Frivolous Friday, 07.16.2010: "Language" support

One of my projects for this weekend involves setting up an installation of the (open source) bug-tracking system Mantis and customizing it convincingly enough to make it passable for a demonstration on Monday. Part of said customization is switching its (relatively) bare-bones list of statuses to something closer to what the office would use.

Mantis is polished enough to have internationalization capabilities, but I couldn't resist joking to Dennis that the "English" version wasn't nearly specific enough. I mean, speaking as a 'merican an' all, there's English, and then there's how they talk over on that lovely little island to the west of continental Europe.

Big difference. I know, 'cuz I more or less grew up on BBC re-runs, y'understand. And it was definitely educational. For instance, I know that J.S. Bach wrote one heck of a lot of classy theme music for the BBC. Years later, I'm still at a loss to understand why they're all lumped together as the "Brandenburg Concertos." C'mon...even I know that Brandenburg is someplace in Germany. That's most certainly not Great Britain. (Best efforts of the Saxons and Hanovrians--with honorable mention to the Luftwaffe and Operation Sea Lion--notwithstanding, nat'cher'ly.)

But back to the point.

So. Let's say, for example, that the "English" version of a bug tracker has the following statuses:

• New
• Assigned
• In progress
• QA passed
• Deployed into production
• Closed
  

Extrapolating from my public television education (plus a handful of Eddie Izzard DVDs), the British translation should, by all rights, look more like this:

• Wotcher!
• Up for it
  
• Stuck in
• Sorted
• Bob's your uncle
• The dog's bollocks

But then--albeit a tad belatedly--epiphany struck: "Hold up! Why on earth would we even need language support? After all, aren''t programmers mostly the same the world 'round? Why not just support a more universal language? You know: The Esperanto of Geek?" Simply put: You could cross several generations of programmers with a syntax that borders on Junginan racial memory. I speak, of course, of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. To wit:

• There's one!
• Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi: You're my only hope.
• It's not impossible; I used to bulls-eye wamp rats in my T-16 back home.
  
• You're all clear, kid! Now let's blow this thing so we can all go home.
• Great shot! That was one in a million!
• The Force will be with you. Always.
  

(Or, perchance, for a slightly campier and gothier crowd, Army of Darkness:

• In God's name, what Hellspawn lurks there?!
  
• Well, hello, Mister Fancy-pants!
• This...is my...BOOMSTICK!
  
• Groovy.
• Buckle up, bonehead: You're goin' for a ride.
• Hail to the King, baby.)
  

Now. I suppose that if you had a strictly Gen-Y crowd, you might want to opt for Firefly references instead. (And if your I/T staff is a Millennial pure-play...well...Cthulu help you, because I certainly can't.) But you get the basic idea, yes?

Except that then I remembered that non-programmers might actually want to submit line-items to a bug tracking system. At least in theory. I've heard...rumors...that code might not actually be perfect when it reaches The Real World. (I speak strictly of other programmers' code, of course.) In such a scenario--a statistical outlier, to be sure--perhaps such statuses might be confusing, perhaps even startling, to the uninitiated. Fair enough.

The point (and believe it or not, there actually is one) is that the more fluently a tool--be hardware, software, or sharpened stick--speaks the native dialect, the more likely it will be used.