On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 03:09:10PM +0200, Juerd wrote:
> Nicholas Clark skribis 2005-04-12 13:58 (+0100):
> > > (Still, having them around does help many people, and that's why I think
> > > perldocs should perhaps come in several languages (as a different
> > > project, so translation delays don't delay Perl releases)).
> > "Should" ?
>
> Yes, should. That's ideology, though.
I read "should" as a danger word. It's often person A describing a desirable
feature and intimating that unspecified other people B-Z ought to be
implementing it.
> > Who is going to pay for all these translations?
>
> Who is going to pay for Parrot? Perl 6? Who's paying for Pugs? Who's
> going to pay for perldocs in English?
>
> Did I miss some important memo?
>
> Many people work on Perl 6 voluntarily, and as many could work on
> translations, but you need an army of translators to keep up with newer
> versions, and that's why I think it should be official, so it gets
> lots of attention.
You missed an important social observation. Many *programmers* work on these
projects voluntarily because they find programming fun. Translation isn't
programming, so it's unlikely to be as appealing to the majority of the
community involved in Perl 6 currently.
> That's nice, but were this an international project for in theory any
> language in existence, then I had probably heard of it much sooner,
> which is my argument for making translated perldocs an official project
> that isn't limited to any language.
Would you be volunteering to organise this?
It's nothing personal if I'm sounding harsh. There is always this great
temptation to assign jobs to the "they" department. ("They should do this"
"They should do that"). There is no "they" department in a volunteer
organisation - stuff happens because people care about it enough to do it
themselves.
Nicholas Clark
