Languages I know, learn and want to learn (in order) with resources — 04.I.2024

1. French
2. English
3. Spanish
4. Polish
5. Russian
6. Persian
7. Classical Arabic
8. Avar

   • Avar Rocks
   • Русско-aварский словарь
9. Chechen
10. German
11. Hungarian
12. Italian
13. Hebrew
14. Serbo-Croatian
15. Turkish
16. Albanian
17. Kabardian
18. Pashto
19. Georgian
20. Basque
21. Mongolian
22. Korean
23. Kabyle

Kakoune syntax highlighting and indentation suck — 31.VII.2023

Default indentation is super-rigid and it manages to get math mode wrong every single time when editing LaTeX.

Why the Kazakh alphabets suck, and how to improve them — 23.VII.2023

Kazakh language is mainly written in two alphabets: Cyrillic (majority) and Latin (official). They are both bad, but for different reasons.

Let's start with the Cyrillic alphabet. It goes like this:

А /ɑ̝/ Ә /æ̝/ Б /b/ Г /g/ Ғ /ʁ/ Д /d/ Е /je̘/ Ж /ʑ/ З /z/ И /əj/ Й /j/
К /k/ Қ /q/ Л /l/ М /m/ Н /n/ Ң /ŋ/ О /o̞/ Ѳ /ɵ/ П /p/ Р /ɾ/ С /s/
Т /t/ У /ʊw/ /w/ Ұ /o̙/ Ү /ʉ/ Х /χ/ Ш /ɕ/ Ы /ə/ І /ɪ̞/ Э /e/

I removed the letters found only in loanwords because it's not important here. I put the vowels in bold typeface because they are the problem here.

First of all, as we can see, the /w/ and /ʊw/ sounds are represented by the same letter. This is problematic, for obvious reasons. The improvement idea is, as the /v/ sound is only found in loanwords, to use the В letter to represent /w/, as it is done in Kalmyk and Mongolian.

The next problem are the Ә and Ы letters. First, having a letter visually identical to the schwa, not represent the schwa /ə/ sound, is at best asinine. In other Turkic (and also in Mongolic) languages using the Cyrillic alphabet, ы usually represents /ɯ/, and it is illogical to have a yer ⟨ы⟩, visually containing the letter ⟨i⟩, representing a sound far apart from the /i/-ish sounds. The improvement idea is to write the /æ/ sound Ӕ (as done in Ossetian), and the /ə/ sound Ә, as simple as that.

Next is Ұ. Although it is not a major problem, it feels a bit un-natural to have a very у-looking sound representing not a /u/-ish nor /y/-ish letter. The improvement idea is, once again, as the /ju/ sound only exists in loanwords, to use the Ю letter to write the /o̙/ sound.

Last but not least: И and І. It simply makes no sense to write /əj/ with a letter representing /i/ everywhere else. Thus, the improvement idea is to simply write it ӘЙ. Then І is not a problem in itself, as there is precedent (notably in Ruthenian) for writing the /ɪ̞/ sound like this, although it may be simpler to write it И.

Now, the Latin alphabet (things get really worse).

A /ɑ̝/ Ä /æ/ B /b/ D /d/ E /e/ /je/ G /g/ Ğ /ʁ/ H /χ/ I /ɪ̞/ İ /j/ /əj/
J /ʑ/ K /k/ L /l/ M /m/ N /n/ Ñ /ŋ/ O /o/ Ö /ɵ/ P /p/ Q /q/
R /ɾ/ S /s/ Ş /ɕ/ T /t/ U /ʊw/ /w/ Ū /o̙/ Ü /ʉ/ Y /ə/ Z /z/

The processus of latinization hoped to be completed by 2025 by the Kazakh government is but an attempt to break away and to destroy the memoryof the Soviet period and of its historical ties to Russia, while showing a desperate desire to befriend the West. This is of the uttermoststupidity and ungratefulness. But we're not here to discuss politics, thus I'll simply show why their Latin alphabet is pure trash.

