as they were able to
pay and had the prereq, specifically the "universal language of
learned men", which was then Latin).  Had Wernerius, the Founder,
insisted on teaching in his native tongue, Lombard (a variation of
German), he'd have had few customers indeed.  As it was, he set up
shop here, mandated Latin as THE *ONE* Language, and on that
basis was the Alma Mater launched (and later imitated endlessly).

You can still see some old-timers in Bologna saying something in the 
Bolognese dialect and then at once the Italian translation of the same 
thing -- that used to be a _Latin_ translation until less than 200 years
ago, and the motivation was ensuring all listeners understood, whether
they were uneducated locals (in which case they'd get the Bolognese
part) or students / scholars from anywhere in the world (in which case
they'd get the Latin part).

Sure, the students coming from Germany tended to party together
(we still have a quarter called "Alemanni" -- that's where they tended
to moslty live), so did those from Spain (we still have "Collegio di
Spagna"), and so on.  But when it came to *WORK*, using just one
language was the crucial choice.  Did Europe become "Assimilated"
because of that?  Let's not be silly: a thousand years of history after
that show us how differentiated, both for good and for evil, our many
cultures have continued to grow.  But for centuries, until the full
flower of Nationalist folly, the "One Language" served us well.  My
father, a physician, barely 30 years ago was still able to get SOME
use out of some medical docs he had received from Yugoslavia about
one of his patients (in Croat, I believe) because the key aspects of
the diagnosis were in Latin.

It matters not a whit *WHICH* language it is, it does matter that it
be ONE language, not hundreds and thousands.  In practice that
one language isn't Latin any more (in most fields of endeavour) but
English.  Fine, whatever.  As long as it's ONE.


> like to think that resistance is not wholly futile.  When one lives a full

Indeed it's not: if there are enough of you, and you fight hard enough,
you may well be able to fragment the world back into incompatible
little warring pieces again.  "Globalization" around 1905/1910 was
roughly the same as today, in terms of many measures such as
fraction of the economic flows being international, immigration and
emigration in the world, unity of ("high") culture.  Yet resistance to
that proved anywhere BUT futile: the growing tide of nationalism
managed to lead right into the carnage of World War I, and almost
inevitably after that, further flag-waving, protectionism, nationalism
ever more extremes, dictatures, further massacres, until the pinnacle
of Word War II.

I'll do whatever is in my power (which is not much at all) against
such prospects, and in favour of the opposite prospect, that of one
world of which we're all citizens -- as culturally differentiated as, e.g.,
today are the various regions of, say, France, or Italy, each with its
own cherished dialects, traditions, cutures, and so on.  But all able
to talk to each other, to work together, to move from one place to
the other without legal impediments -- a world where it's as absurd
to think of two nations going at war against each other as today it
would be to think that of, say, Cote d'Azur and Provence, or Emilia and
Toscana, or Massachussets and New Hampshire.  Being able to
communicate helps, and sharing a language helps, even though
Provencals are justly proud of THEIR own language (quite as different
from French as, say, from Italian), Bolognese of their own (you may
choose to call it a "dialect", but that will get you quite a few hostile
stares...), and so on. 

> computer life in French, say, with no appetite for international
> visibility, limitations coming from the English languages are fully
> artificial.

Just like having to say "adagio maestoso" is artificial...?


Whatever I can do (which is not much at all) against anything
furthering the _fragmentation_ (as opposed to, cultural diversity
within helpful and peaceful cooperation, which is *great*!) of
humanity, I will.  I am convinced that encouraging the use of
a zillion different nautral languages in programs is a terrible idea
and I earnestly hope Python does nothing at all to _help_ it.


Alex