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On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what's wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He's a historian of modern China and we're perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.
Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you're a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is "archaic." Long live the alphabet.
But, Mullaney argues, the invention of the computer could turn China's enormous catalog of characters into an advantage.
His argument is [...] about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, "is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard." You press the "a" key and "a" appears on your screen. "It doesn't make use of a computer's processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof." Type "a" on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.
[...] The Chinese way of inputting text—the software-mediated way—will win out, says Mullaney. Actually, it's already won out. Our mobile phones now have predictive text and autocomplete. It took the constraint of mobile to get Westerners to realize the limits of the simple what-you-type-is-what-you-get keyboard. But even then, you could only get Americans to go so far.
Read more at The Atlantic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:32PM (2 children)
TFA is basically "you can do better than QWERTY" and "computers are fast so predictive text should be enabled everywhere".
The bit where inputting Chinese is relevant is entirely due to the large character set ensuring that there wasn't any long-standing historical standard regarding text input among Chinese speakers, so more recently designed styles of input were more likely to succeed.
Now, QWERTY isn't ideal, but it is familiar, and the (alleged) speed-ups of an alternate layout aren't worth the retraining effort for many people in the US, which is what the article contrasts against.
I will agree that some kind of predictive text or tab-autocompletion probably should be standard though -- when I'm using Notepad++, I have autocomplete enabled even when editing plain text and not just programming. It's just really convenient.
On mobile, you can type like three letters and standard predictive text systems will bring up what you wanted to say.
There's also an argument to be made against predictive text in that it leads you into its own writing style, which would shape what you're trying to convey, but I'm not going there right now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:48PM
https://www.freemake.com/blog/12-funny-autocorrect-mistakes/ [freemake.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:46PM
Personally I hate autocorrect for all purposes I've encountered it in. I turn it off in my programming editor because it's guesses are usually incorrect until I've typed nearly the entire word. I do use it on my phone, partially because I don't know how to turn it off, and partially because the keyboard is so small that whenever I try to hit a key, my odds of the correct key being selected are about 1 in 3...and sometimes it's one of the three keys that the device decided I hit. But with something longer, like a predicted word, my chances of hitting the correct word are significantly better...*IF* the correct word is one of the presented options.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.