10 ms·

It is interesting that it would be trivial for them to localize the units, it seems like they specifically didn't. As a datapoint of one I was fine with thinki

• Symbiote 10y ago
  > It is interesting that it would be trivial for them to localize the units, it seems like they specifically didn't So, just like a good number of apps made by Americans for use in other countries.
  • Symbiote 10y ago
    Incidentally, why doesn't Android provide a global units setting? Some apps that do change seem to do so based on location, but I don't often want to see miles and feet when I'm travelling in the USA. I assume most Americans travelling elsewhere would rather be given directions in miles.
    • krschultz 10y ago
      In general I think software engineers do a bad job with units. We shouldn't work with floating point numbers, we should work with a number class that has a value and a unit. Prior to working on Android & iOS I basically didn't bother with i18n. Now I never hardcode a string, it's always a reference to a string resource that is easily translated. I think this is a mindset shift brought about because the tools & libraries make it easy. The same is true for datetime formatting and unicode. We're collectively much better at supporting i18n in those areas than we were 15 years ago. I think the next step is for us to do the same but with numbers.
      • derefr 10y ago
        > we should work with a number class that has a value and a unit. Not even a unit. I've always wanted a (majorly-adopted) language and platform where "Integer" or even "Number" are low-level mostly-ignored value types, and you instead work with a type that might be called (something snappier, but equivalent to) "RationalComplexPolynomialUnitedMeasurementWithPrecision". Like, why can't my stdlib functions all take: (-5/6±3.5 + i±1/2) km^2/s^2 ...and do something sensible (stoichiometrically) with it?
        • simcop2387 10y ago
          Closest I can come is my esoteric language I made. It's a rough clone of Frink, but diverged during development in a number of ways: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Language-Farnsworth/lib/Language/Farnsworth/Docs/Syntax.pm http://search.cpan.org/dist/Language-Farnsworth/lib/Language... It's missing the ranged/bracketed number support, but will do the rest of that. 13:27:11 < simcop2387> farnsworth: (-5/6+3.5 + i-1/2) km^2/s^2 -> "kJ/kg" 13:27:12 < farnsworth> simcop2387: (2166.66666666666 + 1000.00000000000*I) kJ/kg It'll auto-convert things into floats if you use them, but it's 100 digit accuracy (configurable). Development has halted, mostly because I couldn't decide how I wanted to tackle adding objects as a first class data type and had a number of issues with the parser I needed to solve to make my life saner (easy way to force a difference between a variable and unit named "kg" etc.) I might pick it up again and try using the parser combinators in Rust and actually compile the language down instead of an interpreter (though i'd remove eval[] to do that).
        • Someone 10y ago
          Because it gets messy very soon. To start with, you would have to pick a set of distributions that is closed under the set of operations you want to perform. If you pick 'all normal distributions' as your set, that means that you can only allow addition, subtraction, and multiplication by a constant (= a normal distribution with zero variance); you won't be able to compute x^2, take a square root, compute |x|, etc. That rules out, for example, computing the variance of a set of inexactly known numbers. To make matters worse, to do this really well, you have to track where values come from. You really want: x = 6±3.5m z = x - x to have z equal to 0±0m, but x = 6±3.5m y = 6±3.5m z = x - y to have z equal to 0±4.9m. Similarly, x+x should be 12±7m, and x+y should be 12±4.9m The best you probably can do is to forget about the second issue, and do interval arithmetic. That is useful, but gives you extremely pessimistic results. Edit: a good solution also would resolve the question of how to handle conditionals. if x > 0 could pick each of its branches according to the probability that x is larger than zero, or even execute both branches partially (whatever that would mean), according to the distribution of x.
• thevibesman 10y ago
  > It is interesting that it would be trivial for them to localize the units, it seems like they specifically didn't. In addition to a possible esthetic preference for km, I had two thoughts for gameplay reasons why they wouldn't localize the units: - Conversion to miles would have a loss of precision in the UI (2.0km vs 1.24m) - The name of the item is a 2.0km, 5.0km, 10km egg; it would seem odd when players were discussing the game online to refer to the items differently depending what country they are from.
  • iokanuon 10y ago
    >gameplay reasons why they wouldn't localize the units Their previous game, Ingress, didn't have any gameplay reasons for using one unit system, yet it still used only metric. See a four year old discussion about Ingress using the metric system alone here: https://reddit.com/r/Ingress/comments/13vjcw/the_real_nianticingress_conspiracy/ https://reddit.com/r/Ingress/comments/13vjcw/the_real_nianti...
