IPv4 address with more address bits would have worse, because it would have the same incompatibility problem as IPv6, without its benefits.
Actually, IPv6 is good design. Adoption is slow because most people and companies always prefer a cheap short term inferior solution compared to the good long term one.
Now, IPv6 is 25% of traffic. It will continue to grow, and at a point the network effect will be on IPv6 side. Not long after that, IPv4 will only be a niche for a few legacy systems.
Nitpick: it's 25% (or 29% peak) of clients. As for traffic... dual-stacked eye-ball clients see about 50-70% of their traffic go over v6 on average.
(What about percentage of overall traffic on the internet? That's much harder to measure, but you'd expect it to be something like the product of 25% and 50-70%. But that particular stat isn't actually very interesting; percentage of clients and percentage of servers/traffic are a lot more useful.)
If we want to use only one official working language, it should be Esperanto. This would be neutral for any country (including Ireland and Malta). This would not be a threat to other languages and cultures.
Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language. Its benefits are clear, it only needs a political support to thrive.
> Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language. Its benefits are clear...
Both of these statements are not true, arguable at minimum.
Sorry for not explaining properly but if you do say something like this, is very likely that you are aware of the discussions around it and knows that this is very far from consensus in the linguistics field.
It's obvious Esperanto is much easier to learn than English and there is lots of evidence for it. The studies estimate it to be about 10X easier to become fluent in EO vs EN.
I already speak English * and I can use it to communicate with people all over teh EU who also already speak it.
Why do we all need to learn a new common language? We already have a perfectly serviceable one.
In any case, if we're going to go for a different common language then that really should be my native Greek because it's the language of the country who gave birth to European civilisation, and it was already the lingua franca of the people of Europe in ancient times, so there (i.e. everyone in Europe will have an argument to support their own language being the new common tongue).
And in other centuries they were in French (the language of diplomacy), Latin, and Greek. Things change, and now is not the best time for the US empire (and UK has lost its imperial reach decades ago) -- so the "common" language could change too in 50-100 years.
The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.
Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code... English will never lose its position because of the amount of value that has been created with it.
How could English ever possibly change (in the way that Latin morphed into the various European languages after the fall of the Roman Empire), when we have access to perfect digital copies of how it is spoken and written?
>The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.
I beg to differ. Compared to the Latin and French corpus, the body cultural works created in English is paltry and subpar. And that's the British ones, American ones, even less so. I can give you scientific and commercial if you feel any better.
>Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code...
Yeah, pop music, movies, and TV shows. We'd lose Happy Days, I love Lucy, Breaking Bad, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West. OK, and Melvin and Henry James and Hemingway. Not much loss.
We would still have Racine, Rousseau, Rabelais, Rimbaud (and that's just part of the R).
Plus, all the huge variety and masterpieces of the peoples of the earth, before American commercial monoculture and its marketing power ate everything else.
I think it should be a common language that is already used; so English, German, French, Spanish. Of these English or Spanish are the most logical, but again; it won't happen (any time soon).
Interlingua is not a practical alternative. It hasn't been shown to have any real-world advantage over Esperanto and the number of speakers and material is orders of magnitude less.
For example, compare the Interlingua wikipedia to the Esperanto one.
Esperanto was designed to be easy to learn and to lack many of the special cases and "gotchas" present in every natural language.
There are probably many cases where it would be easier for a native of some language to learn a specific similar language (i.e. for a Dutch speaker to learn German, or a Portuguese speaker to learn Spanish), but I would not be surprised if Esperanto minimizes the cost function for the net effort required for all native speakers/all second languages.
- The vocabulary is a big part of the language learning and it is hard to even begin with when the target vocabulary resembles nothing in your original tongues. It can be probably argued that ESL learners can learn Esperanto more quickly, but it still represents only about 1/4 of the total human population.
- Rhotic consonants are particularly hard to pronounce correctly even for many ESL learners, and yet Esperanto retains them.
- Esperanto by itself does not have a word order, but it does have a preferred word order of Subject-Verb-Object which is equally probable as Subject-Object-Verb but much more familiar to Indo-Europeans.
- I think Esperanto, in spite of its original premise, has picked idioms and phrases up as well, as common in every old enough language.
It is now widely accepted that the difference between the native tongue and the target language greatly impacts the learning curve. If Esperanto does succeed, it would not be due to the easiness, because the easiness would be highly subjective.
> - The vocabulary is a big part of the language learning and it is hard to even begin with when the target vocabulary resembles nothing in your original tongues.
While this is true for Esperanto, it is also true for any other language, natural or constructed. And the idea of Esperanto is to reduce the effort learning vocabulary not through familiarity, but by deriving its vocabulary from a minimal set of roots and a system of suffixes. In Esperanto, if you know the word for "big", you automatically know how to say "small", "huge" and "tiny". This is not the case in most natural languages.
