Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by userbinator 2149 days ago
Just the ability to do that alone would likely entail many many megabytes of code.

Just the font alone for all of those languages will be multi-mega bytes and I'll need multi-megabytes more for space to rasterize some portion of those fonts.

Then for each language I'll need multi-megabytes for handling the input methods.

Those statements clearly show your lack of awareness of what things were really like 40 years ago. They had CJK input and output(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method was invented in 1976, for example) on the systems of the time, and that certainly did not entail "megabytes of code".

What it did entail, however, was a certain amount of skill, creativity, and an appreciation for efficiency and detail that lead to being able to do it with the hardware of the time, skills which are unfortunately a rarity today. Instead, we are drowning in a sea of programmers who think the simplest of tasks somehow requires orders of magnitude more resources than were available decades ago, when the reality is that there existed software at the time able to do those tasks perfectly well and at a decent speed.

The point being that we need the complexity.

The point is precisely that we don't.

1 comments

While parent's "many many megabytes" might be an overstatement, today's editors are expected to display any number of languages and alphabets simultaneously, using user-configurable, scalable, variable-width fonts that render in a variety of different resolutions with sub-pixel smoothing. Things like that add to the complexity of both the OS and the application itself.