I thought China wanted more people who could read and write code?

Nobody codes in Mandarin! No, not even Chinese people.

They code in English and for a reason! It's not a great or reassuring reason, but it's a logical one: English doesn't have any accent marks and a simple, 26-character alphabet. This means the meaning of code can be understood by a compiler or interpreter without having to deal with encodings or enormous lookup tables to determine if a character is valid for say, an assignment (e.g. foo = 1).

I've met developers that tried coding in their native languages using Python, which is one of the few languages that actually supports using non-latin Unicode characters and even right-to-left writing. They all say the same thing: It sucks and it's not worth the trouble.

It's not the govt's stance, it's a bunch of random dum dums online led by a guy who thinks his math tutoring skills qualify him to make strategic decisions.

Obviously, you don't understand programming. Programming does not have a strict English proficiency requirement. What is used in programming are identifiers; they merely distinguish variables and have no strict requirement for meaning. You can absolutely use pinyin or arbitrary strings as identifiers. The English level required for programming is only enough to understand reserved words—they're just basic words.

Have you ever actually tried it? Simple example: Try using an emoji for an assignment: ⭐=foo or foo=⭐

It doesn't work? Why? Because emojis aren't valid for assignments. Why? Because Python follows Unicode Standard Annex #31 (UAX #31). Since emoji are classified as symbols, you can't use them for assignments.

Who cares? We're taking Mandarin, right? Except there's a practical problem: The most common input method for typing Mandarin (and other languages with bazillions of characters) outputs full-width characters (e.g. ＝ full width equal sign) and this screws everything up. It does this for equals, parentheses, commas, and a few other symbols.

My friend said that was the most annoying thing: Having to constantly switch back and forth.

However, many characters that are used as normal words also don't work for assignments. For example, Chinese numerals: 一, 二, 三 (the English equivalent of, one, two, three)

Then there's a practical problem: It looks wacky AF, making the code harder to read:

if 用户.is_active():
    return 获取数据()

The input method editor problem is the biggest one because it really slows you down. Having to switch in and out of it constantly also creates huge friction when coding.

I just asked him and he just gave me something I didn't even think about: Apparently git diffs (on the command line) don't display Mandarin characters properly! That right there would make programming in Mandarin a no-go situation without a special git tool.

Apparently, if you want to be able to deploy your code at all you have to know English. Or at least, Linux English (e.g. ls and similar programs haha).

Obviously, you don't understand programming.

obviously, you don't understand Unicode. moth appreciates your wonderful example of irony. it is often those who speak loudest who understand the least.

Yes, it is often those who speak loudest who understand the least, I can't agree more, because that perfectly describes your behavior. No evidence, No proof, No example, just a viewpoint.

You can't even tell Pinyin from Chinese characters.

Also, most Chinese input methods support toggling between half-width and full-width symbols independently. Even if you really want to program using Chinese characters, you just need to switch to half-width symbols.

moth expected some attempt at a retort, but moth expected... more than just "no u". moth assumed people grew out of that after they turned eight.

but moth digresses. moth has no further interest in arguing with a brand new account that already has low rep warning labels next to their name. moth dismisses you.

Thank you for your reply. I may indeed not be good at talking to people who lack logic. I prefer to refute arguments; without arguments, I can’t say anything more.

I may indeed not be good at talking to people who lack logic

you're just not good at talking, period.

I can’t say anything more.

moth doubts that. you seem compelled to have the last word.

Moreover, no investigation, no right to speak. I write code in a Chinese-language environment every day—so how much code have you written in a Chinese-language environment?

I write code in a Chinese-language environment every day—so how much code have you written in a Chinese-language environment?

sure you do, "Billy". we both know you're full of bullshit, but since you made a claim, support it with evidence.

Fine. What proof are you after? Anything I can provide, I’ll be more than happy to shove down your throat. Keep pushing—see where it gets you.

give us a link to your github profile, Billy. one with a long history of code written in chinese. and edit the Github profile with a link back to your Lemmy profile, so that we know you own the account.

also, since you're more than happy to shove this down my throat, how do you type? do you use pinyin, or a bilingual keyboard? if it's the former, a short video showing you typing code in whatever editor you use. make sure it's from one of the projects from your Github. if it's the latter, then a picture of your keyboard with a handwritten "BillyNaCl" note next to it.

none of this would be unduly hard for someone who codes in chinese to provide for us.