Of course Esperanto will be much easier to learn for someone who already speaks some Germanic or Romance language than to anybody else on the planet. But even to a monolingual Chinese (or whatever) speaker, I believe building a working vocabulary in Esperanto is going to take less effort than in English, Spanish or German.
> It can be probably argued that ESL learners can learn Esperanto more quickly, but it still represents only about 1/4 of the total human population.
But far more than 1/4 of the total population of _Europe_, which is the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion.
> In Esperanto, if you know the word for "big", you automatically know how to say "small", "huge" and "tiny". This is not the case in most natural languages.
Oh? I have heard that "granda" means big, "giganta" or "kolosa" means huge and "eta" means tiny... :-)
Of course I know what you want to say. One can derive "malgranda" (non-big, i.e. small), "grandega" (more-big, i.e. huge) or "malgrandega" (tiny) from a single root "granda". But that alone does not explain all other words! For example, the Zamenhof's original dictionary [1] lists both "grand-" and "et-" as root words while "gigant-" or "kolos-" are missing (probably later additions, haven't checked). Why the heck do you need to know both "grand-" and "et-" when one is an antonym to the other? [2]
I'm not an esperantisto and I'm not able to discern the nuance behind all those different words, but I see a sign of the mature language here: once regular, now naturalized. It is not necessarily bad and the artificial origin can still help learning, but I would be rather careful to claim that it is "easier to learn than any naturally evolved language". And that leads to...
> But far more than 1/4 of the total population of _Europe_, which is the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion.
You have said universally, even though you didn't seem to realize it. And even when we concentrate to Europe, the actual number of ESL learners is not too different: 38% [3].
But yeah, most Europeans can speak either Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages [3] that form the Esperanto grammar and vocabulary. Still, in the same census most Europeans seem to be much more interested in ESL than others [4] and it would be very hard to convince them to learn Esperanto instead.
[2] Of course, the answer is that it isn't. "et-" is described as "marque diminution, décroissance" i.e. "marks decrease or reduction" and not strictly an opposite of "grand-". It is therefore a fault of fellow esperantistos to use it as "tiny"! </joke>
China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University and Radio Peking has regular news broadcasts in it.
> Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc...
I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true. (I'm a native Korean speaker with a working knowledge of English as you can see. And I'm not even opposing to Esperanto in general.) It would be great to have concrete numbers to backup this claim; by comparison, it seems that the prior Esperanto knowledge actually helps learning European languages [1], which again indirectly shows the European influence to Esperanto.
> It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family.
The article correctly points out that the "European" or "Asiatic" labels are not necessarily good groupings, but that's only because those groupings completely disregard both the history and the linguistics. It is absurd to say that Esperanto is very different from other Indo-European languages because Esperanto is isolating and others are not [2]. When we are gauging simliarities the historical influence cannot and should not be dismissed.
> China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University and Radio Peking has regular news broadcasts in it.
There are several Esperanto courses around the world, I'm aware of one in Korea, and that doesn't make the state a sort of supporter. Talking about China Radio International (CRI, originally known as Radio Peking), it is comparable to Voice of America (VOA) in such that both are propaganda broadcasts and target as much languages as possible. It is not special for them to have Esperanto versions.
[2] That is, even after acknowledging the unusual statement that Esperanto is not agglutinative because its "affixes" can in fact freely move inside a word (and even concludes that Japanese is also not agglutinative to the similar extent). I think this is a fair assessment by its own, but it would be inappropriate to reframe the original question with a unusual definition.
Yes, both sound farfetched because "easier to learn" does not imply "easy to learn". Those characteristics do make the language easier to learn, but its Indo-European lineage (that I have detailed in the sibling comments) makes it much harder to learn for non-Indo-European speakers.
Your point is still not substantiated. There are many language pairs closer than Esperanto (I mean, there exists x and y such that `d(x,y) < max(d(x,eo), d(y,eo))`), even after the easiness due to the artificial origin is accounted for.
Of course there are languages that are so close together speakers can understand each other without even studying.
But I'm sure there is no language (with at least 1 million speakers) which is easier than Esperanto to learn for the average Asian. It isn't a European thing.
The concept of Natural Law was an important part of enlightenment legal thinking. When the Declaration of Independence invokes the 'Laws of Nature', it's authors would certainly have been aware of and intentionally referencing contemporary thinking on the subject to justify the declaration.
In fact we know from some legal decisions of the time that Natural Law was explicitly used as justification for various legal decisions, in the absence of explicit written laws on the subject.
The author explicitly said it is not motivated by money for this project.
When you have money, you may like the power it gives you to make incentives so people do what you like. However, in some rare cases, someone doesn't need your money and prefers doing thing how himself likes. If you don't like that, that's your problem and not the one of the people refusing your money.
I'd love to use it, but honestly it's fairly complex to even understand if I can use it. From my home ISP to my compute provider(s), I've not even done enough research to know if I can use it.
