Critical security hole a few months before was due to localized variables. And again and again in the past. Aside from countless other issues with batch and powershell scripts because of localized variables.
I have to use a German API with weird halftranslations and ultra long names, due to bad model generation. Something like getPersonAntragsPersonAdressDetailEintragList().
Unfortunately, it makes sense, since many of the terms have a very precise legal meaning and can’t be unambiguously translated.
The first release of WSL(2) 1.0 (this versioning alone is worth another post here, but let’s not talk about it) have its CLI --help message machine translated in some languages.
That’s already evil enough, but the real problem is that they’ve blindly fed the whole message into the translator, so every line and word is translated, including the command’s flag names.
So if you’re Chinese, Japanese or French, you will have to guess what’s the corresponding flag names in English in order to get anything working.
And as I’ve said it’s machine translated so every word is. darn. inaccurate. How am I supposed to know that “–分布” is actually “–distribution”? It’s “发行版” in Chinese and “ディストリビューション” in Japanese.
At last I had to switch my system language to English to set a WSL instance up. From then on I never use any display language other than English for Microsoft products. Sometimes “translated” is worse than raw text in its original language.
PS: for the original post, my stance is “please don’t make your software interface different for different languages”. It’s the exact opposite of the author has claimed: it breaks the already formed connection by making people’s commands different.
It’s the CLI equivalence of scrambling every button to make sure they are placed differently in different languages in GUI. I hope this sounds stupid enough so that no one will try it.
A not-so-stupid way that I can think of is to add a “translation” subcommand to the app that given any supported flags in any language it converts them to the user’s language. Which is still not so useful and is not any better than a properly translated documentation, anyway.
Try using Excel in another language than English. You have to hope someone, that speaks your language had exactly the same problem as you, because all the formulas get translated and Excel doesn’t recognize the English version when your language isn’t set to English.
@hstde@Spore Even better, the alphabetical index of function names was generated in English first and then translated, meaning the documentation looks like a scrambled mess in any other language because it is alphabetized according to what the English equivalent would be. #excel
Just wait until you’re working with different time/date formats, like, god forbid, sharing such documents to someone who has their Windows time/date format set differently than you have.
So true… Not only sometimes it makes it hard to find the translated function name (especially since they are adding a lot of new functions) but there are quite often longer… For instance in French you go to a simple ifs to si.conditions…
The Microsoft Office installer has translated “Office downloads” (as in office is downloading now) to the plural form in Swedish, so it reads grammatically incorrectly as if there’s multiple downloads going on. Very professional, lmao
we should all standardize on Esperanto. Not because it is good, but because regardless of which language you know, Esperanto is the last choice, and thus the only equal choice.
Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as o and not wo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:
大文字と小文字を無視する
だいもんじとこもじをむしする
Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That’s the sanest suggestion (who’s with me?):
ダイモンジトコモジヲムシスル
Of course, you’re kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don’t generally render unicode…so let’s go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.
It doesn’t really mean anything on its own. It’s romanized as “Shi”. If you know your Japanese, you’ll know “Shi” is how you pronounce 死; or “Death”. The word is not usually written in Katakana, though. There’s also ツ, which is romanized as “Tsu”.
Yeah, this is one of those things which sounds great on paper but also introduces problems. I’ve seen people get really annoyed when exception messages are translated because it makes them harder to search for online. That would need to be solved too.
I’ve had huge issues collaborating on a spreadsheet with a Spanish client. It tries to open the sheet in your locale and then can’t find the functions. Insane that Microsoft didn’t even add some metadata to allow me to work on it in Spanish.
Translation of developer utilities themselves is the final layer of hell. I’m not hearing anybody out about this kinda stuff - after microsoft decided to TRANSLATE THE EXCEPTION MESSAGES IN .NET WITH NO WAY TO BYPASS IT making them unclear, unusable and ungoogleable, I realized what a terrible idea it is to fragment developer knowledge by language.
