Re: Why emacs have not native language menu

[Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp>]

On 25 juil. 07, at 15:44, Alexey Pustyntsev wrote:

> Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp> writes:
>
>> It is just the same for natural languages. And since obviously
>> English is not your native language you should be much more aware of
>> that than native English users who obviously have no "need" for
>> learning other languages since the world comes to them in English...
>
> Speaking about computers, programming etc, I hardly understand
> why people won't need to learn English if Emacs is localized. They
> need to learn it anyway, needn't they?

No they don't. Code is just arbitrary strings that mean only what the  
manual (in whatever language it is written) says they mean.

Confusing code (that looks like English words) and English is the  
biggest mistake people make when learning computer languages. And it  
seems like some members of this list have yet to make the difference  
between emacs "function-name" that looks like English and plain English.

> Hence, there is not much point in
> localizing Emacs, unless you want to make things more complex. But is
> the expense really worth it? I am afraid not. There are more important
> problems to be solved, like printing international characters
> correctly (htmlizing a buffer doesn't seem to be Ok, the output may
> be ugly). This is, of course, my personal opinion.

Very good. You know enough English to find your way in emacs. Reverse  
question: is emacs the reason why you learned English ? Is emacs the  
only activity that involves your using English ? Is programming so ?

Can you imagine contexts where emacs can be used in a linguistically  
"neutral" environment ?

Can you imagine that using emacs in this linguistically "neutral"  
environment would benefit from actual native linguistic information ?

If you can't imagine that then you are right: you should focus on  
other issues.


Jean-Christophe Helary

ps: did it ever occur to you that some massively succesful  
programming languages originated from non-English cultural/linguistic  
environments ?