Because it's not his name. Imagine you are John but you had to make do with Yohn because the people designing you software didn't need the letter J...

it was 30 years ago when i discovered that it doesn’t really matter what my name is. the system i’m interacting with expects my name to be “john” or something like that. so i let it be.

30 years later and i completely dropped all non-latin chars from my name in any and all forms. from airplane tickets to passport to you name it.

and you know what? no one cared about non-latin. not even the government. i loled when i actually realised.

i’ve encountered zero issues ever since.

and it’s been the same for lots of my friends. they just adopted some western name. case closed, no more issues.

it all depends on who much importance you attribute to your name. for me it’s always been a random variable. for others it’s a matter of pride. but to the “system” it will be a “random list of chars”, sometimes latin, other times utf.

It's not strange to localize your name. In ASL for example, you could sign your English name letter-by-letter, but it's much more common to have a totally new sign for your name - usually a word combined with the first letter of your name. Taking part in a different system often means taking on another name.

It seems that you're implying computers are universally american and therefore people are expected to speak/use/adapt to american.

That's the harsh way to put it. A more diplomatic way is that computing is not unique in having deeply ingrained artifacts of the language and culture that birthed it and developed many of the paradigms.

Take anything having to do with seamanship. There are many terms that date back to early modern English that simply don't make sense anymore yet are accepted and universal because the British Empire had a large and enduring influence on maritime matters and happened to be at the forefront of most modern developments until about 70 years ago.

In some cases this is actually built into laws and industry practice. Pilots speak English. That's the rules. Don't like it? Invent the time machine and beat Wilbur and Orville. For much the same reason, science speaks Latin.

This technical debt is difficult if not impossible to overcome, especially in regards to computers because we still haven't cracked general purpose AI. Software will only accommodate what it was written to accommodate.

Recognizing the problem and working to fix it is all well and good. But its wise to understand that this wont be solved any time soon so in the meantime it is pragmatic to operate in such a way to maximize compatibility.

After all, I still have to call it a Foc'sle even if I think that's dumb or isn't inclusive of my culture.

There's also the practical consideration that English, due to having a) an alphabet b) letter shapes that aren't affected by surrounding letters and c) no diacritics, is the easiest major language to store and display on a computer. Even if silicon valley ended up in a country with a logographic writing system, I'd bet that the first character set that would have been used would have been Latin based

> It's not strange to localize your name.

That reminds me that I was talking once to the guy who turn Mikołaj name into Mikowhy pseudonym

My name contains non-Latin characters (apparently strange as we use a Latin language), but 40 years of working with computers I learned to avoid using the original form and always convert to ASCII; yes, it is not my name, but my pride and sense of entitlement are not hurt at all.

Sometimes it is better to avoid being hit by the bus even if you are right.

From the article:

The first idea was to change the username to one that does not contain Polish characters. It turned out that Windows does not rename the user’s folder when changing the username. Manually renaming the folder was not an option. This way I could corrupt my profile in the system.

The end of the article is about how to change the directory where the temporary files go to one not under the user folder.

For the record, it's a stark pronunciation difference as ł has drifted to a very different "w" sound

Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".

Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...

I've seen shipping labels with HTML encoded characters, like é and è. I'm not sure if that's better or worse:

Łódź

This is a pretty frequent thing to encounter actually. Just some years ago many websites actually preferred to use ISO/Windows codepages to save space on multibyte Unicode symbols adding HTML entities to represent everything which is not in it the basic ASCII and their primary language alphabet.

Fun fact: I was looking for an e-mail solution for a small company about a decade ago and found Zarafa. It seemed nice and I deployed it happily. Just to find out it only supports the Western European ISO codepage which was hardcoded. I hope they have switched to UTF-8 since then.

Always omit diacritics when giving your address/name to foreign parties which are going to have to ship you anything or issue any documents for you.

The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why) doesn't mean a fundamental difference. Same letters and whole same words are vocalized differently in the US and the UK (and even different regional accents within both countries) and nobody thinks about them as different letters/words. Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L in English, German, almost all latin-based Slavic alphabets and pretty much everywhere. I bet almost every Mikołaj drops the slash happily (some probably even change the whole name to Nicholas which is the English counterpart) if they get a passport of an anglophone country.

Nevertheless I find it absurd it's 2021 and they still have to. It's almost 30 years since the introduction of Unicode in Windows NT and NTFS, probably also close to that in Java. Pretty much every serious programming language or database supports Unicode by default today.

I believe it's a bug in some app in the toolchain as Windows file system API is perfectly capable of handling non-ASCII symbols. I always cared to avoid using non-ASCII symbols and spaces in my paths (incl. always installing almost everything to a custom directory outside "Program Files") but c'mon, how many decades do we need to develop handling these reliably?