First and maybe the biggest of problems, ⟨ñ⟩. It's also used by the ALA-LC (it's made by Americans, thus it's not a surprise to find such stupidities) and the Common Turkic Alphabet project, serving the same role as the latinization of Kazakh. Anyways, in its original language (Spanish) and in more than 16 languages, it represents /ɲ/. Its use for representing /ŋ/ simply makes no sense at all. Simple solution: just use the IPA symbol ⟨Ŋ⟩ or latinize the Cyrillic innovation (which is to me more visually pleasant) ⟨Ꞑ⟩.

Now, Ū. It's obviously a simple latinization of the Cyrillic letter, and it doesn't make more sense that it does in Cyrillic. Thus, the solution would be more or less the same: in this case, simply use Ō, it's visually more straightforward.

For U, the solution is identical: move the /w/ to W, and only keep one sound per letter.

Then, İ, I and Y. The desire to resemble Turkish is obvious, and it shouldn't be blamed, Kazakh is a Turkic language after all. But representing both /əj/ and /j/ with the same letter is more than simian. Similarly, representing a neighbourg of /i/ with I instead of İ is actually the contrary of what is done in the Turkish language. My solution here is to represent /j/ with Y, /ə/ with I, /ɪ̞/ with İ and /əj/ with IY. As simple as that.

Next is E. It has been taken as phonetically identical to the similarly looking Cyrillic letter, and the Э has been merged in it. Once again, it does nothing but confuse the language learner, thus it should simply represent /e/ with E, and /je̘/ with YE.

Lastly, Ğ. Once again, its use arises from the desire of resembling Turkish. But it makes little sense here. Although it can be deduced just by looking at it if you know Kazakh phonology, it can be confusing and accidentaly read like in Turkish. The solution here would be to use either Ģ or Ġ, the latter already being used for representing a closely neighbouring sound in Arabic.

To summarize, here are the two alphabets, with my modifications added:

А Ӕ Б В Г Ғ Д Е Ж З И Й К Қ Л М Н Ң О Ѳ П Р С Т У Ү Х Ш Ә ӘЙ Э Ю
A Ä B D E Ə G Ģ H I İ J K L M N Ꞑ O Ō Ö P Q R S Ş T U Ü W Y YƏ Z

About the Polish Cyrillic alphabet — 26.VI.2023

The Cyrillic orthography I drafted for the Polish language this year is exceptionally bad, for various reasons:

1. Constructing ⟨ć⟩, ⟨l⟩, ⟨rz⟩, etc. through other means than soft consonants and the soft sign anihilates all etymology;
2. The use of Serbian, Montenegrin and Tatar letters is simply not adapted for a Western Slavic language such as Polish;
3. Accented letters do not exist as a single glyph in most if not all encodings;
4. Some letters used here are actually opposite to what they represent (such as ⟨љ⟩ for ⟨ł⟩)

For these reasons, I came up with another proposal for a Cyrillic writing system for Polish, available here

Why L^AT_EX sucks — 26.V.2023

It sucks mainly for two reasons: the first one is the extreme difficulty that comes with trying to use a different writing system than Latin or even some special diacritics, let alone actually mixing different writing systems. If anyone knows how to do this only loading packages (I can accept redefining one command or two, but not writing 20 lines of code for each writing system I wanna load), please send me an email, I really need this. The next problem, sadly the biggest one and the most impossible to fix, is error reporting. If you haven't seen the error fifty times yet, you will struggle to find out where it happened and why it happened. It's still the greatest typesetting tool for a lot of reasons though. Use L^AT_EX.

The Pillars of Lisp — העמודים הלסוף‎

The Lisp programming language has 4 different pillars. Lacking even a single one of them disqualifies a language from being considered as a Lisp.