That’s why I always select “English (US)” when installing an OS or creating an account online. No bad or missing translation, no mangled UI because of longer words, and of course easily searchable error messages.
Yeah the only drawbacks is I later have trouble giving remote support to family members because their shit is in another language so I don’t know what does the option specifically say hahaha
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
No NSFW content.
Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
The future of the past issues MS had with this shit? Oh, right, programmerhumor.
I’m OOTL. Story time?
Critical security hole a few months before was due to localized variables. And again and again in the past. Aside from countless other issues with batch and powershell scripts because of localized variables.
Excel does this, so that German guy you forwarded a sheet to has to manually replace all the Polish function names before it works
Too half-arsed.
For one,
grepisn’t translated. But more importantly, you have to use the english--use-locale-option to set it. Pah!o.O And I thought translated errors without error codes were the worst cancer in IT world, now you created an IT covid.
IT bubonic plague
I have to use a German API with weird halftranslations and ultra long names, due to bad model generation. Something like getPersonAntragsPersonAdressDetailEintragList().
Unfortunately, it makes sense, since many of the terms have a very precise legal meaning and can’t be unambiguously translated.
This reminds me of a similar experience.
The first release of WSL(2) 1.0 (this versioning alone is worth another post here, but let’s not talk about it) have its CLI
--helpmessage machine translated in some languages.That’s already evil enough, but the real problem is that they’ve blindly fed the whole message into the translator, so every line and word is translated, including the command’s flag names.
So if you’re Chinese, Japanese or French, you will have to guess what’s the corresponding flag names in English in order to get anything working.
And as I’ve said it’s machine translated so every word is. darn. inaccurate. How am I supposed to know that “–分布” is actually “–distribution”? It’s “发行版” in Chinese and “ディストリビューション” in Japanese.
At last I had to switch my system language to English to set a WSL instance up. From then on I never use any display language other than English for Microsoft products. Sometimes “translated” is worse than raw text in its original language.
Related links if you like to see people suffer:
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7868
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4111
PS: for the original post, my stance is “please don’t make your software interface different for different languages”. It’s the exact opposite of the author has claimed: it breaks the already formed connection by making people’s commands different.
It’s the CLI equivalence of scrambling every button to make sure they are placed differently in different languages in GUI. I hope this sounds stupid enough so that no one will try it.
A not-so-stupid way that I can think of is to add a “translation” subcommand to the app that given any supported flags in any language it converts them to the user’s language. Which is still not so useful and is not any better than a properly translated documentation, anyway.
Try using Excel in another language than English. You have to hope someone, that speaks your language had exactly the same problem as you, because all the formulas get translated and Excel doesn’t recognize the English version when your language isn’t set to English.
@hstde @Spore Even better, the alphabetical index of function names was generated in English first and then translated, meaning the documentation looks like a scrambled mess in any other language because it is alphabetized according to what the English equivalent would be. #excel
Oh god the fucking Excel formulas.
I live in Quebec, and all the excels are in French.
God. Damnit.
This is so bullshit that EVERY major datasheet application works the same way. Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc…
All of them have their functions translated and it makes me have to search for tables of equivalency between them. Fuck that.
Even LibreOffice? Is there any variant which uses a sane format?
deleted by creator
Just wait until you’re working with different time/date formats, like, god forbid, sharing such documents to someone who has their Windows time/date format set differently than you have.
Or try having numbers or strings that look like they could be dates.
That would be unfortunate!
So true… Not only sometimes it makes it hard to find the translated function name (especially since they are adding a lot of new functions) but there are quite often longer… For instance in French you go to a simple ifs to si.conditions…
I’ve learned excel in middle and high school in my native language, I absolutely fucking hate the translations… excel-translator.de coming in clutch.
The Microsoft Office installer has translated “Office downloads” (as in office is downloading now) to the plural form in Swedish, so it reads grammatically incorrectly as if there’s multiple downloads going on. Very professional, lmao
Or… maybe it’s language that is wrong
we should all standardize on Esperanto. Not because it is good, but because regardless of which language you know, Esperanto is the last choice, and thus the only equal choice.
