This makes me wonder what effect printing had on English. English used to be chock full of ligatures and special forms for letters (s and ſ for example). I can only imagine as a typesetter and type maker this was all very annoying and people simply started to drop them. However, WP claims [1] ligatures made typesetting easier and it was the introduction of Sans serif fonts in the 20th century that finally drove them away. I'd be interested in a more definitive history.

In either case, by the early 20th century, English (and most Latin based writing systems) were in pretty good shape for computerization, and the limited capacity of computing systems were kind of built around English orthography.

Nevertheless, most of these complaints would be true of English as well if we had carried through with our traditional system of writing. One can almost think of Hangul as a 100% ligature based writing system...there's fairly complex rules about what letters can be typed next to what other letters and produce a valid character.

In Asia, it took longer for general purpose computing to catch on because of both memory and high-resolution display requirements. 7-bit characters being displayed in an 8x8 on-screen block weren't going to cut it. It took several generations of advancement before computers that could handle general purpose Japanese properly went on sale. For Japan, a culture that prizes tradition in many ways, the idea of just throwing away 2 of the 3 written systems in order to cram writing into barely functional computing systems, and then adopting that convention culture wide, would be unthinkable. Japan instead went full-tilt on a paper-based system and computerization was focused on scanning and transmission: fax machines, scanners, high speed telecommunications, etc. Even today, the typical Japanese office is a paper-filled minefield full of paper handling devices the typical American office haven't seen since the early 1980s. More importantly, there are reasons the Japanese use three (really four if you count romaji) scripts. Something written in katakana gives it an elements of "foreignness", a bit of semantic hinting about it's origin and how it should be considered. Imagine you're 11 years old about to play the role of a Western Knight in a video game, the game asks you to input your name, but only offers you katakana, this feels to you more immersive. We have ways of trying to do the same in English, but it's far more limited.

Before computing took off, handling Asian languages was always a chore. When telegraphs were common, Chinese was encoded using a complex telegraph code [2]. This code was so useful that it's still used today in some places. During the cultural revolution, China had a moment where they could have introduced a simpler orthography, Zhuyin Fuhao, that's easy to learn to read and write (only slightly more complicated than Korean) and has full tonal representation. But it does a poor job disambiguating the tremendous number of homophones in the highly monosyllabic dialects of Chinese. It also doesn't provide a unified representation for words across dialects (the names "Wu" and "Ng" might be the same Chinese characters, but would be written differently in Zhuyin Fuhao). This would reverse thousands of years of cultural unification via written scripts previously enjoyed by China's many ethnicities and dialect speakers. (Fun fact, Christianity was first spread to Korea through Korean diplomatic missions to China, where Korean scholars communicated with Chinese converts through writing only as they didn't speak each other's language). These tradeoffs were simply unacceptable and instead China simply tried to reduce the number of strokes and characters in their writing reform.

So does all this suck for computing? Yeah sure. But there's lots of weight in the semantics providing the why things are the way they are. China can't just adopt a simple to compute writing system any more easily than English Speakers could adopt a complex logography. Or for English Speakers to adopt a sane spelling system (the reasons for why our spelling is so horrible are similar to many of the historic reasons Asian languages have hung on to their overly complex orthographies).

If he's complaining about these things and pointing to English as an island of relative sanity, he should be glad he doesn't have to support older versions of the English language and orthography!

HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code