[hnthrowaway6543]

it's certainly hard to localize everything but billions of people use ios/android in India, China, SEA, MENA, etc... i think it's fair to say that at the end user level, computers are in fact usable by non-English speakers.

individual apps may not be as usable, but that's on the developers. good counter-example, a lot of japanese games, even made within the past 5 years, require setting the Windows system locale to Japanese to function properly. and as someone who played a fair number of japanese doujin games in the 00s/10s, it used to be every game with this problem.

> I mean, if the computers had first been built in south east asia, they would have been.

debatable as CJK heavily use Arabic numerals everywhere, but even if they did, so what? you'd learn those symbols and get used to it. the same way that if you're a unix sysadmin you get used to only being able to use a small subset of ASCII characters for usernames.

[abdullahkhalids]

> it's certainly hard to localize everything but billions of people use ios/android in India, China, SEA, MENA, etc... i think it's fair to say that at the end user level, computers are in fact usable by non-English speakers.

Its important to contextualize these discussions in socioeconomics. Computers are not just fun play things. They are serious tools used for economic activities. Their usage, through their design, has significant impact on the social systems of society. Non-latin-language speakers are able to use poorly localized computers, but they are only able to use them less well than the latin-language speakers. At least in South Asia, there is a huge economic divide between those who can speak English and those who can't, where causality runs both ways, and in more recent times exacerbated by the inability of some to use technology. And that economic divide then causes huge sociopolitical problems in societies.

If computers are means for economic progress, we shouldn't put the condition that one has to somehow learn English to use them well. But isn't localization sufficient? No it isn't. Ignore even that localization requires some members of your language to be dual speakers. The current era of economic progress is characterized by software development. But if the only way you can develop software is to learn a foreign language, then surely we are denying economic progress to some communities.

P.S. I will repeat. Nobody has to do any work to help other communities. But to assert that such work should not happen is plain wrong.

[hnthrowaway6543]

you're confusing "speaking English" with "knowing the English alphabet." these things are orthogonal. 95%+ of people in those countries know the english alphabet. i just threw down google maps street view at a random spot in Phnom Penh and instantly found english letters visible from the street, on advertisements[0]. then i threw it down in a much smaller Thai city that i had never heard of, Nakhon Sawan, and instantly found English on the street.[1] i've been in China, Japan and Korea enough to know english characters are all over the place. the English alphabet is omnipresent everywhere, i think you fail to realize this. nobody who is using a computer in these places is getting confused by the english alphabet.

> But to assert that such work should not happen is plain wrong.

i assert it should not happen because it's not solving an actual problem, the same way that changing "x" and "y" to "ㅋ" and "ㅌ" in algebra doesn't solve a problem, and trying to "solve" it will yield to a monstrous amount of incompatibilities and confusion. here's a really good comparison: ipv6. IPv6 is solving a problem, maybe in a way people disagree with, but definitely a real problem... and yet we still can't make ipv6 fucking work after God knows how many years, and trying to get IPv6 networking at any sort of scale is a massive fucking headache. now we want to go through the same headaches to support... umlauts in usernames? yeah, no thanks.

there's enough real work left to be done in the world that we shouldn't waste time with stupid makework like this.

or maybe in 30 years i'll be able to call up IT support and say "hey i forgot my password, can you reset it? my username is 神王 سعود. ... need me to spell that for you?"

edit: somewhat ironically, HN swallowed a few of the unicode characters in my theoretical future username...

[0] https://i.imgur.com/0WkG0ze.png

[1] https://i.imgur.com/VhDR5Xh.png

[abdullahkhalids]

I am from Pakistan. At least in South Asia, there are english characters everywhere because the infrastructure is primarily designed for the rich english-speaking classes, while the poor are left behind. A serious political problem.

I have seen many non-english speaking people interact with computers in English, both poor people and old folks in rich families who don't know English. They kinda recognize the shape of words, or they go by icons. They don't actually know the meaning of anything. They can only do a limited set of pre-memorized actions. Scamming them is easy. If they get stuck, they need to beg someone to help them.

Again, I will say this. There are two problems here. One for users and one for developers. Users must be able to read in their own language. Developers must be able to develop in their own language.

[wongarsu]

> They kinda recognize the shape of words, or they go by icons. They don't actually know the meaning of anything.

That's kind of true of a lot of English computer users too.

But more to the point, what you are advocating for is translating the interface. Which I think nobody is against, and which is a common thing to do (at least for countries people care about, which sadly excludes a lot of the poorer parts of the world). The username prompt should read "username" in Pakistani. That doesn't automatically mean it has to accept non-ascii input too, as long as you accept unicode in the display name.

> Developers must be able to develop in their own language.

I learned coding in Pascal before I learned that "if" is an English word. English helps, but in the end keywords in programming languages and shell commands are only mnemonics. Knowing the translation helps but isn't necessary. What's important are documentation, tutorials and other resources in a language the developer understands.