History & future — a founder’s perspective

This is one person’s perspective (Abhishek Choudhary), offered to frame the work, not as neutral encyclopedia. It will be revised; corrections via /fix/ are welcome.

The compression we are trying to undo

“Human civilization spent ~five millennia creating writing systems. Modern computing spent ~seventy years collapsing them — into a Latin keyword, ASCII, English syntax.”

A short, opinionated timeline

Era	What happened (this lens)
antiquity–1900s	Hundreds of scripts encode the world’s knowledge; identity lives in orthography.
1940s–60s	Machine code → assembly → FORTRAN/LISP/COBOL: programming is born in English, in Latin script.
1970s–90s	C, Unix, the internet; ASCII becomes destiny. Localization = surface translation of UI, not of computation.
1991–2000s	Unicode encodes scripts (a huge gift) — but programming itself stays English/Latin.
2003–04	Romenagri (reversible canonical layer) + Hindawi Programming System: systems programming in Indic languages over unmodified GCC.
2020s	ILM generalizes to all scripts/languages; AGI makes linguistic equity urgent, not cosmetic.

Future timeline (intent, not promise)

Horizon	Aim
~1–2 yr	Registries filled toward all encoded scripts; langspec for all scheduled Indian + major world languages; IDE/LSP keyword support.
~3–5 yr	ILM Institute nodes; dockerised linguistics labs; reproducible coverage across families; DOIs throughout.
~10 yr+	Identity-stable substrate as a default option for multilingual computing and humane AGI.

Maps and detailed roadmaps live in the repos; the author will guide changes.