On the Internationalization of Cows (or: more about my job)

June 27th, 2007

Prepare yourselves for a tech-heavy post. Hey, at least I wrote something.

My job here in Animal Sciences at McGill is to write a Java program that a bunch of people will hopefully be using by the end of the summer. Essentially, I’m writing a new version of an old benchmarking program that they want to ditch. It was too slow and insecure. And buggy. Very buggy.

The old program was written in Visual Basic 6 over the last few years. The code base gives the impression that the program was designed while simultaneously being coded: it ended up with thousands of lines of code in each file. It’s unmaintainable by pretty much anyone except the student who wrote it a few years back (some code is commented nicely, but some of it…well, isn’t). Anyway, what I’m getting at is that the old program works alright but is excessively sloppy. One of the worst aspects is the language handling. Since it is to be used by both French and English speakers, the application needs to be able to switch languages on the fly (not that hard of a thing to do, providing you know both the languages). This was not done properly in the old program: when you change languages, only half (ish) of the program actually gets changed.

I’ve never written a program that needed to support more than one language, but it’s definitely something I’ve thought about. In my recent research, I’ve found that the solution I had in my head was close enough to reality (text or resource files containing the strings in different languages, stored separate from the program and accessed at runtime).

So remember, internationalization and localization prevents misinterpretation! (I’d love to hear crowds of people chanting this in a protest somewhere.)

The programmer who wrote the old VB program, while probably a pretty decent coder, definitely fell into many of the traps described near the end of this posting. I really hope that in two years I don’t end up reading someone’s blog describing how painful my code is to read.

Iraq Body Count range: 66,500-72,800. (up 300ish from last post)

Music: Neil Young

Entry Filed under: Technology