On Fri, 24 Jan 1997 Glenn Adams wrote:
> Fellow Unicoders and Internationalists,
>
> Well, it's quite interesting to receive my first true "hate-mail" message.
> I didn't realize that Unicode would have such an impact on the bigotted,
> and, shall I say, spineless, members of some (I won't say 'our') society
> such as is exhibited in the following.
>
> If anyone knows this individual, please forward me the particulars, as I'll
> have to start a file for any future investigation ...
>
> Regards,
> Glenn Adams
While I don't want to downplay the backwardness of that mail, the shock
one has when one recieves such a mail, or the continuation and bad
consequences this might have, it's worth to mention a few other points.
- The oppinions in the mail are so obviously out of bounds that
they don't pose a threat to Unicode. The rumors spread
e.g. Japan are much more of a problem.
- It's rather probable that this is the one-time outburst of a
frustrated programmer already having difficulties with
the rest of the fast-pacing computer developments.
- It's interesting to note how close some of the comments come to
what I have repeatedly said in talks at Unicode conferences
(but please note the differences!!!).
> >I don't care, I don't want to care, and I highly resent people like you
> >forcing me to care.
What I said was: Average programmers don't care [about Unicode/i18n],
don't want to care, and are not able to care.
I then went on to show that with well-designed architectures and
object-oriented technology, it was possible to isolate the greatest
part of i18n issues from the application programmer.
I still think that existing libraries, APIs, and tools do a mixed
or poor job in this respect, and can and should be improved.
Regards, Martin.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:33 EDT