Wednesday 20 May 2009

Seaside is not multi-lingual

Most business web sites outside the USA are multilingual, because the world is and always will be multilingual.

Seaside offers no support for multiple languages, which is a natural requirement for any web server, because different users (sessions) require different languages simultaneously.

Unfortunately, the same lack of language support is true for VisualWorks Smalltalk as such, which does not offer any support either for language-free code that receives its user visible text from translation libraries (the latest version I know is 7.4).

This is the old problem with Anglo-Saxons, especially with USAmericans who are trying to impose their own minimal language on other people! Language imperialism at the finest!

Therefore, my advice to new Seaside users is to take into account that it will need substantial efforts to make Seaside truly multi-lingual without having code redundancies.

The problem is simple: These naive (and often stupid in the sense of uneducated) North Americans really expect that one writes language dependent text into the code making it impossible to serve different languages from the same source code. What a stupid US ignorance ignoring and trying to suppress this wonderful diversity of different people, languages and cultures!

And the fact that the main author of Seaside, Avi Bryant, is of Canadian origin makes this ignorant mono-lingual implementation even morally worse, as he is denying the natural human rights of his own French-Canadian fellow countrymen, not to mention the many Spanish people in the US of A who are raped to use English .

5 comments:

  1. Umm, that's patently not true (what you say about VW). We've had support for adding translations for many, many releases - see class UserMessage. On Windows, if you load the Unicode support from the "preview" directory, you'll see the ability to display arbitrary languages (and edit them as well, other than right/left ones like Arabic and Hebrew). We've supported single language at a time in other locales for years.

    That support is moving out of preview and into production in the upcoming (summer) release of our product.

    You really shouldn't try to make cultural assumptions based on a release as old as 7.4 (which will fall off standard support this June). The current release is 7.6, and we've pushed out 7.4.1, 7.5, 7.5.1, and 7.6 since then.

    The reasons for not having better intl support before now have nothing to do with culture and everything to do with a confused set of code libraries. We have had support for Japanese for a long time, and a few years ago added the preview support for Unicode. The problem was that all of that represented 3 codebases trying to solve that problem, and merging them was trickier than anyone would have liked.

    Since much of that code was written in Germany and Japan, I think you should check your assumptions at the door...

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  2. Oh, and serving separate languages - especially European languages - is possible now, and has been since at least the 7.1 release. I've had that capability in my Smalltalk based website for years now - see class UserMessage. Don't use strings in your own code, use UserMessage.

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  3. Well, Jarober, you are unfortunately right for one thing: Many European are so strongly influenced by over 60 years of cultural US occupation of Europe that they forget their own heritage(referring to your "check your assumptions at the door"). This made even the British switch from their correct old term "milliards" to the false US term of "billions" (which really are 1.000 milliards, and a billion is falsely called a "trillion" in the US). This was all invented in France and the US are the only not adhering to it.

    As for the locale in VW, yes that has been around for many years but it was minimal and helped very little and had nothing to do with language support.

    I have to admit that I don't know about this UserMessage that you mentioned.

    VisualWorks has been a serious product for about 20 years !!! and if you confirm that this has just been added to one of the latest releases, then you approve that this has been very very late. But in any case, the user interface has always been one of the few darker aspects of VW, which I consider otherwise as the most brilliant development environment around.

    In any case, multi-lingual support is multiple times more important for a web server compared to a desk-top environment like VW. Actually, a web server is almost useless without.

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  4. ... And you get multi-lingual support with UserMessage. It's even documented, which is something you claim to like :)

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  5. VW is documented quite well. My critics were all related to Seaside.

    The comments in the old VW basic classes are an ideal archetype for precise and concise code comments. Only the GUI classes were a nightmare but here I am referring to older releases. Don't know about the recent ones.

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