1. READ, EVAL, PRINT and LOOP. Those do not need to form a REPL as we intend it nowadays. Rather, they must be present and available to the user for him to be able to write a complete REPL using a code of the following form:

   (LOOP
     (PRINT
      (EVAL
       (READ))))
   

   The READ and PRINT functions must also satisfy the following equality: id = read ∘ print

2. Homoiconicity, from Greek ομος and εικων, literally “same representation”. It means that source code written in the language can be manipulated in the language itself as primitive data. Even if not a pillar by itself, the idea of macros naturally arises from this concept, as homoiconicity enables powerful and complex macro-systems to function. What also arises from the concept of representation of the code as primitive data is direct self-evaluation, most notably in Lisp through the Meta-Circular Evaluator, using only seven primitive operators.
3. No non-atom except cons cells. As many non-algebraic types, such as symbols, numbers, characters, Unicode characters, pointers, etc. as wanted may exist, but no algebraic type, meaning a type formed by combination of other types, is allowed to be primitively present in the language, except the linked list, or cons cell. Thus, Clojure is entirely excluded from the category of Lisps, given that its Java-based types contain a lot of those.
4. MCE. The language must expose the necessary primitives to implement a Meta-Circular Evaluator using the least number of operators possible.

Arabic and Hebrew Orthographies for Lojban

A proposal for a Polish cyrillic alphabet

Here is my proposal for adapting the cyrillic alphabet to suit the Polish language. Don't use it, it's terrible, but everybody makes mistakes, right?
I wanted to keep most of the differences that exist in the current alphabet, even for likewise-sounded letters.
Following this principle, I tried to keep some letters that could have been omitted without impacting readability too much.
This can lead to the illogical situation of the cyrillic text being the same length as the latin one, the shorthands offered by automatically managing palatalisation being left unused.
I don't like digraphs, thus I used some ligatures from the Serbian cyrillic alphabet, but due to the lack of ligatures for the [ɕ] and [ʑ] sounds, I needed to pick the letters from somewhere else, but unfortunately, the letter corresponding to the [ʑ] sound is not present in any Slavic-language alphabet, thus I decided to pick it from the Tatar alphabet instead.
The overall design is influenced by the Russian, Belarusian and Serbian cyrillic alphabets.

Here is the alphabet in traditional Eastern-Slavic order:

А Б В Г Д Ѕ Ђ Џ Е Ё Ж Җ З И Й К Л Љ М Н Њ О О́ П Р Р̌ С Т У Ф Х Ц Ћ Ч Ш Щ Ы Ь Э Ю Я І Ѫ Ѧ Ѭ Ѩ

This leaves us with 46 letters (including ligatures), to 35 letters for the latin-ish alphabet, although the latter uses a lot of digraphs.

Following this line comes an example of the script in action on the beginning of Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

The (Internet) Voskhod Protocol — 22.VIII.2022

The (Internet) Voskhod Protocol is a small Internet protocol designed for fast and simple document exchange on a small to medium size network.
It is roughly similar to Gopher, while trying to fix its flaws. You can find its specification here

How I license my programs — 28.IV.2022

• If the program contains less than 300 lines of code (yes this is completely arbitrary), I use the Beerware license. This condition supersedes the two cases below.
• If the program is intended to be integrated in a bigger piece of software (such as a library) and contains more than 300 lines of code, I use the Apache License 2.0 or the GNU Lesser General Public License.
• If the program is intended to be fully standalone (such as a compiler) and contains more than 300 lines of code, I use the GNU General Public License version 3.0 only.
• If the program contains more than 1,000 lines of code (this one is also arbitrary), I use GPLv3.0. This condition supersedes all the cases above.

GPLv3 translation - 25.IV.2022

Here 's my attempt to translate the GNU General Public License version 3 into French. It probably contains a lot of typos and incomprehensible parts, if you spot some, please notify them to me by e-mail.

By the way, quick note on the GPL, that I cannot include in the translation: please don't add the “or any later version” clause to your copyright headers.
Please don't accept automatically a license you didn't read. Even if GNU says that

Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns

Those details can cause problems, like the tivoization clause caused some to quite a lot of people while updating from version 2 to version 3.
So please just say “GPL-3.0-only”.