Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question

[Emanuel Berg]

"Gian Uberto Lauri" <saint@eng.it> writes:

> There are companies creating keyboards with custom
> keycolors and mainly custom key labels - i have
> Ctrl, Super and Meta on the low left corner of mine.

There are many companies that produces keyboards that
look like they have been taken straight from
a science fiction movie tho not a too old one as those
keyboards look way cooler. If they'd just get a touch
of wear and tear they'd look awesome, like the cockpit
of a space fighter or intergalactic carrier, if such
exist. I love those lights and dizzy colors, for
example to light a work station so you can cut
firewood even in the evenings and at night.
Especially when it is windy with rain it can get
phsycadelic with your mind to go with it.

But: on keyboards, such colors don't have any function
as no one has to look down anymore and see what keys
they are hitting. Also, those keyboards are
ridiculously expensive, and are consumed by gamers who
don't know squat about computers. They are
status symbols among the kids in the neighborhood who
don't know anything about life and so let such things
get to their minds, endless consumerism, envy, bad
blood...

It is one of the things with computers, unlike for
example those who walk the paths of physics,
chemistry, and such, that with computers you can go
anywhere from very little, while the chemists etc.
can be all the brilliant they want, and sometimes are,
but without the zillion dollar lab they are lucky if
they can use their kitchen sink to blow up their
cat's whiskers.

So, is all the more a sad state that so many young men
get stuck in the gamer limbo, otherwise they could do
amazing things.

I read somewhere that hackers are bitter. I hope I'm
not, but much of what I see makes me sad, let's put it
that way.

> Let's assume that our code-grinder is a native
> Italian (or French, Spanish or German) speaker and
> he is not used to English. Or the project leader
> does want symbols (i.e. variable names) being in the
> mother tongue of the coders. ... In Italian "amount"
> translates with "quantità" ...

The Italian, French, Spanish, and German programmers
are more than capable of coding in English. If they
are not, which they are, they can learn while doing
it, and do while learning it. This will make the
better programmers as well. Source code in any other
language than the old Anglo-American is a dead end for
many reasons, not just the impractical side of it.
Don't do it.

When you write an e-mail to your mother in Genova
asking for a "quantità" of cash to uphold your
good-for-nothing lifestyle, that is another matter.
Of course, then you should be able to use any natural
language, because then it is a matter of human-human
communication - the computer being a medium in between
doesn't change that. Talking with the computer is
another matter and that is done in code, where
variable and function names are in English. Period: .

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573