BackupPC - a brief rant

[Liam Proven]

On 22 June 2014 17:04, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>  Why the hell couldn't the
> computer just have said to set the clock manually, since it couldn't
> manage to do it itself, instead of some moronic number code?


I know this was a rhetorical question, but:

These days software is expected to be localised into hundreds of
different languages. Until that is done, the programmer does not know
and must not assume what script/alphabet/language/character set an
error might appear in, let alone what words it will contain. It could
be a couple of characters of an ideographic script such as Chinese,
which can convey a whole sentence in 2 or 3 "letters", or it could be
several lines of hundreds of characters in the case of some Polynesian
languages with restricted phonemic inventories. (I pick 2 extreme
cases to make a point.)

And errors by nature are unexpected. If, say, the system language has
not yet been set at this point, then the right thing to do is not to
display a message that the user might not be able to read or even copy
down - could you write down a message in Japanese? And type it into
Google? I speak a little Japanese and I couldn't - but to show a
simple number that they could.


-- 
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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