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Re: Why emacs have not native language menu


From: Jean-Christophe Helary
Subject: Re: Why emacs have not native language menu
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:55:06 +0900


On 25 juil. 07, at 15:44, Alexey Pustyntsev wrote:

Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp> writes:

It is just the same for natural languages. And since obviously
English is not your native language you should be much more aware of
that than native English users who obviously have no "need" for
learning other languages since the world comes to them in English...

Speaking about computers, programming etc, I hardly understand
why people won't need to learn English if Emacs is localized. They
need to learn it anyway, needn't they?

No they don't. Code is just arbitrary strings that mean only what the manual (in whatever language it is written) says they mean.

Confusing code (that looks like English words) and English is the biggest mistake people make when learning computer languages. And it seems like some members of this list have yet to make the difference between emacs "function-name" that looks like English and plain English.

Hence, there is not much point in
localizing Emacs, unless you want to make things more complex. But is
the expense really worth it? I am afraid not. There are more important
problems to be solved, like printing international characters
correctly (htmlizing a buffer doesn't seem to be Ok, the output may
be ugly). This is, of course, my personal opinion.

Very good. You know enough English to find your way in emacs. Reverse question: is emacs the reason why you learned English ? Is emacs the only activity that involves your using English ? Is programming so ?

Can you imagine contexts where emacs can be used in a linguistically "neutral" environment ?

Can you imagine that using emacs in this linguistically "neutral" environment would benefit from actual native linguistic information ?

If you can't imagine that then you are right: you should focus on other issues.


Jean-Christophe Helary

ps: did it ever occur to you that some massively succesful programming languages originated from non-English cultural/linguistic environments ?




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