Hearing the words "engineering speak" bothers me. Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right?
Saying just software framework would have probably been fine. Humans are pretty good at inferring the meaning of words from context...
I seem to recall that Wired was widely regarded poorly in the technical community as early as the turn of the millenium and that it has long been viewed as something read by non-technical folks who want to feel "plugged in" to technology.
So, I'd kind of be surprised if it was really the case that a "significant portion" of Wired's readers were engineers.
Sure, they understand each other, but it's a whole different dialect.
what?
1. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-a...
Twitter lets you tweet 140 characters regardless of the bit width of those characters in. For Japanese, I think almost all characters take two bytes in utf-8. As such, given the same number of tweets, the bandwidth usage is approx 2X.
Twitter also seems much more useful in ideogram languages as 140 characters = 140 words = an article. In English, 140 characters = a short/medium sized sentence.
I wonder if they lost viewership by making a statement in their headline that people thought they knew the answer to already.
The vast majority of words in Chinese and Japanese are not single characters. In fact, a very large portion of the characters cannot be used by themselves, at least in modern Japanese. Japanese is also heavily reliant on two other writing systems which are far less space-efficient. A single character of either hiragana or katakana represents only a single syllable of sound (such as か（ka),ぽ(po),し(shi),etc.). Unless your tweets were just very long noun phrases without any grammar pertaining only to things that can be written with Chinese characters (which means no modern foreign words), less efficient writing systems would be needed.
So, while Japanese may be slightly more compact due to the lack of spaces and the ability to assign a large number of sounds to a single Chinese character (such as 承る＝うけたまわる(uketamawaru)), it's still a synthetic language that can have very large conjugations (which have to be written in hiragana) and has a very unfavorable ratio of amount of meaning:syllables (partially mitigated by the use of Chinese characters).
As for ideograms, your statement is not correct. Kanjis allow for better content/character ratios, certainly, but one kanji is very often not one word - the word foreigner, for example, uses 3 ideograms.
On top of that, Japanese is not written solely with kanjis (as opposed to Chinese, for example). It also uses katakanas and hiraganas, which stand for phonems. This is more often the case on social networks where a lot of western words are used - western words are almost systematically written with katakanas.
Kanas are still more "efficient" than alphabets, but to reuse my previous example, foreigner is written using 5 kanas instead of 3 kanjis.
I'll go back to my corner and leave you alone now.
Also, why downvote? Even if was largely wrong, the discussion engendered was a net positive to HN.
So, contrary to popular belief, the languages that could be discriminated seem to not be chinese or japanese, but languages with possible combinations on each character, such as european languages.
The takeaway of this article to me is that, to be truly successful in the International markets of the new electronic economies, one really does have to disavow oneself of cultural baggage. I think I get better at that as the years go by - but I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. Oh, how impersonal that life was ..
You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.
I don't know about that .. they spent more time doing things that mattered to them - like, work, or associating with work colleagues/blowing off steam - and less time doing things that were highly destructive to their health on an immediate basis, like .. sitting in traffic for hours, being very un-social, breathing in smog.
EDIT: Is it a 'cultural downvote', or something else I said? Because my Japanese friends still don't 'get' why Americans think its so vital to have so much private time being spent 'on the road'. This is very definitely a cultural artifact, people ..
it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home