Hebrew

The single line bug fix

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:17:55 GMT

It is amazing how much time you can hunt for the exact cause of a bug. In this case, it took me almost two days (intersperse with other work, however) to track down and find the issue.

Remember, there is no reason to use ASCII, ever. I actually run a blame on the code (a new feature for SvnBridge!) to find out who wrote it. And then I sent a nasty email about it to /dev/null, just to clear my mind.

You really want to rethink your localization

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:54:59 GMT

This is from a advertising brochure that my company has distribute, for a virtualization conference that we recently did.

I have included the sponsorships part only, it says "Gold Sponsor: IBM", "Silver Sponsors: VMWare, FilesX".

The problem is that in Hebrew, the word for Silver is the same word for Money.

This has the affect of me reading it as: "Money Sponsors: VMWare, FilesX".

That sounds... crass.

The problem is actually not limited to my company's conferences, but it actually wide spread in Israel. I really wish they would think about a different term.

Why you can't code in Hebrew...

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 09:10:06 GMT

In response for my DDD in Hebrew, I was asked why it is not recommended to code in Hebrew. I decided to question my initial response, and give it a shot. I quickly gave it a try and created the following domain model. I don't expect you to be able to read it (although if you can, you'll find it hilarious).

Here is my DDD in Hebrew, the classes are Employee (right, top), Report (Left, Top), HoursReport (Middle, Bottom), WontBeHereReport (Left, Bottom) and Repository<T> (Right, Bottom):

I run into a couple of issues just with designing this diagram:

Trying to specify a generic parameter in Hebrew cause issues because of alignments. Basically, the whole class name is presented in the wrong way (this is a common issue with mixing Hebrew & math together).
Intellisense is mostly useless, check out this, you may not be able to see it, but the Hebrew is half-way reversed.
For some reason Visual Studio is working a lot harder when I write code in Hebrew.

Let us move to more serious issues, take a look at this simple program:

Main issues:

Hebrew is written right to left, the code here is structured left to right.
Hebrew doesn't have upper/lower casing, so words need to be seperated by "_".
I often need to switch keyboard setttings ( even something as simple as "<" has different orientetions in Hebrew and English).
I need to use primitives (such as DateTime) in English.
I need to mix English and Hebrew in the same line (see the "new" lines).
All control flow is in English.
You can't grep this source. At least not easily. Hebrew and the command line do not mix.

That is even beside the nice point of the enconding hell that you get yourself into. It is very easy to save this as ASCII (if you open it in an editor that doesn't support unicode, or simple use a tool to go over it) and lose all the hebrew characters.

Sorry Eliezer, but you will have to write Hebrew# and language pack, and write a translation layer for the framework if you really want me to use it.