    • CydeWeys 10y ago
      There are reasons. It's a worldwide game. Badges, that impact leveling mind you -- I got to level 16 on the back of an onyx Trekker badge, are awarded for walking 10, 100, 300, 1000, and 2500 km. The badges need to be consistent worldwide across all locales, because any player can play anywhere on the globe. It's exactly the same problem with the badge requirements as with the Pokemon egg distances. If you convert it, now the requirements don't make any sense. Hitting 2,500 km walked is a big nice round number, and gives you an onyx badge. Hitting 1,553.4 miles walked is meaningless, but that's what the top badge would be awarded for if written out in miles.
      • iokanuon 10y ago
        There were initially no badges, the game existed for about a year without them.
        • CydeWeys 10y ago
• madaxe_again 10y ago
  Please don't let's have a referendum - the entire planet will go back to imperial - in the UK at least there's still a huge, possibly majority, definitely passionate, group that prefer imperial units. Hence we still have one foot in mph and pints. There's talk of it happening regardless, as without the EU there's no requirement here to use SI units - and one pundit even suggested a return to pre-decimal currency. Either way, people tend to value tradition more than progress or rationalisation. Having a system of weights based on the weight of a grain of emmer wheat is preferable to plenty of people, who don't have to write code or multiply weights or do science, and just want familiar human-scale units. Hell, I'm sure plenty of the aforementioned would prefer imperial too, for the same reason.
  • rmc 10y ago
    > There's talk of it happening regardless, as without the EU there's no requirement here to use SI units The EU did initially have the goal of getting rid of all non-metric units, but gave up in early 2000s since the UK was opposed. A part of me could see an UK-in-the-EEA being forced to switch to metric, if the EU were to go full metric (with the UK not having a vote of course), and that's applying to the EEA (incl UK). And if the UK were to apply to rejoin the EU, I suspect metricification would be one of the requirements of reentry. So the brexit vote might increase the chance of the UK going metric. :)
  • my_first_acct 10y ago
    > Either way, people tend to value tradition more than progress or rationalisation. Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-metric, but the old units are not entirely irrational. For instance, there are 12 inches in a foot, which may seem odd, unless you need to measure 1/3 of a foot. You might argue that the foot represents a future society that uses base-12, while metric lags behind, in the not-as-divisible base-10 world. It's also interesting to note that on rulers, in the US anyway, each inch is subdivided into 16 sub-units, so measurements are usually given as, say, 3 3/16 inches rather than 3.1875 or (rounding) 3.2 inches. In other words, hexadecimal rather than decimal.
    • Someone 10y ago
• thearn4 10y ago
  We've already seen metric creep in a little bit: I'd imagine pretty much every American out there can conceptualize what 2 liters looks like. edit: in addition, military servicemembers should all have a good practical feel for 1km (one "klick").
  • kiiski 10y ago
    Why is that? I'm just curious, because I (finnish) can't associate two liters with anything of the top of my head. Everything is always one liter.
    • bjterry 10y ago
      The largest container of most soda brands available in American supermarkets is a 2L bottle.
    • dogma1138 10y ago
      The "family size" (or store size) soft drink bottles in Europe are usually 2L. Alternatively you can visualize 4 cans of energy drinks (bar the tiny redbull ones) or 4 small bottles of coke, or slightly more than 4 pints of beer ;) I'm actually wondering what is 1L? The only thing I can think off is either the medium milk bottles or the "meal size" soft drink bottles that some convenience stores stock. Unless Finland has a very different bottling system than even Sweden I think you need to think again.
      • kiiski 10y ago
        The 2L soft drinks are probably available, but I just never buy any of them. Milk, juice and yoghurt come in one liter packages.
        • justinv 10y ago
          Right, but I'd imagine you can conceptualize the 2l bottle of coke that you see in the supermarket - even if you don't buy it/drink it.
• barney54 10y ago
  But why woukd Americans care if the entire world uses the same units of weight and distance?
  • StavrosK 10y ago
    Why would the world care if Americans are using a different unit?
    • jessaustin 10y ago
      Why, indeed. My impression is that you are European. Do you care which system(s) we use, and if so, why?
      • StavrosK 10y ago
        I don't care which systems you use, unless I have to write an app that works everywhere, in which case I have to make it work one way for the whole world and another for the US and Liberia.