Is it okay if I type on my phone? My computer happened to break, and it’ll take another 3 to 4 days. Similarly, since it’s not very convenient to use GitHub on my phone, I’ll send it to you later. However, most of my code is local; only one or two incomplete repositories are on GitHub. Also, how would you like me to send the video?

Sorry, because my 2FA authentication is tied to my computer, I can't log in to GitHub right now. If you're willing to give me 2 to 3 days, I'll give you an answer that will leave you speechless.

you're computer just happened to break right now. sure. don't bother, moth has seen what they needed. 🤣

行行行，我懒得用翻译器了。你他妈就是个傻逼懂不懂，你们白皮猪都这样。一帮劣等种族。
我在GitHub上就叫这个名字，现在卡2FA了登录不了而已。你他妈爱信不信。
像你这种loser也就网上找找存在感了🤣👉🤡
我猜你实际上也不过是个国人套了个白皮猪的皮罢了，少几把装劣等民族了🤣👉🤡
要是你真是外国人，记住我说的话：劣等民族永远是劣等民族，一天是劣等民族，一辈子都是劣等民族。

别的我也懒得说，反正你不配听。记得代我向你妈妈问好，告诉我会把她操得在鬼门关七进七出。白人女人只有挨我们高等种族操的份懂不懂。还有别忘了祭奠一下你爸，免得你爸等得急了从地里钻出来把你妈配了🤣👉🤡

还有你也是个低能儿。不用“I”而是用名字称呼自己的，十个里有十个都是傻逼。“moon觉得怎样怎样”“moon认为你什么什么”，哎呦喂呦我的个老天爷呀，你自己听着不尴尬吗？我都替你尴尬🤣👉🤡
不过劣等种族在网上中二一点是好事，毕竟你在现实中还有几十万美元发助学贷款要还呢，大概也做不到直起腰来见人吧🤣👉🤡

我的电脑是“正好”坏的吗？我不是早都跟你说过我电脑坏了用手机不方便吗？哎呀呀白皮猪的记忆力也就那么回事了，你们核桃大的大脑能比得过金鱼我全网直播倒立吃屎

喂喂喂，咋不说话了？刚才不是挺能说的吗？是不是贷款还不完了交不起话费了？哎呦喂，你说怎么我们就没有那么高利息助的学贷款啊？怎么我们上大学这么便宜啊？🤣👉🤡

moth is going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you generated this using an LLM, and not that you're a native speaker and your grammar is just this bad.

笑死我了，没见过网络用语是这样的。还语法，汉语语法博大精深你们低等种子一辈子都学不明白。你要是能找到一个llm能说出我这么流利的网络用语，我给你跪下舔你的脚。如果你找不出来你爸你妈杀了好不好

得了，多的我也懒得说了，我就问你，你去GitHub上查过了没？别光说不行动啊。你懒得查就乖乖等到后天我电脑送回来，我把链接给你。看在你是个绅士的份上我就暂时不说脏话了

if you keep responding to moth like this, people are going to think moth is ragebaiting you. you're trying way too hard to convince some random internet stranger of how chinese you are, Billy. it comes across as more than a little contrived. perhaps you should go cool off by writing some more code in chinese.

especially since you only started this account a week ago, and you've gone from one yellow icon after your name to two bright red warning icons due to your remarkably low reputation.

that's going to follow you around, telling everyone you interact with that you are most likely a troll and untrustworthy. everyone you interact with it can see it. mods who see your comments will be more likely to assume they are in bad faith and remove them. people will be more likely to block you. and for what? because you were so mad you couldn't help but argue with moth? moth is not worth this, you should move along and save your obviously dwindling sanity.

