Crazy how there’s “two billion people” who can read Arabic and seemingly 0 of them are making serious contributions to Arabic text rendering except this one specific guy.
Two billion people can read it to some degree because of Islam. A minority of them actually use the script to write things daily.
And there are plenty of people other than this guy making contributions to it, you’ve only just read a singular post by a single person outlining his most common gripes with companies that do not consult native speakers for their translations. It’s not an exhaustive list of people working in the sphere. Imagine if you read a blog post by Linus Torvalds, and thought: ‘wow, it’s crazy that no one else is making contributions to this cool open source kernel?’ - that’s exactly what you’ve done in your comment.
>A minority of them actually use the script to write things daily.
how do I interpret that? something like "hundreds of millions of arabs constitute a minority of 2 billion"? or are you saying that vast majorities in the arab countries don't use arabic script to write things daily?
That is not the point I’m making, rather a single person is responsible for how most of software render text in most of the world writing systems and no one is wondering how 6 billion people on this planet so much depend on the work of “this one guy”. It is because text layout is something 99% of software developers can’t do right if their lives depended on it (same for anything that involves the irregularities of human nature, software developers are not cut for this).
> It is because text layout is something 99% of software developers can’t do right if their lives depended on it (same for anything that involves the irregularities of human nature, software developers are not cut for this).
Many can't even get the spaces before and after punctuation right, even though the correct way involves no irregularities.
This is not at all weird. The world doesn't need 2 billion text layout libraries. It needs a very small number (probably not 1 but there isn't just 1 as is) that actually work, are easy for devs to use etc.
If 1 person does the job very well others don't have to. That's the way we make progress in software.
Not too uncommon. This (used to be?) is the case for timezones[1]. Even xkcd has joked about it [2].
I think in software once there's one great, free implementation of a hard problem there's a tendency to stick with it. If that project is maintained by one person, then so be it.
Weird.