Courtyard House: A Major Power's Heavy Industry, Hand-Crafted Nuclear Fusion

Autumn 1980, Beijing, Red Star Software Research Institute.

The ginkgo leaves outside the window have turned yellow, carpeting the ground in a golden hue.

However, in a top-secret conference room called "Cangjie", the atmosphere was like a debate without gunpowder.

"Absurd! Utterly absurd!"

The person who slammed the table was Stephen, a computer science professor from MIT. He was an advisor who had accompanied the IBM delegation to investigate the Loongson ecosystem.

At that moment, he was pointing at the lines of Chinese characters on the blackboard, his face flushed red.

"Computer science is based on mathematics, and the common language of mathematics is English and the Greek alphabet! You're trying to write code using... using this hieroglyphic script? This is blasphemy against science! This is turning back the clock of history!"

Stephen's anger represented the mainstream view in Western academia at the time.

In their view, ASCII is the bible of the computer world. All programming languages, from ASCII to C, from Fortran to Pascal, are built upon English logic.

Want to program in Chinese? Isn't that just replacing "if" with "if" and "else" with "otherwise"? That's pointless and a waste of time on translation!

"Professor Stephen, please have a seat."

Su Zheng sat across the conference table, his expression calm. He held a purple clay teacup in his hand and gently blew on the tea leaves floating on the surface of the water.

"You say that computer language must be English because you invented computers."

Su Zheng put down his teacup, his gaze deepening. "But now, we manufactured the chips, we set the architecture. Why should the rules... still be dictated by you?"

"This isn't just a matter of rules, it's a matter of efficiency!"

Stephen countered, "English words are separated by spaces, making the logic clear. But Chinese... even the boundaries between words are blurry. Writing a compiler for Chinese would overwhelm the CPU just with lexical analysis!"

"Yeah?"

Su Zheng smiled.

He turned to Ye Xinyi beside him, "Xinyi, demonstrate to the professor what... the efficiency of Chinese is."

Ye Xinyi nodded and turned on the "Loongson" workstation connected to the large screen.

The screen is completely black.

As she tapped her fingers, lines of bright white Chinese character codes flowed down like a waterfall.

That's not a simple localization.

It was a completely new and never-before-seen grammatical structure.

Program Name: A Laugh in the Vast Ocean

[Definition: Heaven and Earth (screen), Sun and Moon (loop), All Living Beings (array)]

Input: Main function

Let the width of heaven and earth be 1024.

Let the number of sentient beings be 100.

Observation: All beings suffer (initialize array)

If: sentient beings [a certain] > desires

Then: 斩 (delete)

or:

Crossing (moving)

end

Sigh: Time flies (main loop)

Reply: Heaven and Earth

Painting: All Living Beings

only

Out

As Ye Xinyi typed, the scene fell silent.

Those Chinese characters are no longer cold, impersonal commands.

When combined, they create a strange sense of rhythm.

It doesn't look like writing code; it's more like writing a... classical poem? Or a piece of parallel prose?

"What...what the hell is this?" Stephen stared in disbelief. "'Observe'? 'If'? 'Sigh'? What do these words mean in the compiler?"

"The character '观' represents iterate."

As Ye Xinyi typed on the keyboard, she coldly explained, "'If' is a conditional statement, 'sigh' is an infinite loop, and 'cross' is a memory copy."

"What's the point? It's just a name change, isn't it?"

"The significance lies in... information density."

Su Zheng stood up, walked to the blackboard, picked up the chalk, and drew a square.

"In English, to describe the logic of 'traversing an array and deleting elements that meet the conditions,' you need to write for, if, curly braces, and a bunch of long variable names."

"But in Chinese."

Su Zheng pointed to the few lines of text on the screen, "One word is a world."

"Chinese is a two-dimensional pictographic script. Each Chinese character carries far more semantic information than an English word. In our 'Cangjie' compiler, a Chinese character instruction can be directly mapped to a 'macro instruction' at the bottom layer of the Loongson architecture."

Su Zheng's voice rose a few decibels:

"In other words, for the same function, the English code would need to be written in 100 lines, which would then be compiled into 500 machine code lines."

"And the Chinese code only needs to be written in 20 lines, and after compilation... only 300 lines of machine code!"

