[Haskell-cafe] Language simplicity

[Tom Tobin]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 12:45 AM, Colin Paul Adams
<colin at colina.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Tobin <korpios at korpios.com> writes:
>
>    Tom> readability.  The ASCII characters are universal and easily
>    Tom> recognized
>
> No they are not.
> My wife is Chinese. When she was learning pinyin as a child, she asked
> her father for help with some homework. He replied that he didn't
> understand them.

I should have said "The ASCII characters are universal and easily
recognized *for programmers*."  Of course someone who hasn't come in
contact with the Latin alphabet, let alone programming, isn't going to
recognize ASCII — but I think we'd have an amazingly hard time finding
a programmer who wasn't familiar with it, regardless of their native
language.