Nah, ithkuil is equaler (since it’s more or less impossible to learn)
I’ve tried it and I think it’s easier than a natural language to learn. Modulo the speaking part.
Like enforcing that the toilet lid stays down at all times to be “fair” to everyone
Why is the third one not:
?
Because they didn’t think it out fully lol
There shouldn’t even be dashes imo since they replace spaces and Japanese doesn’t use spaces.
Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as
oand notwo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That’s the sanest suggestion (who’s with me?):
Of course, you’re kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don’t generally render unicode…so let’s go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.
Agreed シ
I don’t know what that symbol means, but I’ve always liked how it looks like a smiley face.
Me neither, but it’s my favorite one 😊
ツ
It doesn’t really mean anything on its own. It’s romanized as “Shi”. If you know your Japanese, you’ll know “Shi” is how you pronounce 死; or “Death”. The word is not usually written in Katakana, though. There’s also ツ, which is romanized as “Tsu”.
Interesting, thank you ツ
Ah yes can’t wait to switch keyboard layout mid-command every time, so nice!
Hungary presents:
grep --kis--és-nagybetűk-figyelmen-kívül-hagyásaYeah that is a resounding no. PS: I am not exaggerating. That is the first translation that came into mind
If you reword it a little, it will be shorter:
grep --kassza-szenzitív-abc-nem(/j)
This might be an old April first joke because I couldn’t find anything about it lol
Really ducking hope so. I hate translated software to my native language.
My blood boiled there. Like excel that has functions in all languages. Completely insane.
Yeah, this is one of those things which sounds great on paper but also introduces problems. I’ve seen people get really annoyed when exception messages are translated because it makes them harder to search for online. That would need to be solved too.
I’ve had huge issues collaborating on a spreadsheet with a Spanish client. It tries to open the sheet in your locale and then can’t find the functions. Insane that Microsoft didn’t even add some metadata to allow me to work on it in Spanish.
tar -xvzf (but in German)
you have concisely convinced me how terrible an idea this is.
Would it be less awful if the single letter switches were universal and didn’t change between locales?
… and beared even less relationship to the full names than now.
Please don’t even think about it.
tar --extrahieren --volle-ausgabe --gezippt --folgende-dateiOh yeah that’s much better, thanks!
tar --auspacken --volle-ausgabe --reissverschlussverschlossen --folgende-dateiexpired
Teer --auspacken --volle-Ausgabe --reißverschlussverschlossen --folgende-Datei Datei.Teer.gzTranslation of developer utilities themselves is the final layer of hell. I’m not hearing anybody out about this kinda stuff - after microsoft decided to TRANSLATE THE EXCEPTION MESSAGES IN .NET WITH NO WAY TO BYPASS IT making them unclear, unusable and ungoogleable, I realized what a terrible idea it is to fragment developer knowledge by language.
Let’s just stick to a lingua franca, please.
Yeah, that’s why unlocalize.com exists (or… existed? Dunno, seems down from here!) Or you can have used the official Microsoft Language Portal… until they removed it and replaced it with the worse https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/reference/microsoft-language-resources (but it’s still usable, I guess…)
It’s not down for me
Yeah, it’s working now for me as well, probably just some temporary problem.
That’s why I always select “English (US)” when installing an OS or creating an account online. No bad or missing translation, no mangled UI because of longer words, and of course easily searchable error messages.
Yeah the only drawbacks is I later have trouble giving remote support to family members because their shit is in another language so I don’t know what does the option specifically say hahaha
grep --groß--und-kleinschreibung-der-buchstaben-ignorierengrep --Groß--und-Kleinschreibung-der-Buchstaben-ignorierenMacOS, is that you?
But you just told the computer to ignore case…
That’s not active while the command is being interpreted, though
I need this in my life
Bro are you okay
Sì
Servidor
Servant? I don’t get it