Arabic and Japanese people have been using C and Javascript just fine, so I'm not sure even in the hypothetical future it would be a problem. And if it is - Hoon has keyword style now ("|- a/@ (add 5 a)" can be written (":gate a/@ (add a 5)"), or barring that the language rune parser can be replaced with a simple gsub in the source.
Hoons runes are really just names for which AST node it is, so it would be trivial to make a smartphone Hoon editor that works like Scratch or Lisp instead of textual.
Hell, Hoon compiles down to Nock, so you don't even have to use it, just write another language that targets Nock instead.
Thus, it makes a lot of sense to simply switch input modes and maybe even keyboard layouts.
Now, for something as close to English as Norwegian - you have a rather different touch layout due to having 29 letters. This is actually one reason I like python - less gymnastics due to less curly brackets.
Another problem with using ascii, is that now even code comments need to be in English character set in practice. Never mind function names etc.
Utf-8 by default is actually great in the programming languages that support it.
Don't mistake "have been tolerating absurd limitations of C" with "greatly enjoying the backward limitations of ASCII".
Are there any languages do this right? Even if identifiers can be utf8, they still have English reserved words. Maybe something like Forth, where the entire language is redefinable. Or, I dunno, Smalltalk.
It matters for reading/writing code, having uniform syntax, but it hardly matters for a general user's usage (in fact, I'm just talking about an alias, and its not so troublesome).
And regardless, this special character issue likely exists for any character; I imagine few are consistent among all languages, appearing on all keyboards.
So its just a pick your poison and stick with it situation, and whaddyaknow, English is still the most common internet language, and perl/bash have already ensured that most programmers have had to deal with these characters for decades
I interpreted that whole bit to mean "We tried to make a commandline-free UI frontend for it and failed." But I am glad they're trying to make it more usable! Last time I installed it, using the commandline from the web interface was really clunky, you pretty much had to be at a shell.
That turn of phrase sure is pretty revealing in this case.
P2P connectivity almost always requires a third party to do a three-way handshake. In IPv4 this is because of NAT, and in IPv6 it's usually still needed due to stateful firewalls. Having stable upstream nodes allows rapid bootstrapping of a P2P network by providing known stable points to act as introducers. You can do it in a less hierarchical fashion, but at the expense of performance and stability and possibly security unless you are very careful (see: sybil attacks).
Curtis' political views are what they are. I fundamentally disagree with the core thesis myself-- while I do have problems with pure democracy I see no evidence that aristocracy is in any way superior. But at the same time I believe in treating others' views with respect and respecting their right to hold them. I also must point out that Curtis' views are often hysterically misrepresented and exaggerated, and I doubt he has much to do with today's alt-right which is more of a populist phenomenon. In fact I could see a neo-reactionary calling the alt-right "demotic", which as far as I recall is the term they use for rhetoric of that style.
The text reads: "Urbit has to be just as usable as any widely used app in 2017. For a personal server, the usability bar can't be Unix."
Just above this, there is a screenshot of a browser displaying the following: "OK, ~ravmel-ropdyl is coming online. Ping 734ms, DNS Waiting, :talk Waiting"
...which, well, looks exactly like '70s Unix usability.
I also find it odd that Urbit wants to conquer the world, yet the design is so attached to entering ASCII sequences on a command line. This severely limits the platform's international usability. Their programming language's syntax page even proclaims "To make ASCII great again, we've mapped each punctuation glyph to a syllable": https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/#-glyphs-and-characters
The problem with using all these ASCII punctuation marks is that many of them are hard or even impossible to type on various international keyboards. It doesn't seem like non-English users were ever considered when the decision was made to "make ASCII great again".
On a more conceptual level, marrying a supposed futuristic redesign of the Internet to a 1960s character set just seems off. Today's computing increasingly happens on touchscreens, but Urbit's I/O model is happy to settle for the ancient paradigms of teletype terminal emulation and ASCII streams.
The whole thing has a weird retro-futuristic vibe to it, like it's more of an art project about a computer system that the Mad Men would have used to update their websites in some alternate reality.