3 ms·
I once worked on a large app that had always tried to support translation, but that had never actually been used by clients (after more than a decade running in
by jaza 4y ago
I once worked on a large app that had always tried to support translation, but that had never actually been used by clients (after more than a decade running in production) in a language other than English. Well, what do you know, after all those years, finally a big client signed on, and this client needed the whole UI not in English.
Trouble was, in practice there were gaps in the translation support all over the place, and so several rounds of patching those gaps and performing manual testing were needed, which took a lot of time and manpower. So, was it worth half-maintaining the translation support for so many years? I guess it would have been even more work had it needed to be added from scratch; but it was still a lot of work cleaning it up.
Ironically, the client in question then cancelled on us, shortly before going live, and after we'd finished all that work. Although another non-English client did go live with us the year after that, so it wasn't wasted effort in the end.
- creeble 4y agoNot too ironic I think, more common than not. I wish I had a box of nickels for every feature that cost $100k+ to implement that ended up being a dead end (i.e., sales benefit never materialized) or, even more commonly, the benefit materialized and was less than $100k and resulted in a feature that required continued maintenance and ongoing support cost forever.
- bcrosby95 4y agoI think this is one of the biggest problems with violating YAGNI. They're effectively dead code paths that are never truly being executed, and developers might assume they aren't full of bugs. But they oftentimes are.
- hinkley 4y agoThere's hard coding strings, and then there's hard-coding sentence fragments. If you hard code strings, you can't translate at all. If you hard-code sentence structure ("There are " + n + " copies of this book in stock") then you're going to sound like Yoda in a number of languages. Adjectives are a particularly bad sticking point. Is it a large red book (English), a large book that is red (French), or a book that is large and red? But Verb-Object-Noun order also vary just within first world nations, so even the lame classist/racist/nationalistic excuse of "We don't need their money anyway" doesn't really fly. One of your competitors will be very happy to take Japan's money.