Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

How come I have never in a multi decade career come across "i18n".

I though the canonical way of doing this was to write KEYWORDS in caps and use camel case for Variables.

Also never really brought into adding the type as part of a name - your type is already defined in your schema.




Really? I have. In some circles (e.g., the IETF), i18n is an ancient acronym. People who've worked on operating systems (e.g., OS X, Solaris, RHEL, whatever) have to deal with L10N (localization). G11N (globalization) is I18N + L10N.

And then there's a11y: accessibility. This is all about making user interfaces accessible for people with low or no vision, low or no hearing, difficulty typing, and so on.

There are generally applicable laws requiring G11N and A11Y, and these fall heavily on OS vendors, which is why people who've worked on OSes tend to know these acronyms.

I18N -> dealing with Unicode in general, codeset conversions, font issues, ...

L10N -> dealing with translating system/application messages to the users' preferred languages (and how to even know they preferences) (think locales)

G11N -> I18N and L10N.

Localization is damned difficult. There's all sort of little bothersome things, like how to format numbers (which varies quite a lot) and dates (can't we all just use ISO-8601?!). And translating printf-like format strings is often non-trivial, especially when the coder doesn't stop to think about just how hard they might be to a translator as they write their code.


> G11N -> I18N and L10N.

That's a new one to me, but makes sense. I've been lucky enough to have heard of i19n and l10n for years (almost decades, and this point) but not had to deal with it much beyond tracking down a string in some open source webapp I was patching before deploying.

> can't we all just use ISO-8601?!

Preach on. I sometimes find myself filling out date fields in paper forms in YYYY-MM-DD without thinking. The elementary school my kids attend probably thinks I'm a weirdo. I know my wife does...


V10N --> Velociraptor

T15X --> Tyrannosaurus Rex

D11S --> Dilophosaurus

B11S --> Brachiosaurus

T9S --> Triceratops

S9S --> Stegosaurus


I think we have evidence that 12 characters is where should start the <first-letter><N><N><last-letter> shortening.


V10R you mean.


Of course


Also p13n -> personalization


You've worked on English only applications?


That could be it. Like him, I didn't run into that abbreviation for my first 20 years of coding. It wasn't until I needed to do a dual English/Czech project that it came up.

We're always learning.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: