The article mentions the language and cultural barriers, and the rigid hierarchy with old bosses who demand blind obedience, even when the rules are counterproductive.
I have been living in Japan for years now and I have had the same experience, so I am inclined to believe the article. Mixing Western workers with East Asian management is extremely difficult, to put it mildly.
I am not sure about the literacy rates, but I live in Japan and pretty much every single Japanese person I have ever talked to has told me how painful kanji are and how they wished the Japanese writing system was easier.
In comparison, my mother language is Spanish, a language with very simple spelling rules. My girlfriend is always surprised how she can read out loud a random Spanish text and even though she doesn't understand it, I will understand her easily (it also helps that both languages have very similar sounds).
How would you solve the homonym problem without a kanji like character set? I am sure it's possible but that would be a big challenge.
(For the reader, Japanese has a lot of homonyms since it has a comparatively limited set of phonemes. Specifically a problem in writing due to lack of context, spaces and lack of tonality that can help disambiguate the language when spoken)
As a native Japanese speaker, I find this homonyms concern kind of odd. It’s like asking how Japanese people can speak to each other and understand one another given all the homonyms -- the assumption being that speech alone clearly isn’t enough without written materials with kanji to aid their comprehension.
The obvious way people handle it in speech is by picking words that are clearer in context when homonyms might cause confusion. If you consume any Japanese video content on YouTube etc, it’s very common for speakers to say a homonym, instantly notice the ambiguity, and restate it using a clearer word or brief explanation, which they could, at least in theory, do in no- or low-kanji writing too.
同音異義語の区別に不可欠な漢字の廃止は不可能か？(Is abolishing kanji -- which is essential for distinguishing homonyms -- impossible?)
The biggest source of homonyms are words imported from Chinese, as Chinese morphemes are usually monosyllabic. It is already a problem in Chinese due to the limited phonotactics, made even worse in Japanese.
So the most obvious solution would be to drop on'yomi (Chinese readings) and go to pure kun'yomi (Japanese readings) whenever possible. My understanding is that such a strategy was used by the Koreans to replace Hanja with Hangul.
Now, I understand that it would be a massive undertaking and extremely unlikely to ever happen, and honestly it's not really my problem, so I am just speculating here xD
I strongly agree with you. My little experience tinkering with ARM-based systems has been frustrating, I don't want to touch ARM ever again until it has some kind of standard boot process. Same for RISC-V.
Wait until you find gendered languages (like most languages in Europe) and realize that grammatical gender usually doesn't have anything to do with biological sex :P
This is also something that depends heavily on regulations. In my home country, invoice numbers have to be sequential by law, although you can restart the numbering every year.
Yes, even if it's not a legal requirement it's definitely best practice to have sequential invoice numbers. I thought about this at the time but these numbers aren't invoice numbers, only order numbers.
A sequence per "series", where a series can be a fiscal year, a department or category, etc. But I am not sure if you can have one series per customer, I only find conflicting information.
You can have more details here, in the section "Complete invoice":
Portable to what? Rust works fine on all of today's popular platforms.
I see people complaining about Rust's lack of portability, and it is always some obsolete platform that has been dead for 20 years. Let's be serious, nobody is gonna run Tor on an old SGI workstation or Itanium server.
It is still possible to build for targets such as Itanium. There is nothing stopping you from writing your own targets too in LLVM and its not obscenely difficult
See? This is exactly my point. The last 32-bit only Intel CPUs were the original Intel Core series. Core 2 was already 64-bit, and it was released in 2006.
That's a good point, really there's no reason to waste time on anything but popular platforms. Obviously, of course, this means dropping support for everything except Windows (x64 and maybe ARM) and macOS (ARM). (\s)
In all seriousness, I guess you can make this argument if you only care about Windows/macOS, but the moment you run anything else I have to ask why, say, Linux deserves support but not other less-common platforms.
2) Linux runs all of the world supercomputers, most of the internet infrastructure (server, routers, etc), most of the cellphones (Android), and lots of other things. Its global marketshare is way bigger than macOS and all the BSD put together.
To remain clear: This is largely devil's advocate. I believe that niche platforms generally should be supported, and that includes GNU/Linux on amd64, and NetBSD on literal VAX (yes, that is an officially supported platform in current NetBSD), and RedoxOS on ARM, and OpenBSD on MIPS, and [...]. I just think it's really weird to claim that GNU/Linux, with 3% of the desktop market, should be supported, but a platform that is similarly a small fraction of Linux is dead weight that should be dropped.
With that said, remainder of this comment continues with the position that GNU/Linux, which I am writing this comment on, is obviously not worth supporting for the same reasons as i.e. MIPS and RISC-V.
> 1) Development resources are finite.
That is an argument in favor of cutting niche platforms like GNU/Linux.
> 2) Linux runs all of the world supercomputers,
You can't defend a niche OS by pointing out that it's used in a tiny niche market. How many supercomputers exist on earth? I'd bet you there are more working MIPS installations than supercomputers.
> most of the internet infrastructure (server, routers, etc),
I'll grant you headless machines used by IT folks, but that's still a specific subset of the market and it has little bearing on whether, say, Tor should support it as a desktop OS.
> most of the cellphones (Android),
Android/Linux is quite different from GNU/Linux; effectively nobody developing for Android is targeting Linux in any meaningful sense.
> and lots of other things. Its global marketshare is way bigger than macOS and all the BSD put together.
Only if we include embedded systems and servers. If you intend to target servers, then yes obviously Linux matters. Otherwise, not so much.
I have been living in Japan for years now and I have had the same experience, so I am inclined to believe the article. Mixing Western workers with East Asian management is extremely difficult, to put it mildly.
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