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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that sometimes the command is being run directly by a human at the keyboard, and sometimes it's being run as part of a program. And it doesn't really have a way to know which. Localizing the former is fine, but the latter is bad.

In short, if you write a script that uses /Y to indicate "yes" as an option to a command, then that script will fail on computers which are set to a language where /Y doesn't mean "yes", and where the command is localized accordingly.

If you can solve the problem of differentiating between direct human interaction and running a program, this would be a lot better. But then non-English speakers would have to learn everything twice.

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> If you can solve the problem of differentiating between direct human interaction and running a program, this would be a lot better.

This is already solved to an extent in the Unix world by providing the ability for a program to detect whether its standard input/output is wired to an interactive terminal. This is how, for example, many Unix programs detect whether they're being piped into another program and to therefore be more strict about their output.

So its bad because other people won't localize their programs which might run yours? I can see that being a sadly accurate answer. Thank you for your clarification, assuming I read that correctly.

Although I think a more ideal solution to this problem would be if they are going to run your software they should be using the same library to provide input to it so that they can just specify the machine command (as their software doesn't need to be coded to provide short easy to read commands, like are ideal for a human) to look up the local language command, and give your program the command that will map back to the machine command in their local language where ever it is run. If both a machine and a human will be using your software, wouldn't optimizing for the human be ideal, even if it involves another look up or function call for the machine?

That's one potential problem, yes.

For your solution of running through the same mapping library on both ends, that works, but it transforms the scripting language into something dramatically different from writing commands on the command line. The beauty of shell scripting (and, I would argue, the only thing that even makes it worth doing at all) is that you write the same commands in the script that you would write interactively.

So another dumb question, how do we get from it being a very bad thing in shell scripting to it being a very bad thing in general as the post states?

By the way thank you again for taking the time to answer my questions, I do appreciate it as these are honestly things I am wondering. I seem to be getting down voted because I am so stupid, but at least you are helping me learn to be less stupid on this subject (which believe it or not everyone else the down votes don't actually accomplish).

I don't see any dumb questions on your part. Maybe some differences of opinion. Don't ask me about the downvotes. I personally only downvote stuff that's deeply counterproductive. But it seems other people are more twitchy with them.

Anyway, I take the post as just saying that internationalization is bad for shell commands, not necessarily for other things.

Shell commands are unusual in that they are both a programming interface and a human interface. That puts strange constraints on them that don't show up elsewhere. For things that are clearly just a human interface (for example, a GUI app) you definitely want to localize. For things that are clearly just a computer interface (for example, a REST API) you definitely don't want to. But how do you deal with something like this where it's half and half? Trying to optimize for one use case can hurt the other, which is what this post is trying to show.

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