macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off
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@marczellm on a slightly related note: the formula functions in Excel have their names "localized" based on the language version of the program.
as in, Concatenate function becomes whatever the word for "concatenate" is in whatever language your Excel uses for UI.
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@sh_code it's an office app. Made back when non-English people didn't really know English. Also back when user experience meant something. Formulas aren't advanced-do-not-touch stuff, they're basic functionality. Translating function names makes perfect sense. And there's always MS Language Portal.
Unlike language-dependent keyboard shortcuts which are just pure evil.
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@sh_code said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@marczellm on a slightly related note: the formula functions in Excel have their names "localized" based on the language version of the program.
Also other spreadsheets. But this is a good thing: you simply cannot expect someone who doesn’t speak English (well or at all) to figure out which names to use in a formula, especially the more convoluted ones. Even fairly common English words like
AVERAGE()will make no sense to someone who only speaks a language whose word for the concept doesn’t look or sound like that at all — like, say,GEMIDDELDE(). For your average office worker, especially 30, 40 years ago, localising spreadsheet formulas actually made them usable without needing a language course first.(“Concatenate” especially is a fucking stupid word that nobody outside of coders even uses. Or at least, that I never encountered outside of the context of programming.)
The main problem with localised formula names is that it makes it difficult to find out what you need to use when most web sites that answer your question, will explain things in English.
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EDIT: Read the page, it's not how I though it works. Still, quite annoying.
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@Gurth
GIMEDDELD()is my new favorite Excel function.
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@Gąska said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
Formulas aren't advanced-do-not-touch stuff, they're basic functionality.
They're where you take the step from basic into intermediate functionality.
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@Gurth said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
Also other spreadsheets. But this is a good thing: you simply cannot expect someone who doesn’t speak English (well or at all) to figure out which names to use in a formula, especially the more convoluted ones.
This is a very good point. I've been living in France for twelve years, nearly thirteen, and I still find French words that I don't know the English word for, or English words that I don't know the French word for. Sometimes it's just "false friends" where the false friend meaning isn't, in some other context, wrong, but in this context, it is (dégradé can mean "degraded", but it also has other meanings in French for which "degraded" is completely the wrong word). And colleagues get bitten by this, too. Just recently, we had a code review where someone had written a comment and a variable name in English, according to the local coding rules (even though it's a French company in France), using the word "incoherence" as a translation of French inchoérence, whose proper translation in English is "inconsistency", at least in the given context.
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@Gąska said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Gurth
GIMEDDELD()is my new favorite Excel function.I keep reading it as some weird abbreviation of Get Middle D
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@marczellm said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
Keyboard set to Hungarian -> Goodbye muscle memory
At least, "Shift Right" and "Shift Left" are placed consistently - Ö is left from Ú. Just imagine they'd also do that the other way round.
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@Gąska said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@sh_code it's an office app. Made back when non-English people didn't really know English. Also back when user experience meant something. Formulas aren't advanced-do-not-touch stuff, they're basic functionality. Translating function names makes perfect sense. And there's always MS Language Portal.
They could have done something MS Basic V2 for the C64 did over 40 years already and store a tokenized version of the formula that gets translated into text only for display. But no, that would have made sense. Rather have sheets vomit all over the place when you share them with someone using a different language version (which is a complete anachronism of its own; we had proper localization on the Amiga in the late 80s and at least they could have copied NeXT's)
Unlike language-dependent keyboard shortcuts which are just pure evil.
Both are in the service of perfect discoverability.
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@LaoC said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
They could have done something MS Basic V2 for the C64 did over 40 years already and store a tokenized version of the formula that gets translated into text only for display. But no, that would have made sense.
Wait, Excel formulas really are that language-specific? So if I were to use, say,
=GEMIDDELDE(B1;C1)in a Dutch version of Excel and mail the document to someone in the US, they wouldn’t see that as=AVERAGE(B1,C1)when they open it?Damn. Another reason I’m glad I use Numbers for my
spreading sheetssheetspreadingspreadsheeting needs …
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@Gurth said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
Wait, Excel formulas really are that language-specific? So if I were to use, say,
=GEMIDDELDE(B1;C1)in a Dutch version of Excel and mail the document to someone in the US, they wouldn’t see that as=AVERAGE(B1,C1)when they open it?They would.
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@Jaloopa said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Gąska said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Gurth
GIMEDDELD()is my new favorite Excel function.I keep reading it as some weird abbreviation of Get Middle D
I guess the O wasn't obvious enough in my joke.
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@loopback0 said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Gurth said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
Wait, Excel formulas really are that language-specific? So if I were to use, say,
=GEMIDDELDE(B1;C1)in a Dutch version of Excel and mail the document to someone in the US, they wouldn’t see that as=AVERAGE(B1,C1)when they open it?They would.
I remember a lot of swearing from my wife's office about a decade ago whenever they were trying to share Excel shit between English, German and Spanish office versions. It might just have been the comma-vs-semicolon issue that you can
fix by changing your entire OS' decimal separator to something agreed on by all collaborators. But MS suggests that function name localization works mostly-but-don't-rely-on-it:Excel worksheet functions
Worksheet function names are translated internally for most language versions of Excel. However, due to potential language and COM interop issues it is recommended that you use only English function names in your code.
