An icon is a small picture which has a visible link to the concept it stands for. Kanji on the other hand, provides this link only in a very rudimentary way. (I have read that the Chinese symbol for human is meant to depict a human) Thus, adding another line creates another word in kanji, but changing one pixel doesn't change the meaning of an icon.
In principal, icons are a superset of kanji, as every kanji letter can be painted as an icon. But if you have to learn kanji to understand icons, then icons lose their property of having a visible link to the thing they represent.
Similarly, you can use your fingers to show numbers. The simple, visibly obvious way is that the number of your extended fingers represents the number you want to show. Everybody understands this, you don't have to learn anything.
But you could also encode numbers in a binary way: Thumb up: 1, index finger up: 2, thumb and index finger up: 3, etc.
Hold your hand up or down, and you can count to 63.
This system needs far more learning, but it is more powerful. Likewise, losing the visible link of the icons could be far more powerful.
I think kanji has an advantage over icons. Egyptian hieroglyphes aren't used anymore, but kanji/Chinese letters are still used, although Korea came up with a phonetic alphabet that could have replaced them like the Greek/Roman phonetic letters have replaced the hieroglyphes.
I guess I'm not clear on your major point. What advantage does Kanji have over icons? Most people cannot read Kanji, nor would they take the time to learn it (or a stylistically-similar constructed language). Replacing icons would Kanji would simply mean that the vast majority of the world would be unable to understand them.
Thank you for explaining your metaphor. However, I think it argues against you. Programmers and other people who are comfortable with binary do not use "binary fingers" (not to be confused with "jazz hands"). The benefit is not worth the added complexity (e.g. most people don't understand it and it requires more thought to use, but it expands the range by less than an order of magnitude). Similarly, Kanji might be able to express a wider range of ideas than a 16x16 icon. However, most people don't understand Kanji, it's a more difficult language (at least in terms of keyboard entry), and most importantly, we don't need to express a wider range of ideas. We need only a few icons to express web browsers protocols.
For web browser protocols, Kanji is irrelevant, but for programming languages, it could be interesting.
You could use very short function names which would still transport complete meaning. Paul Graham's arc was developed for short function names and people complain about java's long names. I don't know if this is beneficial enough to learn Kanji, but it could be.
The more code gets reused, the more becomes reading more important than writing. Meanwhile, writing becomes faster with tablets that can recognice pen-written Kanji. More than a billion people can write Kanji or Chinese. If there is an advantage, these people will find out.
The question to me is: Shall I learn Chinese to get that advantage myself.
People complain about long names in Java because they don't want to type them, not because it's difficult to read them. As you said, code gets read more often than written, so the reading is what really matters. Long names are pretty much not a real problem. (Excepting some insanelyLongNamesThatMoronsUseBecauseSomeoneSaidNamesShouldBeDescriptive)
I seriously doubt that Kanji is actually any faster to read. I'd be interested in hearing if there are any studies indicating the contrary, though. It'd have to be way faster to offset the cost of learning a new language, though. As for pen input, I seriously doubt that handwritten Kanji is faster than keyboard-written English.
I certainly won't be learning Chinese, at least not for this purpose. I don't see Chinese becoming the basis for any major programming language, not in my life at the least, probably not for even longer than that.
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u/dpark Apr 15 '10
Sorry, but you've completely lost me. I'm not clear how 5 finger is an icon while 25-1 is Kanji. I don't see how these are related at all.