Post #715435

2026-03-21 13:34 UTC

whats interesting about petname systems like https://www.inkandswitch.com/backchannel/ is that they mesh extremely well with the arguments i made in 2019 that in order to have a programming experience that did not privilege one written culture over another you had to abandon the notion of &quot;human-readable names&quot; at the level of APIs and libraries. i used the terms &quot;display names&quot; and &quot;canonical names&quot; but the ideas are quite similar. makes me feel like the underlying problems are related. my 2019 work: * http://ojs.decolonising.digital/index.php/decolonising_digital/article/view/PersonalComputer * https://www.deconstructconf.com/2019/ramsey-nasser-a-personal-computer-for-children-of-all-cultures

Replies (2)

@esoterra@hachyderm.io 2026-03-21 14:01

@nasser one place I would hope to be an opportunity to address this, and could still be someday, is in the Wasm Component Model and WASI, but for now at least the identifiers in its IDL in Components themselves are restricted to the Latin alphabet. I'm curious what Luke Wagner, @sunfish, and other folks think about broader language support in Wasm. Ideally Wasm Component composition would let us link components across programming and human languages and help address this someday.

Open ##1404591
@benjohn@todon.nl 2026-03-21 14:42

@nasser i’d not made that connection. Seems right. I think the reason we overload display names as symbol identifiers in programming languages is because (in almost all cases) we expect our code to exist in plain text files we directly edit with very little additional tooling. As such, we don’t have a lot of choice. But it doesn’t have to be like that, and I (for one) predict the advantages of richer representations for code will eventually be too strong to ignore.

Open ##1404596