6 ms·

Am I missing something? The realisation comes down to „yes, there are regional differences in formatting“, and doesn’t strike me as a particularly profound insi

by 9dev 2y ago

Am I missing something? The realisation comes down to „yes, there are regional differences in formatting“, and doesn’t strike me as a particularly profound insight.

okanat 2y ago
When I was learning programming in 2008 as a student and was still using my computer in Turkish, the number of Java and PHP programs that did not specify a proper locale was outrageously large. For whatever messed up reasons they had lowercase / uppercase conversions for importing modules, opening files. Glibc library in Linux systems is also designed by shortsighted people so libc functions like tolower() made conversions in the local locale. The end result was phpMyAdmin usually failed with "include not found" because its developers did this: include(tolower(MODULE NAME)) and BLABLAINTERFACE was converted into blablaınterface (there is no dot on top of i there look closely). Or Eclipse failed in similar ways since it was searching plugins using locale-dependent functions.
rideontime 2y ago
Maybe this was less widely known back in 2008 when it was published? Still doesn't explain why it's getting attention now.
kolme 2y ago
No, you're not missing anything. Anyone programming outside of the USA is well aware of localisation and how to use it.
- lucb1e 2y ago
  I wouldn't say that last bit though. So much code fails outside of the origin country, also from e.g. Dutch coders even though we're well aware how small our country is and how much we rely on trade and collaboration. People across the EU come into the country so you'd need to support other languages, payment methods, currencies, special characters in names, date notations, address formatting, timezones, phone numbers, etc. Part of Belgium even speaks the same language so the barrier really small, or even across the atlantic ocean where there are more people "in" The Netherlands except nobody ever realizes that a part of the country uses the US Dollar as its currency and is in a very different timezone. Now living in Germany, they even translate timezone names. Not only do you have to look in a timezone database to figure out what a MESZ is, when the timezone database says "there is no such timezone" you have to realize you need to look in a German translation of it. Very approachable for the international people that need to know which timezone that German picked for the meeting invite Which is all to say: sure, people know other countries exist and are more likely to need to learn to use localization, but by default it's not like everyone knows how to do that
CarVac 2y ago
It's that Turkey in particular makes a good test for a lot of these regional differences.

by 9dev 2y ago

Am I missing something? The realisation comes down to „yes, there are regional differences in formatting“, and doesn’t strike me as a particularly profound insight.

okanat 2y ago

When I was learning programming in 2008 as a student and was still using my computer in Turkish, the number of Java and PHP programs that did not specify a proper locale was outrageously large. For whatever messed up reasons they had lowercase / uppercase conversions for importing modules, opening files. Glibc library in Linux systems is also designed by shortsighted people so libc functions like tolower() made conversions in the local locale. The end result was phpMyAdmin usually failed with "include not found" because its developers did this: include(tolower(MODULE NAME)) and BLABLAINTERFACE was converted into blablaınterface (there is no dot on top of i there look closely). Or Eclipse failed in similar ways since it was searching plugins using locale-dependent functions.

rideontime 2y ago

Maybe this was less widely known back in 2008 when it was published? Still doesn't explain why it's getting attention now.

kolme 2y ago

No, you're not missing anything. Anyone programming outside of the USA is well aware of localisation and how to use it.

lucb1e 2y ago
I wouldn't say that last bit though. So much code fails outside of the origin country, also from e.g. Dutch coders even though we're well aware how small our country is and how much we rely on trade and collaboration. People across the EU come into the country so you'd need to support other languages, payment methods, currencies, special characters in names, date notations, address formatting, timezones, phone numbers, etc. Part of Belgium even speaks the same language so the barrier really small, or even across the atlantic ocean where there are more people "in" The Netherlands except nobody ever realizes that a part of the country uses the US Dollar as its currency and is in a very different timezone. Now living in Germany, they even translate timezone names. Not only do you have to look in a timezone database to figure out what a MESZ is, when the timezone database says "there is no such timezone" you have to realize you need to look in a German translation of it. Very approachable for the international people that need to know which timezone that German picked for the meeting invite Which is all to say: sure, people know other countries exist and are more likely to need to learn to use localization, but by default it's not like everyone knows how to do that

CarVac 2y ago

It's that Turkey in particular makes a good test for a lot of these regional differences.