Fire the programmer (was: Re: Appeal to ISO 639 RA in support of Elfdalian)

Luc Pardon lucp at skopos.be
Fri Apr 29 19:21:03 CEST 2016


On 28-04-16 19:24, Shawn Steele wrote:
> As a one-liner, yea, it's exciting and points the finger at the application.
> 
    That (the last part) was indeed what I wanted to say.

    Because that's where the finger should be pointing at.

> But that's being in a car wreck and blaming the other driver (or yourself).  Neither of you are going to get to work on time.
> 

    That analogy assumes mutual damage and the possibility of mutual
errors and therefore does not apply here.

    The Y2K bug is a better analogy.

    Was the year 2000 blamed for triggering it? Of course not.

    Neither should this group be blamed if we correctly apply the BCP47
rules and thereby trigger pre-existing bugs in some language processors.

    In both cases it's a matter of dormant bugs in applications, and in
both cases it is the applications that need fixing. Not the calendar nor
the RFC.


> Some customers have the ability to just dump the app or fix the program, but many, probably very important, &/or vocal ones, aren't going to have that luxury.
> 

    OK, understood, but why would they want to dump or fix anything?

    Your existing customers will not be affected if we introduce
5-letter subtags. They will not need them nor use them, they will
continue to process documents with 2 or 3-letter tags, the bug will not
bite them, and their life will be as beautiful as it was before.

   No car wrecks, and nobody late for work.

   Luc



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