Hieroglyphs
A few of weeks ago a friend of mine mentioned that the Chinese hieroglyphs were a big deal when introduced because they unified a large country by creating a notation that everybody could understand, regardless of what the things it denoted were actually called in any particular language or dialect. I am sure it all made a lot of sense a few centuries ago (especially, taking into account relative unimportance of the written language to most people). Nonetheless, in my guts I knew that this was the bad design choice, I just couldn’t put in words what exactly I didn’t like about it.
Yesterday it dawned on me! Yes, they unified the written language—the fact that two people who couldn’t understand each other talking, could communicate in writing was truly a miracle, but still they couldn’t talk to each other. And this is ironic, because you still had to learn quite a lot of new stuff—some five thousand characters (or whatever the actual number is)—and nowadays they do have the language that everyone speaks—Mandarin—but now they stuck with the writing system that is nothing but pain—pain to learn and pain to use (if you ever saw a Chinese person typing, you know what I am talking about.)
What does it teach us? Obvious (albeit partial) solutions—however brilliant they might look at the time—are not necessarily good solutions in the long run. And more often than not, big complex systems need refactoring to move forward.
leave a comment