inappropriately human-optimized code

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Inappropriately human-centric code optimization is when machine code that should be optimized for machines is poorly optimized via attempts inappropriately focused on human readability.

Archetypical examples are defined by counterproductivity. Many people try to make code more human-readable using configurations that are actually less human-readable than a configuration intended for machine readability. In these cases, the attempt at optimizing for human readability is seen as inappropriate because human readability would have been better served by simply optimizing for machine readability. It’s unclear whether anyone would ever see a reason to declare productive efforts at readability optimization "inappropriate."

As a highly prominent example, most programming languages, including interpreted languages, promote the use of natural language "strings," or labels, without assigned numbers or other compact binary codes; this causes people who speak other languages to waste bandwidth and memory on binary for the natural-language strings of an incorrect language, and worse, it may hinder code collaboration by people from different backgrounds.

Most programming languages even have built-in natural language strings forcibly attached to functionalities of the language itself, such as the "print" function in many languages.

Most programming languages don’t even keep complete documentation of all the natural-language strings they’re bundled with, for the sake of translations.

Since the American military industrial complex has maintained an iron grip for decades over all advanced technological developments and their early manufacturing, the most common example of this issue worldwide tends to be English-centric code. As a result, trust and usability in electronics are undercut for people targeted by the countries of the anglosphere, such as Palestinians. These attempts at human-focused optimization result in optimizing products only for some human populations while reducing the quality for other humans.

The nostr protocol has had its development heavily hindered by these issues; the early implementations of the protocol have used bad programming languages (such as JavaScript), and the initial design for nevents was counterproductively English-centric. This particular design issue makes the wider problem especially difficult to fix, as a new form of nevent needs to be created, along with compatibility tools for converting between the two.