Last I recall (years ago) my buddy was running some type of VPN through Comcast just to be able to use IPv6 properly. That's when I decided it was still too new for me.
Clearly I don't know anything on the subject, and I'm not claiming to. These are one of the areas where I don't know, don't desire to know, and want it to "just work". I am however interested in making my applications compliant asap, but until I can reliably use it, I've not even attempted.
So with that big pile of ignorance, are we "there yet"? Ie, could I build applications and run them on a IPv6 compatible host, with hit it with my home ISP with a reasonable expectation that everything will work? (assuming my code works, of course).
I feel like I need a "caniuseIPv6.com" site, similar to https://caniuse.com. From the outside, IPv6 implementation and support seems bizarrely cryptic.
I'm a current Comcast customer. I own my own (non-Comcast-purchased) router (an RT-AC68U) and cable modem (a Motorola Surfboard).
On the modem side, nothing needed to be done for IPv6. Any firmware updates or configuration needed is done by Comcast.
On the router side, there is a dedicated IPv6 configuration page. Settings are:
• Connection Type: Native
• All other available settings: Set to either 'Enable' or 'Stateless'.
That was it. My Mac has IPv6 configuration set to configure 'Automatically', and I get an IP. If I go to plain Google and ask it "what's my ip" I get a IPv6 IP back.
On my iPhone, on wifi, if I do the same "what's my ip" Google search, I get an IPv6 back. My carrier is Ting GSM; if I turn off wifi and do the same Google search, I get a different IPv6 IP back.
At work, IPv6 is rolling out _very_ slowly, but I was able to get a fixed IPv6 address. That has been programmed into the configuration for my laptop's USB-Ethernet adapter, so I have IPv6 at my desk at work. Although most work services are not IPv6-enabled, DNS is.
And at home, IPv6 is enabled and is in active use, both on desktop and on mobile.
If I'm at home and my computer has an IPv6 address, and I want to visit a site that has only IPv4 address, where does the NAT happen? Or does it happen? Or is it sort of like ASCII in UTF-8; all IPv4 addresses are directly representable in the IPv6 format? But even if that, how does the IPv4 service send a response back to me?
At home you will be "dual stack". That means your operating system implements an entire IPv4 network stack and an entire IPv6 stack, it will see this site only has IPv4, and use IPv4. If your IPv4 access goes through a NAT, then it will use the NAT exactly as if you didn't have IPv6 at all.
(Yes, all IPv4 addresses can be represented as IPv6 addresses in a reserved zero prefix network, some network APIs just offer IPv6 and then treat IPv4 addresses this way for convenience, but we obviously don't route packets this way since those would be IPv6 packets, yet they're for an IPv4 destination which can't read them)
In some very large deployments they do v6-only. Everything internally is IPv6, when you connect to that IPv4 only site you'd actually connect to a company-provided gateway that speaks IPv6 on your side but IPv4 to the outside world.
If you're big enough this makes loads of sense - now you have this vast address space for everything, all your systems are simply configured for IPv6 only (not twice the configuration) and it pretty much just works. You buy some specialist appliances at the edge for that translation, but your users only have IPv6 stuff.
Wouldn't it have been nice for IPv6 to provide a basic translation protocol or mapping for seamless migration and backwards compatibility? Where your IPv4 address is also an IPv6 address?
I'd welcome someone showing me how that was basically impossible, but I don't see why the entire IPv4 space isn't in a special prefix / address space of ipv6 since they allegedly have so many atoms of mappings.
This was done, it was called 6to4 and it worked pretty well when native IPv6 was less available. The gateways had an anycast IPv6 address too so you didn't have to manually configure the address of your gateway to the real IPv6 internet.
As an example, if we look at https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/container-vm-guestboo... then there are a couple of things here that are IPv4 only. The first is that the application is only configured to listen on the IPv4 address family, app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=80), on linux if that was changed to app.run(host='::', port=80) this the application would be able to receive both IPv4 and IPv6 requests (on windows the situation is different however)
The second, and less important change, is that the redis connection is using 127.0.0.1, and if instead it was using "localhost" then that would resolve to the correct address family. This is less important as it is only relevant if there is no IPv4 on the server host, the first change would allow your app to accept IPv6 traffic.
Neither of these changes are required if there is a dual stack proxy or CDN that sits infront of your application, as they will most likely talk to your application over IPv4.
The other gotcha is if you try to interrogate clientIP for analytics, authorization, geo-ip etc, which may need a little more care.
From your point of view it will "just work". One day you'll get an IPv6 address, if you haven't already, and it will look and feel identical to your IPv4 address. So I wouldn't worry about it.
(As a comcast customer that "one day" for me was several years ago)
Actually, IPv6 is good design. Adoption is slow because most people and companies always prefer a cheap short term inferior solution compared to the good long term one.
Now, IPv6 is 25% of traffic. It will continue to grow, and at a point the network effect will be on IPv6 side. Not long after that, IPv4 will only be a niche for a few legacy systems.