8.11.05
These people write your software
Joel Spolsky's website, Joel on Software, is daily musing for me. While I'm hardly a programmer, I do find his take on programming, hiring programmers, and end-user program usability very interesting to read.
Anywho, I was reading a post he made yesterday that included tidbits of an audio interview he recently gave. In it, he praised a book, Internationalization With Visual Basic, by Michael Kaplan. Being the investigative type, I simply click the link and head over to Amazon to check it out.
Low and behold I immediately see two negative reviews. The first one, blah, who cares. I simply skipped over it. The second one, although from 2003, really helps me appreciate why some software simply sucks.
My company is going to get some customers in Asia. We are (2 ASP, VB 10-year experience programmers) going to make our products to be able to support Asian language. What we read this book and we found totally nothing help us. Even I would like simply message box a Chinese word instead of ??? in VB application. We also searched many websites and newsgroups that talk about it. Michael and People sometimes introduce this book in the newsgroup. But why people still keep asking such kind of questions, like ???.How in the world can someone attempt to manipulate, in a meaningful way, a programming language when their own grasp of English has failed miserably. At least spoken language can be "assumed" when portions are missing or misused.
3:19 pm in random | 1 person viewing0 ramblings so far