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>I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single
by SilasX 5y ago
>I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.
I know someone who won't sympathize with this difficulty, as he insisted on an obscure abortion joke in the man page for abort(), which will come off as super confusing to anyone who doesn't know the reference.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015644
- lupire 5y agoRMS has been known to make the odd comment (once or twice) where raising awareness of an important idea takes priority over immediate convenience. That doesn't mean he unsympathetic to challenges of foreign languages.
- SilasX 5y agoIf the documentation is intended to be used as a technical reference by people who won’t get the reference, that is, by its nature, unsympathetic to the people who will be using it, no matter what he claims — and I don’t think he has ever actually shown how he’s weighed such concerns.