3 ms·

A lot of these seem to be the "not America" test.

jiggawatts 2y ago
Something that drives me crazy about the big public clouds is that everything is US regional defaults with - if you’re lucky - UTC as the time zone. We’ve spent easily several months of engineering time “fixing” apps that kept picking up these defaults directly or indirectly. E.g.: What regional options does Azure Data Factory use for parsing CSV by default for batch jobs if you deploy an instance in Australia East? Your guess is as good as mine! It’s especially hilarious considering that all three major operating systems ask these questions up front, just as they as for a password instead of providing a result. Vendors have had to learn the hard way that defaults for some settings are nonsense for 96% of the planet, and now the same companies have forgotten this lesson and will have to learn it all over again.
- lxgr 2y ago
  UTC timestamps, but displayed on a 12-hour clock, are among the most cursed things I have to work with every day. Always trips me up, and much more so than "fully US" conventions (i.e. local time and MM/DD/YYYY and am/pm timestamps). Sometimes (but not always), it helps to change the locale to en_UK. But then spellcheck becomes confusing...
lxgr 2y ago
Sure, but there are degrees of "not-America-ness", and not all of the examples listed in TFA occur in all other regions. UK? So far so good: Maybe those time parsing routines will need some brushing up for the 24 hour based clock, and day and month are swapped, but at least the decimal separator is the same. And it's almost the same language, and definitely the same alphabet. France? Now you're adding accents to the mix, although in a pinch you can just drop them. (Not that it's a good idea, but there's no better solution.) But watch out: Different decimal separator! Germany? Better rethink that "just drop the accents" solution; it changes the meaning of words, sometimes drastically/embarrassingly so. However, there is a canonical way of transliterating äöü! Chinese: Obviously, abandon all hopes of using Latin-1. But at least you can use the US decimal separator again :)
- Tallain 2y ago
  And then tacking on to another poster's "Thai test": there are multiple semi-canonical ways to transliterate Thai to English, and I can only imagine the landscape for Thai to other languages. Added to that, times of day can be referred to in several ways (1 PM could be, literally, "afternoon o'clock") and sometimes different words for the different "sections" of the day, e.g. 7 PM is "1 evening". Depending on your audience and intent. Lots of variation. As an American, it's really eye-opening to learn other languages and cultures and apply that context to your work in software.
  - Doxin 2y ago
    It's pretty wild how different languages can handle things differently. Even basic stuff like numbers. Thank goodness we've standardized on using arabic numerals most of the time. writing out numbers is a mess. E.g. in dutch the last two numbers get swapped when written out: 21 -> "eenentwintig" -> "one and twenty" French gets especially zany: 80 -> "quatre-vingts" -> "four twenties" I'm sure there's about a million more ways languages have wildly differing concepts of numbers from what you expect. Now repeat the above exercise for numbers, dates, money, names, just about everything.
- s4i 2y ago
  And then there’s the Fennoscandia test: do you convert äöåø with the same rules as for German? Because, if you do, it looks very silly at least in Finnish. This is often the case in international sporting events and is basically a joke among Finns how Räikkönen becomes the insanity of ”Raeikkoenen” etc. ”Raikkonen” would be much preferred.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Good point – transliteration obviously needs to be aware of the source language! Even in English, or you might end up attending a Motoerhead concert :)
penguin_booze 2y ago
Indeed. Somehow the rest of us needs a test!

Something that drives me crazy about the big public clouds is that everything is US regional defaults with - if you’re lucky - UTC as the time zone. We’ve spent easily several months of engineering time “fixing” apps that kept picking up these defaults directly or indirectly. E.g.: What regional options does Azure Data Factory use for parsing CSV by default for batch jobs if you deploy an instance in Australia East? Your guess is as good as mine! It’s especially hilarious considering that all three major operating systems ask these questions up front, just as they as for a password instead of providing a result. Vendors have had to learn the hard way that defaults for some settings are nonsense for 96% of the planet, and now the same companies have forgotten this lesson and will have to learn it all over again.

lxgr 2y ago
UTC timestamps, but displayed on a 12-hour clock, are among the most cursed things I have to work with every day. Always trips me up, and much more so than "fully US" conventions (i.e. local time and MM/DD/YYYY and am/pm timestamps). Sometimes (but not always), it helps to change the locale to en_UK. But then spellcheck becomes confusing...

lxgr 2y ago

Sure, but there are degrees of "not-America-ness", and not all of the examples listed in TFA occur in all other regions. UK? So far so good: Maybe those time parsing routines will need some brushing up for the 24 hour based clock, and day and month are swapped, but at least the decimal separator is the same. And it's almost the same language, and definitely the same alphabet. France? Now you're adding accents to the mix, although in a pinch you can just drop them. (Not that it's a good idea, but there's no better solution.) But watch out: Different decimal separator! Germany? Better rethink that "just drop the accents" solution; it changes the meaning of words, sometimes drastically/embarrassingly so. However, there is a canonical way of transliterating äöü! Chinese: Obviously, abandon all hopes of using Latin-1. But at least you can use the US decimal separator again :)

Tallain 2y ago
And then tacking on to another poster's "Thai test": there are multiple semi-canonical ways to transliterate Thai to English, and I can only imagine the landscape for Thai to other languages. Added to that, times of day can be referred to in several ways (1 PM could be, literally, "afternoon o'clock") and sometimes different words for the different "sections" of the day, e.g. 7 PM is "1 evening". Depending on your audience and intent. Lots of variation. As an American, it's really eye-opening to learn other languages and cultures and apply that context to your work in software.
- Doxin 2y ago
  It's pretty wild how different languages can handle things differently. Even basic stuff like numbers. Thank goodness we've standardized on using arabic numerals most of the time. writing out numbers is a mess. E.g. in dutch the last two numbers get swapped when written out: 21 -> "eenentwintig" -> "one and twenty" French gets especially zany: 80 -> "quatre-vingts" -> "four twenties" I'm sure there's about a million more ways languages have wildly differing concepts of numbers from what you expect. Now repeat the above exercise for numbers, dates, money, names, just about everything.
s4i 2y ago
And then there’s the Fennoscandia test: do you convert äöåø with the same rules as for German? Because, if you do, it looks very silly at least in Finnish. This is often the case in international sporting events and is basically a joke among Finns how Räikkönen becomes the insanity of ”Raeikkoenen” etc. ”Raikkonen” would be much preferred.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Good point – transliteration obviously needs to be aware of the source language! Even in English, or you might end up attending a Motoerhead concert :)

penguin_booze 2y ago

Indeed. Somehow the rest of us needs a test!