"Impossible!" Stephen shouted. "The compiler efficiency couldn't possibly differ that much!"

Let's run a benchmark test.

Su Zheng gestured for him to proceed.

Test item: Fast Fourier Transform (FFT).

Left screen: C language version, written by Stephen himself and optimized to the extreme.

Right side screen: Cangjie language version, with a poem composed on the spot by Ye Xinyi.

"start!"

As the Enter key is pressed.

Two identical Loongson computers began to run at full speed.

The progress bar is rushing forward rapidly.

one second.

two seconds.

drop!

The result popped up first on the right side of the screen: Time taken: 1.24 seconds.

Meanwhile, the screen on the left is still spinning.

The result didn't appear until 1.8 seconds later.

1.24 vs 1.8.

It's almost 50% faster!

"This...this is not scientific..."

Stephen slumped into his chair, his face covered in cold sweat. "Why? Why so fast?"

"Because of 'artistic conception'."

Ye Xinyi closed her laptop and said calmly, "C language focuses on 'how'; it needs to teach a novice CPU how to do things step by step."

"The Cangjie language focuses on 'what'. The grammatical structure of Chinese inherently contains a description of the overall logic. Our compiler can understand the 'meaning' of the code, thereby directly calling the parallel computing units inside the CPU."

She pointed to her head:

"In Loongson's architecture, we have pre-installed a microinstruction set specifically for handling 'Chinese character logic.' This is our home-field advantage."

Su Zheng looked at the completely silent Western delegation and felt a surge of intense pleasure.

This is cultural confidence.

Who says code has to be in English?

Who says logic has to be linear?

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors could describe the universe and all things using classical Chinese. Today, we can build a digital world using Chinese character codes just as effectively!

Moreover, it can be built more beautifully, faster, and stronger!

"Mr. Su..."

After a long silence, the IBM representative finally spoke, his tone less arrogant and more respectful: "Could you license this... 'Cangjie' language to us?"

"certainly."

Su Zheng smiled and nodded. "However, if you want to learn Cangjie, you must first learn the Shuowen Jiezi (a dictionary of Chinese characters). I think you all should enroll your programmers in a Chinese language class when you get back."

"in addition……"

Su Zheng pointed to a calligraphy scroll hanging on the wall of the conference room: "The Tao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, Three gives birth to all things."

"This is the origin of binary. In fact, we are the pioneers in this field."

……

After the foreign guests left, a cheer erupted in the conference room.

The young Chinese programmers were so excited that tears welled up in their eyes.

Once upon a time, in order to learn programming, they had to carry around thick English-Chinese dictionaries and memorize those tedious words by rote. Integer, Float, Pointer... each word was a hurdle, blocking countless talented but poorly English-speaking Chinese teenagers.

But today.

The glass ceiling is broken.

"Minister Su! I'd like to give it a try!"

A boy wearing glasses rushed to the computer, "I want to use Cangjie to write... to write a Snake game!"

"Write!"

Su Zheng waved his hand and said, "Not only will we write a Snake game, but also an assignment system, office software, and games! From today onwards, our screens will not only have Chinese characters on the interface, but also the soul of Chinese characters!"

Ye Xinyi stood beside Su Zheng, watching the excited young people.

"You've released these children," she said softly. "Do you know what that means?"

"What does that mean?"

"This means that in the future, Western hackers will have to pass the Chinese Proficiency Test Level 6 before they can crack our code."

Ye Xinyi made a rare joke, "Besides, they'll never understand why we hid the phrase 'Sunset glow and lone wild goose fly together' in the variable name."

Su Zheng laughed loudly.

Yes, that's the romance of Chinese code.

It is rational, and it is emotional. It is logical, and it is poetic.

For the first time, it gave cold silicon-based chips a temperature.

"I like it."

Su Zheng's smile faded as he looked out the window. "The foundation is laid, the pillars are erected. Now, it's time to build the house."

"You mean...?"

Graphical interface.

Su Zheng pulled out the simple mouse he had brought back from Silicon Valley from his pocket.

"With the high efficiency of the Cangjie language, we can finally run that... truly future-oriented interface on this chip whose computing power is not yet strong enough."

"Next, we want to bring Windows to China ten years ahead of schedule."

……