Greetings from new member

[gar <gar at arabink dot com>]

> آهلا وسهلا
>
> After lurking for quite a while (first discovered arabeyes a few years 
> ago, if I remember correctly) I've decided to take the plunge and try 
> to find the time to get involved, so this is my introductory missive.
>
> First off, congratulations to everybody involved; arabeyes is a very 
> impressive project and it has progressed quite a bit since I first 
> discovered it.  Obviously computing is still in its infancy in the 
> Arab world, and it's exciting to see a community coalescing around a 
> project like arabeyes with its emphasis on free software and full 
> arabization.
>
> As for myself, I'm more-or-less fluent in Arabic (enough so to land a 
> job working with Arabic after years as a software developer) and I 
> hope to help out mainly by assisting the translation effort.
>
> I've got a million ideas for arabizing software (who doesn't?).  I've 
> been thinking about it for many years, ever since I first started 
> studying Arabic and realized the potential of the computer in making 
> this arduous task easier.  But also (and more important) the need to 
> close the technology gap between the "advance" world and "the rest" of 
> the world is a great motivator.
>
> In particular, here's what I see as a fundamental issue:  the 
> nurturing of an indigenous, monolingual software development 
> community.  By this I mean it should be possible for a kid anywhere in 
> the Arab world to learn to hack code without having to learn English 
> first.  A simple measure of success is easy to define: successful 
> implementation of a major software project entirely in Arabic.  (The 
> same obviously goes for any linguistic community; I just happen to 
> have learned Arabic so that's where I concentrate.)
>
> So I propose as a possible goal for arabeyes the design and 
> implementation of an Arabic language programming language.  Virtually 
> all programming languages today are optimized for expressiveness in 
> English; what would happen if we had a language optimized for 
> expressiveness in Arabic?  Arabic is terrifically powerful and 
> flexible when it comes to abstraction; who knows what interesting 
> things might come out of a project to create an Arabic-based 
> programming language?
>
> As a start, I propose the arabization of Scheme, probably using the 
> Guile implementation.  Scheme is very simple, very powerful, 
> relatively easy to implement, and it's a wonderful language for 
> learning computational concepts.  I think it would be relatively 
> simple for a good experienced programmer to modify a Scheme 
> implementation to work with Arabic keywords and handle Arabic strings. 
>  Wouldn't it be fun to write code in Arabic?
>
> Another goal I propose, for which I have an immediate pressing need, 
> is the arabization of a basic set of XML tools.  First off, a decent 
> editor with a user-friendly interface.  I've downloaded and tested 20+ 
> editors in the past few weeks, and have yet to find one that supports 
> Arabic.  Many of them, strangely enough, almost support Arabic - they 
> shape the glyphs properly, display Arabic right-to-left, but editing 
> doesn't quite work; the cursor behaves strangely, so you can't tell 
> where the true insertion point is.  In any case, I suspect it wouldn't 
> take all that much effort to enable basic Arabic support.  Possible 
> open source candidates are http://www.butterflyxml.org and 
> http://www.xerlin.org.  There are other free xml editors but their 
> names escape me at the moment.  Once I've finished my evaluation of 
> editors I'll post the results to arabeyes.org.
>
> In addition to XML editing, I need a good file comparison tool that 
> handles Arabic.  I've looked at a bunch of them but still haven't 
> found one.  If there isn't a good one out there I suppose the thing to 
> do would be to arabize gnu diff.
>
> Finally, just to stoke a little discussion, I'd like to get this off 
> my chest:  Unicode is a catastrophe for the Arabic-speaking world and 
> for any community using a right-to-left writing system.   Why?  
> Because contrary to the claims of the Unicode designers (and virtually 
> everybody else, alas) Arabic is not bidirectional, nor is any other 
> language in the world.  The alleged evidence for said bidirectionality 
> is numbers in Arabic.  But in fact this claim is based on spoken 
> Arabic, which is obviously not the same as written Arabic, and 
> furthermore is not uniform - it is not uncommon to hear Arabic 
> speakers utter numbers in LSD-first order.  This is incredibly 
> frustrating, because the issue is so simple - all you have to do is 
> realize that written Arabic is a monodirectional language with LSD 
> polarity - it writes numbers Least Significant Digit first.  The fact 
> that people usually utter numbers MSD first is totally irrelevant to 
> the writing system.  English happens to be a monodirectional language 
> with MSD polarity.  Big deal.  I don't see anybody claiming that, 
> because we say "seventeen" and not "tenseven" the number should be 
> written "71".  It's idiotic, the bidi requirement.  grrrr.
>
> Think of it this way:  Unicode is a hidden tax on the entire rtl 
> world, whose value I would guess must surely reach into the billions 
> of dollars.  Without the bidi requirement it would be a relatively 
> simple matter to adapt the billions and billions of dollars worth of 
> software out there to rtl languages.  With the bidi requirement, most 
> of it will never be adapted.  Just try asking your favorite small 
> software company to support Arabic and you'll see what I mean: "it's 
> too expensive to implement bidi".
>
> And that's not even considering the bizarre (and IMHO totally 
> unacceptable) behaviour of the cursor in bidi enabled software.  Nor 
> the many other issues that make Unicode Arabic one of the worst 
> designs in the history of technology.
>
> Whew!  Got that out of the way.  Thanks for listening.  ;)
>
> Gregg Reynolds