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Comment by gedy | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why this is not more common. Is there a reason you can't just have localized keywords in each language that map to the same thing? Chinese JavaScript, etc?

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Excel seems to be localized and I absolutely hate it. A german version of excel expected me to write WENN instead of IF, or SUMME instead of SUM. It's dumb. Especially since if you're trying to look up code snippets or how to do something in excel, you'll find one in english and then have to find the corresponding german commands.

I hate that too soooo much. You never know the function names in your native language and need to google them. :)

Google docs had a really interesting quirk that drove me insane for about 20 minutes while I figured it out. I was helping someone with some shared spreadsheet on Google Sheets and figured out that SUMIF(...) was what they needed, by doing a bit of searching. Except that it refused to work where I needed it even when I followed the docs to the letter, and when I explored it a bit more the function seemed to work but only randomly. I'd recreate exactly the same data in the same positions in one sheet where it would behave as I expected, but in another it would fail.

It turns out that according to the locale Sheets will change the separator for params, so in en-US it'll be:

    =sumif(A1:A10, "Something", B1:B10)

while in cs-CZ it should be

    =sumif(A1:A10; "Something"; B1:B10)

On the one hand, that's really quite cool and impressive. On the other, I would never have expected a language or development environment to support different syntax depending on the locale in use.

Yeah, the pain whenever I have to remember what HLOOKUP is in German.

And a similar feature made CSV even worse.

The Italian version of Excel requires “;” to serate clauses in the localised version of IF, SE(<condition;<if-true>;<otherwise>) and other differences beyond mere translations, and that drives me up the wall and through the roof.

That's how it works in Excel, I'm not sure how it works under the hood but it's translated to your system locale so you can open up your French speaking colleagues spreadsheet and not notice the difference until they start asking about "=RECHERCHEV()".

Different word order (especially, verb-noun order [1]), different syntax for affixes and adpositions, difficulty in segmentation and even the non-existence of English-like "words", ...

You can't "localize" programming languages in that way. A new programming language, probably similar in semantics but with a completely rethought syntax, is needed for the true localization.

[1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2019/10/verb-noun-vs-noun-verb....

That is a really great way of geofencing programming as a job where you can use the same knowledge basically everywhere. A really terrible idea imo.

But there are already (joke) projects that do this:

https://github.com/frozzare/fikascript

The A#1 most import aspect of a programming language is consistency. The alternative is localization hell, with no options in the middle.

Most things aren't this black or white, but this is one of them. Whatever the keywords for a language are, they must be exactly the same everywhere.

Microsoft tried it for VBA in Office 95. It turned out to be a horrible idea. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21352796

I think it's cognitive overload. I remember when I was pretty young, there was a language named Logo. It has different but similar syntax in Polish and English. Eventually you used only one of them.

Fun fact: LOGO is actually a LISP.

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