Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
This looks like the final layer of hell. Your coworker writes their scripts in another language and now you have to decipher what the hell they mean. Who has a problem woth English for development tools, etc.? It's really not a monumental task to learn it, and I'm not even a native speaker.
May I introduce you to the concept of Microsoft Excel?
One time, someone from HR asked me, if I could help them with an Excel formula. So, I quickly looked up how to do something like that in Excel, adapted it as needed on my laptop, then sent it to them. And well, it didn't work on their system, because I coded it in English, whereas their OS was in German.
Translation of developer utilities themselves is the final layer of hell. I'm not hearing anybody out about this kinda stuff - after microsoft decided to TRANSLATE THE EXCEPTION MESSAGES IN .NET WITH NO WAY TO BYPASS IT making them unclear, unusable and ungoogleable, I realized what a terrible idea it is to fragment developer knowledge by language.
Let's just stick to a lingua franca, please.
Yeah, that's why unlocalize.com exists (or... existed? Dunno, seems down from here!) Or you can have used the official Microsoft Language Portal... until they removed it and replaced it with the worse https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/reference/microsoft-language-resources (but it's still usable, I guess...)
It's not down for me
tar -xvzf (but in German)
tar --extrahieren --volle-ausgabe --gezippt --folgende-datei
tar --auspacken --volle-ausgabe --reissverschlussverschlossen --folgende-datei
expired
Teer --auspacken --volle-Ausgabe --reißverschlussverschlossen --folgende-Datei Datei.Teer.gz
grep --groß--und-kleinschreibung-der-buchstaben-ignorieren
grep --Groß--und-Kleinschreibung-der-Buchstaben-ignorieren
But you just told the computer to ignore case...
That's not active while the command is being interpreted, though
This reminds me of a similar experience.
The first release of WSL(2) 1.0 (this versioning alone is worth another post here, but let's not talk about it) have its CLI --help message machine translated in some languages.
That's already evil enough, but the real problem is that they've blindly fed the whole message into the translator, so every line and word is translated, including the command's flag names.
So if you're Chinese, Japanese or French, you will have to guess what's the corresponding flag names in English in order to get anything working.
And as I've said it's machine translated so every word is. darn. inaccurate. How am I supposed to know that "--分布" is actually "--distribution"? It's "发行版" in Chinese and "ディストリビューション" in Japanese.
At last I had to switch my system language to English to set a WSL instance up. From then on I never use any display language other than English for Microsoft products. Sometimes "translated" is worse than raw text in its original language.
Related links if you like to see people suffer:
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7868
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4111
PS: for the original post, my stance is "please don't make your software interface different for different languages". It's the exact opposite of the author has claimed: it breaks the already formed connection by making people's commands different.
It's the CLI equivalence of scrambling every button to make sure they are placed differently in different languages in GUI. I hope this sounds stupid enough so that no one will try it.
A not-so-stupid way that I can think of is to add a "translation" subcommand to the app that given any supported flags in any language it converts them to the user's language. Which is still not so useful and is not any better than a properly translated documentation, anyway.
Try using Excel in another language than English. You have to hope someone, that speaks your language had exactly the same problem as you, because all the formulas get translated and Excel doesn't recognize the English version when your language isn't set to English.
Just wait until you're working with different time/date formats, like, god forbid, sharing such documents to someone who has their Windows time/date format set differently than you have.