Ludicrous Levels of Denial About Characters
“The level of denial in this regard can sometimes reach ludicrous proportions. A musician friend…who specializes in jazz music once forgot how to write the word for ‘jazz’ in Chinese, _jueshi_ 爵士. When I poked fun at him…, he became a bit defensive”
— Troubadour WW (@troubadourww) May 6, 2024
—David Moser @david__moser pic.twitter.com/sCUIFWQgxg
To provide a bit of background, “common things should be easy…” is often considered a good guiding principle in the world of computer software development. For example, pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay said:
“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.”
This basic idea has also been declared to be a guiding principle for widely used software projects such as the Perl programming language and Apple’s SwiftUI framework.
Since writing systems like Chinese characters and Pīnyīn are really technologies, it is fair and reasonable to want common things like reading and writing Mandarin expressions (especially common ones!) to be easy, just as we want other common technological things to be easy.