        • jessaustin 10y ago
          First, TFA illustrates that this isn't really a requirement, at least for some apps. Second, L11n for different locales is an unavoidable aspect of app production. If it's difficult to use measures that are intelligible to users, it's probably difficult to make their lives better in other ways too. This seems different than the sky-is-falling metric appeals we see from time to time.
          • StavrosK 10y ago
            "Requirement" is relative. People will definitely prefer their own units to others. Localization has to be done, sure. That doesn't mean it's binary, that you either localize or you don't. The more things you have to localize, the more effort it is, and that's why standards are good. I don't agree with "if it's hard for you to spend time on things that aren't necessary, it will be hard to spend time on things that are necessary, too". I think it's objective that the fewer changes you have to do because of arbitrary legacy, the better it is. It would be easier to reach everyone if we all spoke the same language, had the same culture, used the same units, etc. It's hard to teach everyone the same language, but it's less hard to agree on a system of units. Almost everyone else has done it.
• insulanian 10y ago
  > hopefully some time in the future, we'll realize it's better for everyone to use the same units, and have a referendum. Imperialeave!
  • ENTP 10y ago
    Menter!
• everyone 10y ago
  Also its a buggy mess, I dont think distance localisation would be that much of a priority if they also couldnt build something that doesnt hang every few minutes. I've been working specifically as a Unity developer for a couple of years and this thing smacks of amateurishness.
• jlarocco 10y ago
  > It is interesting that it would be trivial for them to localize the units, it seems like they specifically didn't. I don't know if I'd call it "trivial". It's not a difficult and challenging problem, but it's boring and tends to be a pain in the butt because somebody has to hunt down everywhere numbers with units are displayed, and it's easy to miss some because it's not easy to notice at a glance whether a number is in metric or imperial, etc.. Even NASA has had problems with unit conversion. And the conversion in software is easy, but it raises questions of how the converted units would affect gameplay. Would "Walk for 2 km" directly become "Walk for 1.24 miles". Or should everything change a bit so it becomes "Walk for 1 mile," so the numbers work out better. At the end of the day, Americans aren't completely stupid. Kilometers aren't completely unheard of. They'll convert and get over it. Nobody's going to stop playing the game over it, so there's no point spending money to do the conversion and work out the issues around it.
  • to3m 10y ago
    Actually, it's super-easy to tell whether a number is metric or Imperial: it's metric. UK programmers aren't stupid. Metric vs US Customary is a completely different matter and I couldn't possibly comment.
• city41 10y ago
  It's been slowly seeping in since at least the 70s, when the Metric Conversion Act was passed. I remember when I was a little kid in Michigan all the street signage had both kilometers and miles on them. Yet here we are over 40 years later and the penetration of metric is still basically nil (in day to day scenarios, not science/engineering). I'm not convinced America will switch to metric in my life time.
• anexprogrammer 10y ago
  If the 150 years of attempting to metricate the UK is anything to go by, it'll happen by legislation otherwise barely at all outside of industry. The UK had legislation permitting metric units since the mid 1800s (as did the US apparently). Full metrication was recommended around a similar time! It was 1965 legislation was passed to fully metricate within 10 years. We taught only metric in schools since the early 70s. A huge publicity campaign and changeover began. Only the EU really pushed it along by requiring only metric measurements, since around 2000, on packaging with a few exceptions. The previous 30 years was a weird half hearted mix of units mainly down to where something came from. So now we buy a 454g jar of jam etc. There's no need for it to be 1lb, but it almost always still is. You'll still hear folks young enough that even their parents were only taught metric ask for half a pound of something at the supermarket counter. The shop then gives them a metric marked equivalent. Youngsters still talk of weight in pounds, and height in feet and so forth but have never been taught imperial units. A good part of must be social (hearing on tv, from parents etc), but I suspect the human friendliness of imperial units, being generally coarser (6ft or 182cm, 454g or 1lb) and often derived from body parts, is part of the reason they still stick around so tenaciously. The thing outside EU weights and measures, weed, is also still always in ounces and quarters! :)
  • boznz 10y ago
    Probably nothing to do with the parents, do not underestimate the power of American TV
  • nattofriends 10y ago
    I thought it was common to quote weight in stone in the UK?
    • anexprogrammer 10y ago
      I was thinking of 5lb of potatoes, 1/2 lb of cheese when I was typing. Yes body weight is usually stone and fractions, or stone and pounds. I expect everyone over 15 knows their weight in stone. I doubt most of them know how many pounds in a stone any more! :)