I would also consider Windows' inability to optionally change the actual home directory name and distinguish between the user's full (display) name and their "username" (which are 2 distinct properties in Linux) "feature-bugs".

> The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why)

It was a long process of L-vocalization [0] that started around XVI century. The first segment of the population to be affected by it were peasants (it is also one of the reasons why the original sound quality of «ł» survived relatively long among Polish artists in early XX century as a sign of professionalism, similarly to English’s Mid-Atlantic accent [1]).

I suspect that L-vocalization’s proliferation was aided by multiple wars, partitions and occupations that followed, which caused many waves of both natural and forced internal migration and disappearance of most dialectal differences.

According to [2](PL) the pronunciation of «ł» as /w/ was codified as the standard around XIX/XX in both informal and formal settings. There are still remaining populations using the old sound quality, but they are mostly confined to the areas in proximity to other Slavic languages.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-vocalization [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent [2]: http://www.dialektologia.uw.edu.pl/index.php?l1=leksykon&lid...

I actually take a hint of offense that you say "Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L". By what measure? It was always a separate phoneme. Just because it shifted to w doesn't mean it wasn't distinct to poles to begin with - just now clearly distinct to everyone as the sound has only become more distinct! Pointing to ways we poles live with the situation doesn't mean it's ideal

It was not "always a separate phoneme". English-L-like hard pronunciation of Ł still is valid Polish, although rare to encounter in real life outside certain regions in the east. In fact it is even considered sort of more literate (conservative/standard) in theory.

Would you also say Greek lambda has nothing to do with the English L? Or, slightly more relevant and complex example, actual Polish L with Slovak Ľ and Serbian Љ?

Can you provide argument that a letter was created for Polish for something that was not a phoneme? It has always co-existed with normal L, while it has sometimes sounded close to L I don't think one could say standard Polish ever merged these.

Conservative Ł would still be distinct.

You probably misunderstood me, I never meant to say Polish Ł and Polish L are the same and have no reason to be distinguished. I meant Polish Ł is a direct counterpart to English L and only differs significantly by the sake of regional/historical shift in accents.

The problem is some software just has problems with non-English alphabets because, roughly saying, all the software was meant to only process English text historically and much of it still has not been fixed. Users of non-latin-based alphabets have been accustomed to this and have no problem writing "Иван" as "Ivan" (despite it normally reads even more different in English, more correct phonetic transliteration would be "Eevan"). Heck they even spell "Семён" (~"Semyon", the Russian counterpart to English "Simon") as "Semen" X-). But the users of diacriticized Latin somehow get surprised with this.

If I could travel back in time to when ASCII was designed and give the engineers a hint I would ask them to add first-class diacritics to their design so anybody would be able to add the slash for Ł, the umlaut for Ü, Ö or whatever using an extra byte. Sadly, even today we mostly encode Ü as a letter absolutely distinct to U rather than a combination of the latter with the umlaut even though Unicode allows doing this the latter way AFAIK.

That’s about as aggravating as asking Ryan to change name to Pyan — because the encoding doesn’t support “R” and “P” looks very similar.

Interestingly, this particular change would work in cyrillic :)

Руап?

No, "Яуап" is better, I think.

So the solution is for the user to change their entire windows account name, rather than handling common characters in your code?

When you have non-standard characters in your name you quickly learn to never use them in computers since even though most systems works fine, some don't. And you can't fix all the thousands of systems your name has to interact with.

I even had trouble booking flight tickets since their security system couldn't parse my name, and then had to go through some special security check due to it returning errors. After that, never again. Not sure how they managed to do it but they had some basic rules that they used to say "no real name can look like this, this is a fake person!" and just kicked it out.

> When you have non-standard characters in your name

'standard' by what measure? Ł is more standard than X or Q in the polish alphabet.

~ Sincerely, a person whose name contains „ń” and therefore had to deal with this bullshit his entire life.

From a programmers perspective. The characters in my name are standard where I come from, but they are not standard to the international air travel security systems likely developed by Americans.

Edit: You know how aircraft travel security always transforms your name into letters from the English alphabet to parse? Yeah, it transformed my name and then the resulting string looked so bad that the system rejected that. The original name doesn't look bad, but after transformations it did...

They're not non-standard characters. They're just as much a part of the Polish alphabet as 'a' and 'b' are.

That is exactly what I meant. My name doesn't have non-standard characters either from the perspective of my home country, it is just normal letters in the alphabet, but not in the English alphabet.

I totally understand what you’re saying, but it’s also a sad state of affairs when we can’t handle “non standard characters”.