可笑，你到现在都没去github上搜索我的账号，这么的，你的GitHub搜索功能“正好”坏了吗？还是说你害怕被打脸呢？小宝贝
你是不是没发现我一直在骂你？换个好点的翻译器吧兄弟，你就能明白我骂的有多脏了。我不在乎什么声望，反正大不了注册一个新账号。

另外，你也才注册16天而已，装什么老资历呢，宝贝。我敢打赌你玩弄互联网的时间不会比我长

moth has been around for twice as long as you have, and has become twice as wise as you as well.

assuming, of course, that moth isn't an alt of someone else.

moth couldn't care less about your insults. the only reason moth continues with this is moth is curious how long moth can lead you on a leash. you are an amusement, but not one moth takes seriously.

moth never cared about your GitHub, moth asked for that to waste your time, because moth is playing with you like a cat with a bit of string. moths comments, and you inevitably reply. almost your entire comment history is nothing more than you being moth's plaything. you belong to moth, Billy. and no amount of insults can change that. you'll do as moth wants, because moth is under your thin skin and through your thick skull.

我也只是乐意羞辱你而已，moth，你以为你在牵着我走吗？恰恰相反，你不过是我等待国庆假期的调剂而已。我也不在乎什么声誉，说白了这只是我在lemmy上的众多账号之一罢了。
不过说实话我真没见过像你一样自大的人，以为别人聊两句就被你牵着鼻子走了。我只有无聊的时候才会登录这个账号骂你两句而已。前几天没放假，电脑也没修好，实在没什么事做。
说白了你以为你在牵着我在，其实不过是我乐意陪你玩玩罢了。以后每当我无聊的时候，就会来骂你两句取乐的。我建议你最好屏蔽我，否则指不定哪天打开收件箱就会看到我哦。

Final word: your whole routine is nothing but shameless thug logic. If I reply, you'll say I'm being led around by the nose. If I don't, you'll say I'm running away.

So do yourself a favor and actually ask yourself for once: every time I reply, you reply right back. By your own laughable standard, doesn't that make you the one on my leash? What's the matter—are you bored too because you've got a vacation coming up? 🤣👉🤡

moth is glad to see you haven't gotten over moth. moth had almost forgotten you existed, it's been so frightfully dull without someone to tease.

So who exactly can't let go of whom? These days I only glance over when I'm bored, just to see if you're still yapping. But it seems like every single time I reply, you immediately come running back with a reply? Oh, how very strange. What on earth could be going on here? Oh my god—don't tell me that the moment a little red dot pops up on your phone, you just can't wait to find out what His Excellency BillyNaCl has said? 🤣👉🤡 So who is it that can't let go of whom? Tsk tsk, what a terribly difficult guess. Could it be that you can't forget me? Surely not. Surely not?

come now, Billy. you know as well as moth that that is a poor attempt. you are a sad little man, Billy. but at least you have given up wasting tokens on LLM translation, no? you should invest in a machine capable of locally hosting large language models, Billy. then you could tell it to periodically check to see if someone pretending to speak Chinese has responded to you, and to write a reply to them, without wasting any money on it.

Well, well, well. Look at the timestamps, genius. You couldn't even hold out for a whole hour before crawling back to reply. Called it. The one who really can't get over me? It's you. Yes, you. 🤣👉🤡

Go on, admit it, sweetheart—you're already caught, hooked, obsessed. Sorry for being this irresistible; I know it must be humiliating for you.

And as for that pathetic little paragraph of yours? I wouldn't waste one second reading it. Go scream at the empty air and have your impotent little tantrum. No one's watching. No one cares.

I've worked in Japan for years which has plenty of people terrible at English, especially in the older generations. They find (or these days google/ai/whatever translate) any documentation they need and just learn the various built-in names for things as needed. This doesn't stop them from programming. There are websites where people have done that and uploaded the resulting translation and/or answer questions in Japanese about things. I stumbled upon similar sites in Chinese by accident.

Identifiers in code that didn't support non-ascii identifiers were just romanized Japanese (and I assume Chinese does this as well). So print(zeikomi_nedan); or something where that is the variable name. They don't redefine alias print in some library or something (though I'm sure a small minority might, I've never seen it).