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@LaoC said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
It might just have been the comma-vs-semicolon issue that you can
fix by changing your entire OS' decimal separator to something agreed on by all collaborators.Side note - I can't believe Excel still doesn't allow selecting CSV separator when opening files - only when saving. 30 years of users complaining isn't enough for them?
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@LaoC said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
However, due to potential language and COM interop issues it is recommended that you use only English function names in your code.
What the actual fuck is this supposed to mean? I hope that @loopback0 is correct and they just store the actual functions instead of their translated names (I don't have a way to confirm this right now), because that's the only thing even close to sane. But I cannot actually just use the English function names as they say, they are not available.
The
AVERAGEfunction is translated asMITTELWERT, but the original name is not available.
And don't get me started on their CSV insanity. If I read/write, say, a json file than decimals are encoded in C locale. Same as with every other file format. But, of course, fucking Excel thinks that it needs to import CSV files according to whatever the current locale is set to, so importing the same file has completely different meaning for different users.
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@Gąska said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
Side note - I can't believe Excel still doesn't allow selecting CSV separator when opening files - only when saving.
It doesn't work when you "open" a CSV file, but it does when you "import" it. (Where that option is might vary on your version, I've used this before but can't find it on my version right now.)
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@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
But I cannot actually just use the English function names as they say, they are not available.
The
AVERAGEfunction is translated asMITTELWERT, but the original name is not available.Excel for Mac is different™ but also it doesn't need to worry about issues with COM
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@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
(Where that option is might vary on your version, I've used this before but can't find it on my version right now.)
File > Import on Excel for Mac.
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@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
And don't get me started on their CSV insanity.
You're OK provided the CSV is in ASCII. Outside that, all hell breaks loose…
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@dkf said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
And don't get me started on their CSV insanity.
You're OK provided the CSV is in ASCII. Outside that, all hell breaks loose…
You probably think so only because your locale doesn’t break it.
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@dkf said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
And don't get me started on their CSV insanity.
You're OK provided the CSV is in ASCII. Outside that, all hell breaks loose…
And nothing needs quoting. And you're not in a locale that uses
,as a decimal separator.
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@dkf said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
And don't get me started on their CSV insanity.
You're OK provided the CSV is in ASCII. Outside that, all hell breaks loose…
I've pulled in UTF8 files before.
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@dcon said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@dkf said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
And don't get me started on their CSV insanity.
You're OK provided the CSV is in ASCII. Outside that, all hell breaks loose…
I've pulled in UTF8 files before.
Was it a ZWNJSV file?
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@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@LaoC said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
However, due to potential language and COM interop issues it is recommended that you use only English function names in your code.
What the actual fuck is this supposed to mean?
I believe, from the word 'code', it might refer to code that invokes Excel functions, such as from VBA or through COM APIs from any other language.
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@dkf insert a UTF-8 BOM before the data, Excel will presume the data is a CSV in UTF-8 and not mangle it so much.
It'll still fuck up unquoted text entries like
1-5into a date to be helpful but it'll not mangle accents so much.
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@Arantor said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
UTF-8 BOM
My inner
always flies into a rage when it encounters this sequence of letters.
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@Arantor said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@dkf insert a UTF-8 BOM before the data, Excel will presume the data is a CSV in UTF-8 and not mangle it so much.
There was at least one version of Excel where, if you did that, it would mangle the content in a different way but still would mangle it. (The data categorically had to be in UTF-8 as it was in mixed languages from all over the world; titles of papers and names of authors are like that, and very strongly so in some fields.)
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@ixvedeusi as it should, in UTF-8 this should be unnecessary but there are people who adamantly suggest it should be there. They are, of course, TRWTF.
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@dkf I never had the misfortune to encounter that, thankfully, and have since progressed to just telling people who work in daily office life to send me XLSX files (and people who are actually competent can still send me CSVs if they like)
I learned this way of life from the folks who would open things in Excel and be confused that Excel has creatively interpreted the CSV… it seems to be less creative about XLSX files.
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@Arantor said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@ixvedeusi as it should, in UTF-8 this should be unnecessary but there are people who adamantly suggest it should be there. They are, of course, TRWTF.
I probably don't want to know, but what does it do?!
There's only one way to order one out of one bytes.
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@topspin well, in UTF-8 land as you say it does nothing in its own right, but there are systems that look for a BOM to differentiate “hey this is UTF-something” vs “I don’t give a shit what this is, treat it as Win-125x”. Like Excel.
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@Arantor of course there are also systems that treat BOM as a separate meaningful character and crash the parser when they encounter one.
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@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Arantor said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@ixvedeusi as it should, in UTF-8 this should be unnecessary but there are people who adamantly suggest it should be there. They are, of course, TRWTF.
I probably don't want to know, but what does it do?!
There's only one way to order one out of one bytes.The reason it's called Byte Order Mask is because it determines byte order in UTF-16. And UTF-8 has all the same code points as UTF-16. Eventually people figured out it makes a nice way to indicate that the text is indeed UTF-8.