Standard characters (ie english) are only used by a small subset (maybe 5-10%) of the global population.

For a user, changing their account (probably creating a new user, since rename apparently doesn't change the directory), is something they can do.

Changing all software to respect their perfectly valid name isn't something they can do.

They shouldn't need to change their name, but if they do, they can ignore all the broken software and go about their day.

This particular user is more capable than most, and found a workaround for this particular problem, which is good... But this is not likely to be the last of the problems.

Of course it would be better if all code was bug free. But that's impossible. As a user, avoiding unicode is a pretty easy way to avoid bugs like this - its the rational thing to do.

Because that's not their name?

Their URL is even mikolaj-kaminski.com . I get its annoying, but I would never use non-ascii chars in a username / file path.

So, what does 阿部明仁 do in this case?

Polish may be close enough that an approximation is available in English, but there's an awful lot of languages that don't have a large overlap with English characters.

In the Asian case above, if someone with that name did try to "convert to English" they are ironically just as likely to end up with Ａｋｉｈｉｔｏ Ａｂｅ as the ASCII, which will be just as broken!

Assuming that hypothetical guy is an average Japanese male(somewhat leaning right), he'd just turn IME off. Japanese input on desktop is consist of three following states:

- IME On state. IME capture and interpret keypresses as engraved and generate corresponding Kana-Kanji texts.

- IME Off state. IME passes through keypresses as engraved on keytops.

- Direct Input state. IME becomes dormant.

In IME Off state, the keyboard behaves as a plain jp106(or ANSI if it is) keyboard, like I'm doing right now. The cases where you would use conversion with IME on for an English word is when you have reasons for the word to be in "full width"(usually for typesetting reasons).

I don't think it's something that people should 'just know' that when Windows asks them their name during install time, they ought to use 7-bit clean ASCII for everything, no matter where they are in the world or how much they know about other languages. When Windows says "What is your name?", they ought to be able to use their name without things breaking.

I'm sure a computer savvy speaker of a fully-non-Latin language may still guess this is a good idea, but "computer savvy" doesn't cover everyone... and they shouldn't have to.

"Just use 7-bit-clean ASCII English" is not a solution to this problem.

Usernames and passwords are always 7-bit ASCII at least in Japanosphere, to the point it would look odd that you get to log into a computer using their own legal names. To use a computer for any useful purpose as a Japanese, you will have to be able to understand what "English" or "alphanumeric" or "half-width" means, which are non-tech terms for `char str[]`, and be able to constantly and quickly switch IME between ASCII mode and multibyte mode with an at most 2-key combination.

It might be a "you're holding it wrong" situation, but everyone has already learned how to hold it "correctly " - it'll be a disruptive change to default a "natural" hold that you suggest.

They could use a different name as their windows name (Do people use their real names as their usernames? I never do). Or, they would have to go through the pain of finding a real solution, like the author did.

Considering JetBrains seems unwilling to fix this bug, maybe the best solution of all is to switch to an IDE that works.

"You're holding it wrong"

The problem is the technology, not the user using it in a reasonable way. ł is older than computers and the only reason computers struggle with it is lack of foresight or choosing to make things harder for most of the world by some of the people involved early on.

Obviously the IDE is at fault here. Rider has a bug with Unicode.

BUT, there is an easy workaround to avoid all Unicode related bugs: don't use Unicode. If that's morally objectionable for you, then you can keep fighting this fight.

I think it's reasonable to find that morally objectionable: English is the only language* that can be fully represented in ASCII, so pretending that ASCII is all you need excludes a large part of the world.

* yes, by and large. Many languages make do, but even the European languages that use the same script as English cannot be fully represented:

- Pretty much all mainland European languages use accents (simple example, in Spanish el and él are different words)

- French misses ç

- German/Swiss/Austrian misses ß

- Spanish misses ñ

- Dutch misses ij

It's naïve of you to maintain the façade that English can be fully represented in ASCII. We've just had longer than other languages to adapt to that particular encoding technology, and the good luck to have a code set built to represent our language become the lingua franca of computer technology.

A single example is worth more than a thousand slights.

Not even Britain and Ireland can manage with ASCII: they need £ and €.

I agree with you, and disagree strongly with dahfizz, who is essentially telling people their name and language are unacceptable.

Cyrillic-writing countries miss all of their alphabets and so does Greek.

Avoiding unicode, or anything but 7-bit ASCII is like using chiseling text into a stone instead of pen and paper because the pen might break. Fix the pen! Or replace it with a computer (and we're back full circle)!

It is not morally objectionable avoiding, it's just stupid.

Then there are the people whose names ARE in Kanji, thankyouverymuch. Ah, no big deal, there's only around 1.6 billion of us.