English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Robusto

2:48 AM

@RegDwigнt Breaking Bad Lite.

A track from the son of one of our friends. Fifteen years ago already I said this kid had talent.

I have a bunch of his stuff on my iPod.

tchrist

3:21 AM

@Rob I was thinking of you today.

I’ve been plunged into the dazzling drizzle of the middleware world yclept PSGI, and I make same pronouncement as on all intricate frameworks: when they work they work, and when they don’t, you’ll spend three days trying figure out what the fuck went wrong.

Robusto

@tchrist My view of frameworks exactly.

tchrist

I was of course doing backend stuff when I belong. I had to do a tiny piece in the middle that dealt with the frontend. Totally ridiculous.

Robusto

And if you need something 3% different from what the framework gives you, it takes a 97% effort to get it.

tchrist

All because somebody didn’t think of a really simple thing.

Robusto

Which happens ALL . . . THE . . . TIME.

That's why I write my own front ends. At least that way I only have 3% more work to do and I get everything I want.

tchrist

3:26 AM

Like, how dare I have the temerity both to set a cookie and do a location redirect at the same time?

In the old days, this was common. And it is trivial to do.

And I just lost three days of my life to somebody else having never thought of the need to do this.

Robusto

Which framework are you using?

tchrist

Plack.

Robusto

Hmm. Never had the pleasure.

tchrist

It actually isn’t Plack’s fault.

It’s the fault of a now-former employee who did a very stupid thing in a way that was hard to trace.

You can’t just pop into a debugger in these things, you know.

Robusto

Well, you can.

Or you should be able to.

tchrist

3:28 AM

And a compact dump of the object is in excess of 50k — lines.

Well, yes; you could indeed run it in singlethreaded static/non-FastCGI mode.

And secret games rewriting your exceptions behind your back really piss me off.

Robusto

Hmm, yes. The hard part is when you have minified, obfuscated code to deal with.

tchrist

So the stack dump lies.

So annoying.

The now-ex-employee thought it would be a cute way to do Location redirects by throwing an exception object with a "Found" and a Location => wherever property.

He then neglected to emit the rest of the needed HTTP headers necessary for the cookies I had dutifully housed there.

Since I’m not a front end guy, I’m not fixing the JS side of things this release, just a few of the AJAX bits that actually hit the server.

Fortunately, the most senior guy on the project (but for my boss, whose eyes haven’t been in the code for a while) lives in Denver not the east coast, and was also working today to play catch-up. He helped me see where the silliness was happening.

I don’t know if I mentioned what I’m doing. Basically l10n'ing stuff right now.

Using the pretty-much-standard GNU gettext stuff layered very deeply down underneath.

Trying to l10n a content-delivery system after-the-fact is A. Lot. Of. Work.

I left the tiny middleware bit till the end because I figured it would be trivial. It was supposed to be trivial, and should have been. But somebody else just wasn’t thinking, and limited all future choices by doing a short-cut cheat.

I’d guessed 1 hour for that part; took 3 days. How can you plan for shit like this? You can't.

Fortunately the corporate structure is flat and very software-savvy, so at least it is not like long reporting chains where they simply never understand how these slips can happen.

Was supposed to be done yesterday. Wasn't. Will be though.

Plack is middleware that uses the PSGI stack, also used by many other middleware layers.

Ice Boy

So I take it that you got the new job?

tchrist

Yes.

Ice Boy

Congrats pal :-)

tchrist

3:40 AM

I also see why they have a really rigorous interviewing process. You can’t really afford to hire people who don’t know crap.

All the work really is taken up by going from langs=1 to langs≠1. The actual count isn’t that big of a deal.

It also really helped, much more than they would ever have anticipated, that lang#2 was Spanish. We had a native speaker do the basic initial translations, but I caught a hundred things that would have been missed by someone less than very well schooled in Spanish.

The guy who had been going to do it was the previous new-hire. He’s smart, probably damned smart, but his Perl is not quite as strong as mine and he is a French speaker not a Spanish speaker, so wouldn’t have realized errors looking him in the face.

They didn’t hire me for Spanish, of course. It has just been really lucky.

Getting used to gettext took a while. It is not very friendly, because too “C-minded” if you take my meaning.

The only always-good translations were when the translator was given entire sentences or paragraphs. You just cannot do single words, because without context, there is on way to know what word to pick.

The gettext supports that, allowing for a compound key lookup by not just "msgid", essentially the English text, but also by a message context, which is arbitrary but could be something like "noun" versus "verb".

Imagine a UI element that says "View" in English. Which one should that be?

It most other languages, you have to pick the noun or the verb. And in fact, in some places in your UI, it will be one and not the other.

So somebody who didn’t know Spanish wouldn’t have realize how wrong those would have been.

I bitched the other day about how dreadfully long “hover for tooltips” becomes in Spanish. Or French. Or anything but English.

Turning “hover for tooltips” into “Pase el cursor por encima para ver las direcciones emergentes” simply will not fit in a UI element. Just fill it with eels and call it good.

I hate frontend shit.