The LANGUAGE variable is broken for English as main language
by Leandro Lucarella on 2020- 11- 18 11:38 (updated on 2020- 11- 18 11:38)- with 0 comment(s)
The LANGUAGE environment variable can accept multiple fallback languages (at least if your commands are using gettext), so if your main LANG is, say, es, but you also speak fr, then you can use LANGUAGE=es:fr.
But what happens when you main LANG is en, so for example your LANGUAGE looks like en:es:de? You'll notice some message that used to be in perfect English before using the multi-language fallback now seem to be shown randomly in es or de.
Well, it is not random. The thing is, since English tends to be the de-facto language for the original strings in a program, it looks like almost nobody provides an en translation, so when fallback is active, almost no programs will show messages in English.
For example, this is my Debian testing system with roughly 3.5K packages installed:
$ dpkg -l |wc -l 3522 $ ls /usr/share/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/ | wc -l 12
Only 12 packages have a plain English locale. en_GB does a bit better:
$ ls /usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/ | wc -l 732
732 packages. This is still lower than both en and de:
$ ls /usr/share/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/ | wc -l 821 $ ls /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/ | wc -l 820
The weird thing is packages as basic as psmisc (providing, for example, killall) and coreutils (providing, for example, ls) don't have an en locale, and psmisc doesn't provide es. This is why at some point it seemed like a random locale was being used. I had something like LANGUAGE=en_GB:en_US:en:es:de and I use KDE as my desktop environment. KDE seems to be correctly translated to en_GB, so I was seeing most of my desktop in English as expected, but when using killall, I got errors in German, and when using ls, I got errors in Spanish.
If you don't provide other fallback languages, gettext will automatically fall back to the C locale, which is the original strings embedded in the source code, which are usually in English, and this is why if you don't provide fallback languages (other than English at least), all will work in English as expected. Of course if you use C in your fallback languages, before any non-English language, then they will be ignored as the C locale should always be present, so that's not an option.
I find it very curious that this issue has almost zero visibility. At least my searches for the issue didn't throw any useful results. I had to figure it all out by myself like in the good old pre-stackoverflow times...
Note
I know is not a typical use case, as since almost all software use English for the C locale it hardly makes any sense to use fallback languages in practice if your main language is English. But theoretically it could happen, and providing an en translation is trivial.
Go nuts
by Leandro Lucarella on 2009- 11- 11 15:14 (updated on 2009- 11- 11 21:48)- with 0 comment(s)
I guess everybody (at least everybody with some interest in system programming languages) should know by now about the existence of Go, the new system programming language released yesterday by Google.
I think this has a huge impact in D, because it's trying to fill the same hole: a modern high-performance language that doesn't suck (hello C++!). They have a common goal too: be practical for business (they are designed to get things done and easy of implementation). But there are still very big differences about both languages. Here is a small summary (from my subjective point of view after reading some of the Go documentation):
| Go | D |
|---|---|
| Feels more like a high-level high- performance programming language than a real system programming language (no asm, no pointer arithmetics). | Feels more like a real close to the metal system programming language. |
| Extremely simple, with just a very small set of core features. | Much more complex, but very powerful and featureful. |
| Can call C code but can't be called from C code. | Interacts very well with C in both directions (version 2 can partially interact with C++ too). |
| Feels like a very well thought, cohesive programming language. | Feels as a bag of features that grew in the wild. |
| FLOSS reference implementation. Looks very FLOSS friendly, with proper code review, VCS, mailing lists, etc. | Reference implementation is not FLOSS. Not very FLOSS friendly (it's just starting to open up a little but it's a slow and hard process). |
| Supported by a huge corporation, I expect a very large community in very short time. | Supported by a very small group of volunteers, small community. |
I really like the simplicity of Go, but I have my doubts about how limiting it could be in practice (it doesn't even have exceptions!). I have to try it to see if I will really miss the features of more complex programming languages (like templates / generics, exceptions, inheritance, etc.), or if it will just work.
I have the feeling that things will just work, and things missing in Go will not be a problem when doing actual work. Maybe it's because I had a very similar feeling about Python (indentation matters? Having to pass self explicitly to methods? No ++? No assignment in if, while, etc.? I hated all this things at first, but after understanding the rationale and using then in real work, it works great!). Or maybe is because there are is extremely capable people behind it, like Ken Thomson and Rob Pike (that's why you can see all sort of references to Plan 9 in Go :), people that knows about designing operating systems and languages, a good combination for designing a system programming language ;)
You never know with this things, Go could die in the dark or become a very popular programming language, only time will tell (but since Google is behind it, I guess the later is more likely).