Comment on The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)

• lucas@startrek.website ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Well, it’s not really clear-cut, which is part of my point, but probably the 2 most significant people I could think of would be Babbage and Turing, both of whom were English. Definitely could make arguments about what is or isn’t considered a ‘computer’, to the point where it’s fuzzy, but regardless of how you look at it, ‘computers were invented in America’ is rather a stretch.

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  • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    ‘computers were invented in America’ is rather a stretch.

    Which is why no one said that. I read most of the article and I’m still not sure what you were annoyed about. I didn’t see anything US-centric, or even anglocentric really.

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    • lucas@startrek.website ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      To say I’m annoyed would be very much overstating it, just a (very minor) eye-roll at one small line in a generally very good article. Just the bit quoted:

      currency symbols other than the $ (kind of tells you who invented computers, doesn’t it?)

      So they could also be attributing it to some other country that uses $ for their currency, which is a few, but it seems most likely to be suggesting USD.

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• Deebster@lemmyrs.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think the author's intended implication is absolutely that it's a dollar because the USA invented the computer. The two problems I have is that:

  1. He's talking about the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, not computers at that point
  2. Brits or Germans invented the computer (although I can't deny that most of today's commercial computers trace back to the US)

  It's just a lazy bit of thinking in an otherwise excellent and internationally-minded article and so it stuck out to me too.

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