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@Gąska now I'm thinking about the byte order of UTF-32 and ... ugh, I just need to stop thinking about Unicode.
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@topspin and thus you need a BOM…
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@Gąska said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Arantor of course there are also systems that treat BOM as a separate meaningful character and crash the parser when they encounter one.
Why yes, that's what it is, namely a zero-width non-breaking space, so "I assumed it was meaningful" is not really a good reason to crash anything.
Edit:
If U+FEFF had only the semantics of a signature code point, it could be freely deleted from text without affecting the interpretation of the rest of the text. Carelessly appending files together, for example, can result in a signature code point in the middle of text. Unfortunately, U+FEFF also has significance as a character. As a zero width no-break space, it indicates that line breaks are not allowed between the adjoining characters. Thus U+FEFF affects the interpretation of text and cannot be freely deleted. The overloading of semantics for this code point has caused problems for programs and protocols. The new character U+2060 word joiner has the same semantics in all cases as U+FEFF, except that it cannot be used as a signature. Implementers are strongly encouraged to use word joiner in those circumstances whenever word joining semantics are intended.
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@topspin said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Gąska now I'm thinking about the byte order of UTF-32 and ... ugh, I just need to stop thinking about Unicode.
Should be
\000\000\376\377or\377\376\000\000. Though of course there might still be hardware which uses\000\000\377\376or\376\377\000\000and supports unicode, and there's 20 other permutations to pick from if you want to be evil.
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@Gąska said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Arantor of course there are also systems that treat BOM as a separate meaningful character and crash the parser when they encounter one.
That's hardly the fault of the BOM itself.
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@Arantor said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@ixvedeusi as it should, in UTF-8 this should be unnecessary but there are people who adamantly suggest it should be there. They are, of course, TRWTF.
Do Microsoft systems still do that? Because it was really pain back in the 2000s, when all proper standard-compliant XML parsers choked on that (because XML standard does not allow it).
Man, that was such a pain, trying to explain that to Microsoft shops and C# developers... usually in vain, of course.
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@Kamil-Podlesak last I checked they still check for BOM to indicate UTF-encoded CSVs… not sure about the rest of the ecosystem.
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@Arantor said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Kamil-Podlesak last I checked they still check for BOM to indicate UTF-encoded CSVs… not sure about the rest of the ecosystem.
Yeah, CSV is understandable, there is no other way (except guessing). But XML already has perfectly fine charset information header, usable for any superset of ASCII (which does include UTF-8).
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@Kamil-Podlesak sure, you shouldn’t need a BOM in those cases except if you use UTF-16 or UTF-32 without explicitly declaring endianness - at which point you are stuck with it because unless you actually declare “I am UTF-16 LE” or similar that’s literally all you get and I believe parsers are free to reject it in that case where the order is theoretically indeterminate.
I say theoretically because you absolutely could work it out for XML to 100% knowable but I don’t remember if that’s in spec or not. I never saw UTF-16 documents in the wild because I’m a bit young for that shit. Only place I ever saw UTF-16 is the UCS-2 stuff in Windows.
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@Arantor said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Kamil-Podlesak sure, you shouldn’t need a BOM in those cases except if you use UTF-16 or UTF-32 without explicitly declaring endianness - at which point you are stuck with it because unless you actually declare “I am UTF-16 LE” or similar that’s literally all you get and I believe parsers are free to reject it in that case where the order is theoretically indeterminate.
Yes, from the very beginning, BOM was mandatory UTF-16 / UCS-2
The UTF-8 BOM, however, was added as a possible beginning in the second edition. Hmmm, already in 2000, I would swear is was around 2006...
I say theoretically because you absolutely could work it out for XML to 100% knowable but I don’t remember if that’s in spec or not. I never saw UTF-16 documents in the wild because I’m a bit young for that shit. Only place I ever saw UTF-16 is the UCS-2 stuff in Windows.
Which means that you probably don't remember big-endian computers either
Although, there was a Windows version for big-endian architecture, I think... NT 3 or something?
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@Kamil-Podlesak I came to the PC from the Amiga which was big endian. I was dealing with the concept years before I knew the term or before I encountered UTF-anything.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
BOM was mandatory UTF-16 / UCS-2
Only when it was serialized. In memory, it's usually unnecessary as you usually use the host endianness (and byteswap incoming files that are the other way ASAP).
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@dkf said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
BOM was mandatory UTF-16 / UCS-2
Only when it was serialized. In memory, it's usually unnecessary as you usually use the host endianness (and byteswap incoming files that are the other way ASAP).
Well, of course, memory representation is not specified by the standard at all. That would be... horribly unreasonable
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in macOS 12 Localized Keyboard Shortcuts piss me off:
Well, of course, memory representation is not specified by the standard at all. That would be... horribly unreasonable
Having briefly dealt with the actual Unicode technical people, “horribly unreasonable” is a very useful phrase.
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@dkf you have my deepest sympathies. Where should I send the wreath to for the departed brain cells?
