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November 19, 2004
Will we be coding in Chinese?
One interesting thing that has always struck me about computer programming is that despite the international nature of the computer and software industries, high level languages are written for the most part in English. As far as I am aware. Assembler opcodes are short for english words, too, even if the acronyms are fairly useless and hard to remember. Anyways, I am curious if the next major high level language will be written in English, or if it will be written in Hindi or Chinese? Both major Chinese languages are written the same, and the Chinese economy is booming. I give China the edge. On the bright side, with the increase in use of Unicode, and the one character per word structure of Chinese, I suppose we can look forward to much more efficient source code in the near future. I'm sure there will probably be some kind of translating compilers, if there are not already for high level languages in English, but still.
Today I was on a panel at a JETRO conference with Hong Liang Lu. He has some amazing numbers about telephones China. Chinese are buying 90M new mobile phones a year. (Compared to 80M total mobile phones in Japan.) Japanese are about to make pre-paid mobile phone illegal because they are being used in crime. 80% of Chinese cell phones are pre-paid because of collection issues. PHS (Personal Handy Phone) which was developed in Japan (and I thought was a dead standard) is heavily deployed in China with 70M subscribers vs. only 5M subscribers in Japan. Minutes are as cheap as 1 cent per minute in China. China has 300M land-line phones and 300M mobile phones now.I knew telecom was going crazy in China, and many of you may know these numbers, but they are stunning none the less.
Posted by Mike at November 19, 2004 04:18 PM
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