The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)
Modern extension to classic 2003 article by Joel Spolsky
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currency symbols other than the $ (kind of tells you who invented computers, doesn’t it?)
Who wants to tell the author that not everything was invented in the US? (And computers certainly weren't)
The stupid thing is, all the author had to do was write "kind of tells you who invented ASCII" and he'd have been 100% right in his logic and history.
Where were computers invented in your mind? You could define computer multiple ways but some of the early things we called computers were indeed invented in the US, at MIT in at least one case.
Well, it's not really clear-cut, which is part of my point, but probably the 2 most significant people I could think of would be Babbage and Turing, both of whom were English. Definitely could make arguments about what is or isn't considered a 'computer', to the point where it's fuzzy, but regardless of how you look at it, 'computers were invented in America' is rather a stretch.
'computers were invented in America' is rather a stretch.
Which is why no one said that. I read most of the article and I'm still not sure what you were annoyed about. I didn't see anything US-centric, or even anglocentric really.
To say I'm annoyed would be very much overstating it, just a (very minor) eye-roll at one small line in a generally very good article. Just the bit quoted:
currency symbols other than the $ (kind of tells you who invented computers, doesn’t it?)
So they could also be attributing it to some other country that uses
$for their currency, which is a few, but it seems most likely to be suggesting USD.
I think the author's intended implication is absolutely that it's a dollar because the USA invented the computer. The two problems I have is that:
- He's talking about the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, not computers at that point
- Brits or Germans invented the computer (although I can't deny that most of today's commercial computers trace back to the US)
It's just a lazy bit of thinking in an otherwise excellent and internationally-minded article and so it stuck out to me too.