Apple Computer released the original version of AppleScript in 1992 with 3 dialects: English, Japanese and French. Not only did they all have native keywords, but the AppleScript engine was able to do automatic translation between them. And it worked, too -- word order, proper syntactical constructions, plurals, masculine/feminine, etc. etc.
This made for a really, really cool demo, especially for Japanese people who read little English. I did this a number of times for people and their eyes lit up rreally wide, and I could tell they were thinking "so that's what all that gobbledygook programming stuff means... "
Non-English dialects were killed from AppleScript two years ago, likely because it was too much effort to support. But it was way cool.
ESR's talk at MacHack has caused a lot of discussion, but surprisingly few of the issues raised in that session are getting talked about.
One of the most interesting comments made at machack was about the motivation for good user support, and it shows the different bias of the Mac community. ESR used the "most software company phone support sucks" argument as part of the basis for showing that the retail software market should really be a service market: if people paid for phone support directly rather than through a pricetag on software, phone support would be better.
Curiously, some mac developers turned this argument on its head: the experience in the Mac community is that having good phone support which feeds back to product development makes a better product, which then drives sales. The point being that the entire organization, and not just the UI, is user-focussed.
Its just reinforcing the idea that there are different markets and different kinds of software and different kinds of users. Its no surprise that OSS fits some niches and doesn't fit others.
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Apple Computer released the original version of AppleScript in 1992 with 3 dialects: English, Japanese and French. Not only did they all have native keywords, but the AppleScript engine was able to do automatic translation between them. And it worked, too -- word order, proper syntactical constructions, plurals, masculine/feminine, etc. etc.
This made for a really, really cool demo, especially for Japanese people who read little English. I did this a number of times for people and their eyes lit up rreally wide, and I could tell they were thinking "so that's what all that gobbledygook programming stuff means... "
Non-English dialects were killed from AppleScript two years ago, likely because it was too much effort to support. But it was way cool.
- Olof
ESR's talk at MacHack has caused a lot of discussion, but surprisingly few of the issues raised in that session are getting talked about.
One of the most interesting comments made at machack was about the motivation for good user support, and it shows the different bias of the Mac community. ESR used the "most software company phone support sucks" argument as part of the basis for showing that the retail software market should really be a service market: if people paid for phone support directly rather than through a pricetag on software, phone support would be better.
Curiously, some mac developers turned this argument on its head: the experience in the Mac community is that having good phone support which feeds back to product development makes a better product, which then drives sales. The point being that the entire organization, and not just the UI, is user-focussed.
Its just reinforcing the idea that there are different markets and different kinds of software and different kinds of users. Its no surprise that OSS fits some niches and doesn't fit others.
- Olof