Alright, since people are mad at me:
Reasons I tend towards not liking complex libraries:
1) I'm not a good programmer. I've note written real code in years, and even then I wasn't good. However, sometimes you need a tool and should be able to code that with just C and std libs. Restricting this to professionals defeats the whole point of computers being programmable.
2) I've seen what happened in science before everyone standardized on English. It lead to issues:
a) Fragmentation. If you wanted to be a good coordination chemist in the 80s you HAD to learn Japanese. (My boss, Jewish guy from Toronto did.) So if you were in say, Spain and wanted to do coordination chemistry? Try to find someone to teach you Japanese.
Oh, but now you want to cross it over with some really hardcore main group chemistry? The Germans run that section, so sit down and learn a third language.
Ewald had a story about how he took 6 months to reinvent fourier transforms as they weren't well known in German yet. Six months of the life of a GREAT scientist wasted at the prime of his career. What else could he have spent them doing?
We still have to deal with this with legacy papers. I've had to deal with Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Italian, and French papers in grad school. They mean you have to polity ask someone for help or SLOWLY type things into Google Translate and cross your fingers.
Have you ever tried to get a non-professional translator to read you something, even when they are 100% fluent and grew up speaking both? It is agony.
Suggestion: Everyone who speaks English natively pay a 1% tax that is given to non-English countries for use in teaching their kids enough English to get by.
(Remember, I'm from a country where it is expected everyone know at least some French. In Canada it is mandatory grades 4-9 I think? I had to be exempted due to a learning disability)
@Canageek Why English and not, say, Mandarin?
@Canageek Fair enough. My underlying thought was that the trouble with English is that it was the language of two successive imperial powers so anything that looks like linguistic imperialism is going to make a lot of people cross.
@ghost_bird Right, but wouldn't a language that looks and feels very similar to it, plus you have to train the billion+ English speakers in it have similar problems?
@Canageek Yes. Which is a basic problem with your proposal.
@ghost_bird Right, but since doing science in more then 2-3 languages is incredibly inefficient (and outright discriminatory as it stops people from say, Africa from easily publishing in journals other people will read.), either you create a language based on the best of all languages, or use English.
@Canageek ...or choose another suitable language with fewer unfortunate overtones, or retro-fit one of the less suitable ones. Or accept that language standards have a political dimension and that’s why we have Unicode and not ASCII++
@ghost_bird Suggestion, since people seem to be misunderstanding ASCII++: A stablesubset of unicode that has every known character that doesn't need ligatures, text direction changes, or special programming. Just lots of characters. You could get *most* languages in it (Even Hebrew, if you encoded it backwards).
Then you'd have people like me actually able to use it, AND I'd know it would still work in 40 years.
@ghost_bird Whereas if I use a unicode library it might not work NEXT year, AND it might randomly crash on me.
@ghost_bird There are valid reasons that things like the CIF file formats are still restricted to ASCII today, namely they can't keep up with the changes, and need 40+ year backwards compatibility.
So your choices right now are ASCII or something that changes, and might crash peoples systems.
@Canageek Which is to say, looking at it from a different angle, a choice between coerced efficiency and risky inclusivity. And people who are excluded by the first option are going to notice that it doesn’t create any barriers for you.
@ghost_bird I mean, Canadians are already expected to learn enough French to get by
@ghost_bird You've suggested what might be the single worst language to do science in. Too many elements sound almost identical, archaic number system (The Indians and Arabs got it right, use that)