There's a somewhat relevant concept in Seymour Papert's book Mindstorms. Papert talks about "body-syntonicity" where the act of drawing a circle on the computer screen with LOGO can be seen as bridging children’s sense and knowledge about their own bodies to something abstract. Young children would often pretend to be the LOGO turtle, acting out commands on the floor, during stages of planning a LOGO program, or while debugging LOGO code. It has also been a strategy for teachers to introduce programming and procedural ways of thinking. This video shows this in action (with some followup comments from Papert): https://youtu.be/bOf4EMN6-XA?t=254
Computers and the World of the Future (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/computers-and-world-future) is a highly recommended read. It's not a "history" text per-se, but rather, it is a transcript of a number of talks (and the resulting discussions) given by the then-stalwarts of computing in 1961. It's a fascinating account of the what these people thought about the direction in which computing was taking. John McCarthy, for example, talked about the "utility computing":
"We can envisage computing service companies whose subscribers are connected to them by telephone lines. Each subscriber needs to pay only for the capacity he actually uses, but he has access to all programming languages characteristic of a very large system."
> except that keyboard layouts and input (esp. on mobile devices) is an even bigger mess and even more fragmented than character encoding.
Encoding was in a similar place 10-15 years ago. Almost every publisher in Bengali had their own encoding, font, and keyboard layout - the bigger ones built their own in-house systems, while the smaller ones used systems that were built or maintained by very small operators. To make things even more complicated, these systems needed a very specific combination of operating system and page layout software to work. Now the situation is quite better with most publishers switching to Unicode, at least for public facing content.
With input methods, I expect to see at least some consolidation - I don't necessarily think we need standards here, but there will clear leaders that emerge. Yes, keyboard layouts are influenced by Unicode code-points, but only in a specific context. Usually when people who already have experience with computers start to type in Bengali (or any other Indic language), they use a phonetic keyboard, which is influenced mostly by the QWERTY layout. Then, if they write a significant amount, they find that the phonetic input is not very efficient (typing kha everytime to get খ is painful), and they switch to a system where there's a one-to-one mapping between commonly used characters and keys. This does tend to have a relationship between defined codepoints and keys, but that's probably because the defined codepoints cover the basic characters in the script (so in your case, ্য would need to have a separate key, which I think is fine). There will still be awkward gestures, but that's again, a part of adjusting to the new medium. No one bats an eyelid when hitting "enter" to get a newline - but when we learn to write on paper, we never encounter the concept of a carriage-return.
> I have literally never once heard the jophola referred to as a viram and a য
Interesting - I guess we have somewhat different mental models. For me, I did think of jophola as a "hoshonto + jo", possibly because of the "jo" connection, and this was true even before I started to mess around with computers or Unicode. I always thought about jophola as a "yuktakshar", and if it's a "yuktakshar", I always mentally broke it down to its constituents.
> [...] especially when looking at some incredibly obscure and/or antiquated modifiers that are given their own characters
I think those exist because of backwards compatibility reasons. For Bengali I think Unicode made the right choice to start with the minimum number of code points (based on what ISCII had at that time). As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread - it is an evolving standard, and additions are possible. Khanda-ta did get accepted, and contrary to what many think, non-consortium members can provide their input (for example, I am acknowledged in the khanda-ta document I linked to earlier, and all I did was participate in the mailing list and provide my suggestions and some evidence).
> [...] it's rather confusing mental acrobatics, and it doesn't reflect either how the writing system is taught, or how native speakers use it and think of it on a day-to-day basis.
Mental acrobatics are part-and-parcel of the language, either in digital or non-digital form. If I were to spell out your name aloud, I would end with "ত-এ য-ফলা", which doesn't really say anything about how ত্য is pronounced. While writing on paper, we say "ক-এ ইকার", and then we reorder what we just said to write the ইকার in front of the ক. Even more complicated mental acrobatics - we say ক-এ ওকার, and then proceed to write half of the ওকার in front of the ক and then the other half, after the ক. We don't necessarily think about these when we carry out these acrobatics in our head, but they exist, and we have made the layer on top of the encoding system (rendering, and to some extent, input) deal with these acrobatics as well. My point in the original comment (and to some extent in the preceding one) was to emphasize that a lot of these issues are at the input method level - we should not have to think about encoding as long as it accurately and unambiguously represent whatever we want it to represent.
Just out of curiosity - I would be interested to know more about your learning experience that you feel is not well aligned with the representation of jophola as it is currently.
> The Bengali fonts that you have installed happen to render it as a jophola
It's not only the Bengali font - the text rendering framework of my operating system also needs to have a bunch of complex rules to figure out that a jophola needs to be rendered. It also needs to know that the visual ordering of i-kar is before the preceding consonant cluster (দ in আদিত্য).
> the characters that are required to type a jophola have no semantic, phonetic, or orthographic connection to the jophola.
Not so sure about that. The fact that it's called a "jo"-phola points to a relationship. The relationship may have become less apparent as the script has evolved (though there are words such as সহ্য which makes the relationship more visible), but the distinction is still not as pronounced as between "ta" and "khanda-ta". For the khanda-ta case, it was explicit from the the then-current editions of the dictionaries produced by the language bodies of both Bangladesh and West Bengal that the character had become distinct (স্বতন্ত্র বর্ণ was the phrase that was used). As far as I know, there hasn't been any such claim about jophola from the language bodies. Also, if you look at the collation in Bengali dictionaries, jo-phola is treated as (্+য) for collation.
Not sure if the l33tspeak analogy is fully justified.
In case of the "missing" letter (called khanda-ta in Bengali) for the Bengali equivalent of "suddenly", historically, it has been a derivative of the ta-halant form (ত + ্ + ). As the language evolved, khanda-ta became a grapheme of its own, and Unicode 4.1 did encode it as a distinct grapheme. A nicely written review of the discussions around the addition can be found here: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2004/04252-khanda-ta-review.pdf
I could write the author's name fine: আদিত্য. A search with the string in the Bengali version of Wikipedia pulls up quite a few results as well, so other people are writing it too. The final "letter" in that string is a compound character, and there's no clear evidence that it needs to be treated as an independent one. Even while in primary school, we were taught the final "letter" in the author's name as a conjunct. In contrast, for the khanda-ta case, it could be shown that modern Bengali dictionaries explicitly referred to khanda-ta as an independent character.
For me, many of these problems are more of an input issue, than an encoding issue. Non latin languages have had to shoe-horn their script onto keyboard layouts designed for latin-scripts, and that has been always suboptimal. With touch devices we have newer ways to think about this problem, and people are starting to try out things.
[Disclosure: I was involved in the Unicode discussions about khanda-ta (I was not affiliated with a consortium member) and I have been involved with Indic localization projects for the past 15 years]
Also, we have started to build a Scratch Extension system, where Javascript can be used to extend the functionality of Scratch (you can define blocks that call web-apis, etc.) We will have more information about that in 2015.
Almost there with SSL - we will be rolling it out for testing by the community in the next month, and we hope to get the entire site SSL only by summer 2015. Sorry it took so long.
(One of the annoying things when we tried rolling SSL out a while back: we got a bunch of reports that users with OS X couldn't access the site - turns out the OS X's parental control blocks SSL sites by default unless explicitly allowed in the whitelist: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201813)