I have seen some kanji-based identifier names in languages with default utf-8 support, but I still don't think that's the norm, especially if non-Japanese-speakers are expected to read the code such as in shared projects.

obsessed? yes, obsessed with scrolling through Lemmy. you just happen to be here. if you want to imagine you are somehow what brings moth back, then moth has no problem with that.

you're still here, replying, which moth has told you already is moths agenda, plaything.

Japanese doesn't count because half the words for things are just English with a Japanese accent!

Drink your koohii and maybe have an aisu kuriimu later to understand what I'm talking about 😁

不错，这次坚持了4小时，下次继续努力

Yeah, obsessed with scrolling Lemmy. But if that’s really the case, how do you explain the fact that since your second-to-last reply, you haven’t posted anything except replies to me? Babe, didn’t you use to love writing your little essays? What’s wrong—run out of talent now?

no replies that you can see. not all of my comments, and none of my posts, federate to untrusted public instances like yours. the majority of them are on proper FAF instances in communities that you will never be allowed to even see, let alone take part in.

But they don't always mean what you think 写真はイメージです。 is a classic. "[the] picture is an image". Of course it is! Well, except it means image in the sense of a representative sample image, not an image of the exact thing. It's basically a disclaimer they put on product images in case it doesn't look exactly alike.

Yes yes. You don't need to remind us all that Japanese is stupidly complicated. Everyone who's watched a bit of anime knows that 🤣

Sooo... Let's say you want to actually use Japanese in your code. Which of the three writing systems would you choose?

Also, do you start counters at zero or do you...

Noun + Particle + Number + Counter?

I mean, it must be a real pain to first have to figure out what it is you're counting before you can actually start the index 🤔

Also, make sure your fonts follow the shinto stroke ordering! Otherwise your schoolteacher will haunt you from their grave and curse your program!

😁

Having worked at a company where all the code was written by Japanese for Japanese-speakers, it's just nouns in romaji for variables, something verb-y for functions. Some function names had particles as a part of that (still in romaji). No counters that I recall in code (though used in comments).

So serious! I was just being silly.

I bow my head in apology, for making you consider my statements with such intense defensive posturing!

"Proper FAF instances"? Cute. Sounds less like anarchism and more like a micro-government with better branding.

Anarchism isn’t “no rules”; it’s no unaccountable rulers. Secret rules, unrecallable admins, no appeals? That’s not a flotilla—that’s a tiny state.

Public instances aren’t “untrusted”; they’re windows. You’re not protecting a movement—you’re hiding a clique that can’t survive being seen.

Why avoid public instances? Because your “movement for all humanity” dies the moment humanity can see it. A revolution hiding from the public is just a clique in the dark.

Dazai at least admitted he joined the illegal party for the thrill. You just wear “you’re not allowed to see” as a personality.

Ask Makhno where the money came from. Ask what followed. Oh right—expropriation and hunger. Your “proper” club has the same vibe: self-righteous, unaccountable, allergic to daylight.

Enjoy your proper little club. Your superiority is very convincing—to the five people already in the room.

it's nice to see you took moth's advice and switched to an LLM. unlike you, moth doesn't pay for tokens, since moth runs locally, so only one of us is burning money.

it's also likely you aren't using the API so that your agent can post directly, and are copy/pasting responses manually. this is inefficient, and you need to have your agent write a framework to address this ASAP.

finally, you need to run your output through some kind of humanizer, so that it isn't so obviously LLM output. moth has created a custom agent skill so that moth's posts are indistinguishable from those that moth's agent writes.

Oh, bless your heart—thank you for the “technical guidance.” Unlike you, I’m not so spectacularly useless that I need an LLM to accomplish the backbreaking task of posting. Every sentence comes to me unaided—no tokens, no fees, no machine holding my hand. So this is what anarchism has come to? Just anyone gets to play now? Even someone so utterly helpless they need AI just to produce a single post?

moth generally delegates conversations with users moth deems unimportant to moth's agent, to be responded to during idle GPU cycles. these agents are trained on moth's way of speaking so that they are capable of responding as moth would. politics and world events are not topics that moth has approved for agents to speak on, however. if you say anything important, it will be forwarded to moth in a daily digest.