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Comment by gyulai | Hacker News Reader

What makes it really funny is that the joke was lost on Microsoft in the mid 90s when you might program macros for MS Office in a version of BASIC that actually did get its keywords translated.

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Still to this day, when I occasionally use Excel/Libre Office Calc I never know wether to write `sum(` or `summe(`. Function names depend on the localization settings of the system I'm working on.

This. I am always wondering if this was a serious decision. In my view it doesn't make any sense to switch function names by locale. It just confuses

Presumably one uses the same locale everywhere? So switching by locale should not be a problem?

Supporting multiple languages is a problem all right: googling, communication, etc...

> Presumably one uses the same locale everywhere?

It depends.

> So switching by locale should not be a problem?

Until you get an Excel file written in another locale. The coolest one i had was one with Japanese formulas.

It seems obvious in hindsight that everyone, non-native speakers included, prefer to read syntax in English. But was it as obvious 30 years ago?

I mean sure, hurdur Microsoft dumb, it's a classic joke. But if that was the first attempt at translating keywords, then how is it "really funny"?

It just gets my goat when people make fun of innovators with the benefit of hindsight.

Microsoft's choices can easily be understood under the following frame: They essentially think of everyone they (supposedly) serve as stupid. Thinking that the need to learn a bunch of keywords in a foreign language is a serious stumbling block to the adoption of their programming language is just one case in point. Having a good laugh at their expense about it feels like karmic justice, because it's bad enough that they keep getting away with it as much as they do.

counterpoint: Microsoft does serve a lot of computer-illiterate customers. They also have very literature customers but they have to design for the lowest common denominator

It usually doesn't have this charitable "no user left behind" character, though. Their shenanigans include "Let's inject advertising in between people's e-mails and turn everyone's OS into a billboard. Will it be hard for people to get any work done this way? Of course it will. But who is going to stop us? Surely not those suckers whose money we take." What is the appropriate reaction to that? Surely not "Thank you, thank you, Microsoft, for putting me into a digital world that is so perfectly matched to the stupidity, laziness, and digital helplessness of me and my brethren".

It's a very dangerous path to walk down, to think to yourself "I'm smart and powerful, but most of my customers are stupid and helpless, so it's not the needs of my peers that I need to cater to, but rather the needs of the [stupid] many". The contrapositive of that is: Most of my customers aren't truly my peers. Well that's the first step on a slippery slope towards: These people aren't really deserving of being treated in a moral/ethical way, the way I would treat my peers and the way I would expect my peers to treat me.

I was there Nindalf, 30 years ago. And let me assure you, it was already a stupid idea back then ;)

Microsoft are still doing their forced and absurd localization in all their garbage.

Being forced to use their software while outside an English speaking county is terrible.

Do you realize you can just switch language and locale with few clicks. What's the problem there?

That's not actually true.

Many times in corporate environments you don't have permissions to do that, and let me tell you it's a pain when you 5 layer down a RDP rabbit hole to figure out which locale you're using

One problem is that a lot of translations in Microsoft's documentation are subtly wrong, but you don't immediately notice because the grammar is correct. And this problem already existed before machine translation was a thing (I guess MS just hired translators who were not familar with the documentation's product or even 'computer-lingo' in general).

Haha, hardly. That's far from the case.

> But if that was the first attempt at translating keywords, then how is it "really funny"?

Because they didn't really bother to ask native speakers if the translation makes sense in the target language.

Well, I'm only saying locale dependent file formats!

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