Re: DONT READ -- Continuing James Donald flamewar

["James A. Donald" <jamesd@netcom.com>]

On Fri, 27 Jan 1995, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> DONT READ THIS UNLESS YOU GIVE A DAMN ABOUT JAMES DONALD'S "OPINION"
> OF UNIX -- HIT DELETE NOW.
> 
> jamesd@com.informix.com says:
> > But my statement concerning internationalization and
> > resource files was correct.
> 
> Nope, sorry.
> 
> Posix defines these things called "Locales". They provide automatic
> and seamless support for things like changing currency symbols, date
> formats, fonts, etc. The X windows system has full support for
> internationalization in most of its widget sets, too.

I know what a Locale is:

The fact that you confuse this with the internationalization
problem shows that most unix folk have no tools for this problem,
so that the idea of tools that address it is inconceivable
to them.

Typical primitive unix mentality.   I would expect no better
of someone who is unaware that the times have changed since
the days when the PC world did not have make files (because
our programs were so small we did not need them.)

I will explain this to you in simple terms:

To facilitate internationalization, everything that is 
translatable, for example dialogs, buttons, etc, has to
be in one set of files, and everything that should not
be translated needs to be in another set of files.

If you do this by hand you get an immense number of
connections between the two file sets, and the possibility
of many subtle bugs being introduced when one set
of files is translated.

Therefore your tools for painting dialog boxes and menus etc.
must work in such a way as to facilitate separation and 
translation, which is done in windows by having *.rc files
that get translated, and *.c files that do not.

In Unix each company seems to have its own hand rolled tools
to accomplish this task, or no tools at all -- they do it
by hand.

(Somebody sent me a letter saying that Next Step supports
graphical editing of dialog boxes.  While this is an important
part of internationalizability, it is not internationalizability.

For example Visual Basic also supports graphical editing of dialog boxes,
yet it does not support internationalization in the way that
App Studio and Resource Workshop do.)

> Frankly, I have yet to see a single statement from you that actually
> bore some relationship to reality. The most devistating comment you
> seem to be able to come up with about why Unix is bad is that make --
> an application that doesn't even come with DOS -- used to have some
> places where it required tabs. 

You display profound ignorance Perry

We in the DOS world have been using make ever since we had enough
memory to make it worth while.

Furthermore the "make" bug that I complained of, shows typical unix
shoddiness.  Unix tools have sharp edges in the wrong places.

It is these unexpected sharp edges, like chain saw with no
handle, that make unix hard to use.

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