Re: Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum

On Dec 31, 5:09 pm, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"spinoza1111" <spinoza1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

On Dec 31, 2:15 am, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > "Richard

Heathfield" <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
As a teacher in China, I advise you that "Chinaman" to refer to a
Chinese person is racist, since it originated in America in the 19th
century, where Chinese men were allowed into California commencing in
the Gold Rush and the construction of the transcontinental railroad as
near slave labor, and not permitted to bring their families, and the
word for a Chinese person was "Chinaman".

If you use a euphemism, doesn't that betray your real attitude to you
students?

No, it does not. First of all, you don't refer to them as Chinese
people. You learn their names, put the patronymic before the given
name, and you use that.

It is nonsense to say that using a "politically correct" "euphemism"
is discourteous, save in a society so corrupted by irony, such as this
one, that people never know when the sarcastic person is speaking the
truth. It's simple respect.

Furthermore, the concept of euphemism itself needs to be, without
apology, deconstructed. It presumes that there is a "natural" name
tied mystically to the thing, as if Chinese *ren* were always Chinamen
and not so named in a racist time as a consequence of a racist
American immigration law, and that any neologism is patronisingly
artificial.


what they look like, to an English person all Chinese characters look
 >>pretty similar.
Just like all dem flesh and blood Chinese characters, with their
slanty eyes? Har. Chinese characters are of course dramatically
different. They have to be written in a specific way and precisely:
for example, the relative width of the 2 horizontal bars in the
Chinese character for Tian (heaven) have to be correct.

Yup. Their genetic diversity is much lower than other human populations. I
frequently mix up one with another, which is a bit embarrassing.

WTF? You've got to be kidding. This sounds like pseudo-science to me
in a land that was invaded by Altaic and Mongol people repeatedly.
China has 50 different "native" languages, and is in actuality
genetically diverse.


This is what Palestinian intellectual Edward Said called Orientalism:
the unconscious presumption that the default point of view is Western.
FYI, the PURPOSE of a symbolic mechanism is to support the source, not
the margins, and the West is from the Chinese point of view the
barbarian margin.

Computers are our toys, not theirs. A Chinese-invented information
processing technology probably wouldn't work with discrete bits and bytes,
for instance. It's a profoundly Western way of looking at information.

Nonsense. Computers depended upon PRINTING, which was invented in the
Song dynasty and imported to the West, which added of necessity the
innovation of mobile type.

Chinese ideograms aren't analog symbols. They are best thought of as
the results of executing a memorized algorithm for the radical and the
final symbol: many of my students, when they write in Chinese, seem to
have the algorithm embedded in a chip in their hands, which is where
it needs to be emplaced by rote.

This algorithm is digital, depending as it does on stroke order and
relative stroke length.

I suggest that a people who learn at least 3000 algorithms in baby
school were indeed well placed to invent computers, had it not been
for the violation of international law implicit in the takings of
Chinese territory in Hong Kong, the international settlements of
Shanghai, and Tientsin, and the fact that the West looked the other
way when China was invaded by the Japanese.

As it happens, Taschen has a collection of images of early computers,
and one of these images is of Chinese engineers clustered around a
COMPUTER in 1949. Now, the Mao government, following Stalinist
practice in early computerisation, was given technology by the
Soviets, who consistently stole IBM and Univac technology any way they
could, lest their engineers think creatively and, in so doing,
question Stalinism.

Nonetheless, there was work in early computation in China, and
computers do not deserve to be called a Western invention. Even if
that were so, the ethic of "the customer" would not allow you to force
your customer to do things your way just because it's convenient for
you.


The representation of which you speak is useful, Mister Dead Inventor
of the Containership, but only from an Orientalist point of view. It
is furthermore based on a truly neutral (which is to say numerical)
representation: unicode. Your friend Zhong Fu has the more important
right, which is to generate the bit mapped Chinese characters with a
keyboard that makes this easy for him. It's your responsibility to be
smart enough, when you get email from him, to switch to HTML and
numerics.

Zhong Fu certainly want to be able to use a computer in Chinese. One's
natural first thought would be to provide a 32-bit character set, encoding
every Chinese character. However actually this isn't such a good idea. The
Chinese glyph set is open (I believe, I don't speak the language). So the
set would have to be updated every time someone coins a new word.

Same deal for Western glyph sets as in the case of the smiley face! I
don't think that the Chinese glyph set is that open.

Obviously it is much easier to speak of my own needs rather than Zhong Fu's.

Obviously, but if you want to communicate with him successfully,
you're going to have to do more than send him ASCII in HTML.


My students struggle 24/7 to master two cultures. Do them the courtesy
of not calling them Chinamen, and not forcing them to use a form of
machine language.

Part of my job is, indeed, to force Chinese students to use a form of
machine language. The non-programming Chinese user should maybe be protected
from this, but the budding IT professional should not be. That's why they
come to Britain to study rather than staying in China.

I find it hard to believe that they don't teach "machine language"
here. And I got news for ya: the MAIN reason they come to Britain is
to be bilingual, not to learn engineering, which is taught at any
number of fine schools in China, starting with its most prestigious.
Most members of the Politburo are trained engineers from Beijing Uni.

I am glad to hear that you teach machine language. My own CS prof made
us write our first program in machine language.

.

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