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Can those californians now actually show some care towards support for multiple languages in the software they write and encode some basics like support for use

by izacus 3y ago

Can those californians now actually show some care towards support for multiple languages in the software they write and encode some basics like support for users to move between places, countries and regions? :P It's kind of incredible how absolutely terrible most SV products are at supporting other locales and how horrible experience with products is if you dare to do something silly like move to another place. God forbid support for multiple languages from multiple people.

blululu 3y ago
You seem to be operating under some assumptions that Californians are well represented in SV tech companies. I am frequently the only Californian on my team and often the only American in my meetings. Internationalization is just a lot of work. The extent to which it exists is largely due to American style multiculturalism.
- bradlys 3y ago
  The only companies where you’ll see more than one American in a meeting is in startups. They don’t have the bandwidth for internationalization when they can’t even get a domestic audience. People outside of SV don’t get how few Americans are actually working in SV tech.
jwells89 3y ago
I think a lot of this has to do with the tech stacks used to build the software. Some platforms make internationalization relatively simple with a lot of it happening automatically (as with UIKit on iOS), whereas bring-your-own-everything platforms require someone to think to pull in the appropriate libraries and integrate them properly to have any at all.
morbicer 3y ago
I agree that there is a lot of room for improvement. However, proper internationalization is extremely hard and costly. There are soo many languages on the planet and lot of them are quite quirky, my native language is one of them. For example proper pluralization is hell because the declension has multiple forms depending on the amount and noun paradigm. ICU format helps a lot but doesn't solve everything. It's good that browsers are at least getting native support for localization of numbers and datetimes. Right-to-left can make you sweat a lot. Then you have different sentence orders, vastly variable length of words, rules about where it's ok to break line. Then you have non-linguistic aspects like cultural context. Some icons can have different meaning, some images might be offensive. The truth is that if you are a startup, doing all of this is a waste of precious time. You have access to 300m customers just in USA alone and the worldwide middle class with money to spend can usually work with English. Internationalization becomes worthy if you get big and want to penetrate more exotic markets or you want to sell to foreign governments which mandate it. On the other hand even giants like Google can botch it pretty often.

by izacus 3y ago

blululu 3y ago

You seem to be operating under some assumptions that Californians are well represented in SV tech companies. I am frequently the only Californian on my team and often the only American in my meetings. Internationalization is just a lot of work. The extent to which it exists is largely due to American style multiculturalism.

bradlys 3y ago
The only companies where you’ll see more than one American in a meeting is in startups. They don’t have the bandwidth for internationalization when they can’t even get a domestic audience. People outside of SV don’t get how few Americans are actually working in SV tech.

jwells89 3y ago

I think a lot of this has to do with the tech stacks used to build the software. Some platforms make internationalization relatively simple with a lot of it happening automatically (as with UIKit on iOS), whereas bring-your-own-everything platforms require someone to think to pull in the appropriate libraries and integrate them properly to have any at all.

morbicer 3y ago

I agree that there is a lot of room for improvement. However, proper internationalization is extremely hard and costly. There are soo many languages on the planet and lot of them are quite quirky, my native language is one of them. For example proper pluralization is hell because the declension has multiple forms depending on the amount and noun paradigm. ICU format helps a lot but doesn't solve everything. It's good that browsers are at least getting native support for localization of numbers and datetimes. Right-to-left can make you sweat a lot. Then you have different sentence orders, vastly variable length of words, rules about where it's ok to break line. Then you have non-linguistic aspects like cultural context. Some icons can have different meaning, some images might be offensive. The truth is that if you are a startup, doing all of this is a waste of precious time. You have access to 300m customers just in USA alone and the worldwide middle class with money to spend can usually work with English. Internationalization becomes worthy if you get big and want to penetrate more exotic markets or you want to sell to foreign governments which mandate it. On the other hand even giants like Google can botch it pretty often.