Bidi Brackets for Dummies
Just like the Hindu-Arabic number system enabled great innovation in mathematics because it was so much easier to use than the Roman system, I wonder if the simplicity of characters in English, enabled the US to jump to such an early start in computer software.<p>English characters are pretty compact (26 symbols), no accent marks that can&#x27;t be ignored, have 1:1 mapping between uppercase and lowercase, and are easy to break up by word. This enables even very simple algorithms in a very resource constrained computer to do some work that is mostly right.<p>For example, splitting a person&#x27;s name by space, taking the last word, making it uppercase and sorting by ASCII value lexicographically, mostly works if you want to produce a phone book listing, especially in 1950s-1980&#x27;s America. And you can code this with very simple integer operations without needing a lookup table or a bunch of special rules. Soundex is also pretty simple to implement and deals with a lot of homophones.<p>Of course, now that we have the computing resources and libraries, handling the vast diversity of human languages is doable, but in terms of bootstrapping a computer software industry, simplicity, I think played a role.