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posted by chromas on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the everyone-loves-autocomplete dept.

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by hwertz on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:45PM

    by hwertz (8141) on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:45PM (#874129)

    This is nonsense. I don't have some autofilll thing on the desktop because I don't want one, I can type 120 words per minute and don't need it trying to guess what I'm typing. On the phone, I do have it suggesting words, but I have a Blackberry so I don't need it; the guesses tend to be more a nuisance than helpful, but (contradicting the author) it IS THERE. In Ubuntu, the command prompt has tab autocomplete; apps do underline mispelled words (like "mispelled") so I'm getting typing aids even in this very browser. I have all kinds of helpful tools in IDEs (integrated development environments) like Android Studio.

    To repeat my premise, westerners don't have this stuff the chinese have because WE DON'T NEED IT. The letters are there on the keyboard. It's not some sign of China surpassing the US technologically (not going into who is higher tech, just saying keyboard input has nothing to do with it.)

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