zbraniecki

> What is the equivalent of xgettext.pl

There is no standard one, although people build their own. The general consensus is that source strings should not be inlined into code. The closest analogy is to "style" vs "class" in HTML/CSS - the clean separation of concerns comes from the "id" being the contract.

You can read more about it here: https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-vs-gette...

There are attempts to "merge" those two philosophies, by extracting and "generating" slugs as ids. Examples: - https://formatjs.github.io/docs/getting-started/message-extr... - https://lingui.dev/guides/message-extraction - https://app.studyraid.com/en/read/15768/550728/setting-up-th...

I'm fairly skeptical of this approach.

> the file extension for the main catalog file `.po`

In MF1.0 world, the file format is JSON or XML. You encode id=>Message pairs. In Fluent world there is a Fluent (FTL) file format. In MF2.0 the format itself is, again, message scoped. On top of it there's a proposal by Mozilla to create MessageResource - https://github.com/w3c/i18n-discuss/blob/gh-pages/explainers... and that may feed into DOM L10n - https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/blob/main/dom-localiza...

> the __ function?

see the (1) and links to "generated ids".

> How does gender work (small example)?

MF 1.0:

``` {GENDER, select, male {He answered} female {She answered} other {They answered} } ```

Fluent: ``` user-answered = { $gender -> [male] He answered. [female] She answered. *[other] They answered. } ```

> How does layering pt_BR on pt_PT work?

MF does not prescribe fallback behavior. It also more popular to treat each locale as "complete" and fill "gaps" at build time. So at runtime you have `pt-BR` which has pt-BR strings and missing ones "completed" from `pt` (parent locale).

Fluent has a "resource manager" (simple one like this: https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent-rs/tree/main/fluent-... or more complex like Mozilla L10nRegistry), which can fallback at runtime, allowing for what we call "partial locales" which can roll out to production with gaps and the resource manager will fetch the fallback strings from the parent locale.

> What is a compelling reason to switch?

If you and your users are happy with gettext, none!

If either of those groups complain, there may be many: - https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-vs-gette...

Hope that helps!

Lmk if you have further questions!

We (authors of Fluent and collaborators on MessageFormat 2.0) wrote this explainer which you may find informative - https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-vs-gette...

> 1) “Your knight has killed a dragon with a crossbow”

We have a proposal for dynamic references to address this problem - https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/issues/80 - it's non-trivial but I hope we'll see it solved in Fluent and/or in MessageFormat 2.

> 2) The parser is extremely sensitive

True. It's on purpose. We wanted to start with strict and loosen, rather than the opposite.

> 3) The input files mandate a weird arrangement of new lines for even the simplest branching

Same as above.

> 4) The documentation is too Spartan to know what happens in edge cases.

We're a small team :)

> It heralds itself to be the saviour of all i18n, but it’s literally worse than the mess that came before it.

I'm sorry to hear it doesn't work for you. I'm relieved that your criticism is seems more subjective except of one missing feature that no other l10n system has as of yet. We'll keep pushing, but if you encounter a better l10n system, please let me know! We're working on Unicode MessageFormat 2.0 based on Fluent and incorporating lessons learned.

Since then @hsivonen from Mozilla wrote a new normalizer that recently got merged into ICU4X - https://github.com/unicode-org/icu4x/tree/main/components/no...

I don't have perf numbers yet but I suspect it to be perf comparable to ICU4C at least.

There have been 9 revisions of ECMA-402 since 2012. We are, in fact, following TC-39 on a yearly cadence of releases.

You can see the history of editions here: https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standard...

The first edition (finished in 2012), had just NumberFormat, Collator and basic DateTimeFormat.

Since then, we added Locale, PluralRules, ListFormat, RelativeTimeFormat, DisplayNames, two new revisions of NumberFormat, two major additions to DateTimeFormat, and we're now adding Segmenter, LocaleInfo, CalendarInfo and working on MessageFormat 2.0.

Here's a very incomplete list of finished proposals that have been merged into the standard and implemented in browsers - https://github.com/tc39/proposals/blob/master/ecma402/finish...

I may or may not be involved in majority of them! :)

You might say "I want to supply my own pattern, you just do step two for me" and technically we can provide that functionality by exposing it.

The issue is that from the API design perspective it would lead to people misusing the API misunderstanding what is going on and believing that they "internationalized their UI" which is not the case. In fact, they'd make things worse for their users than if they just displayed a date in a single locale with consistent pattern+localization because in some cases "MM/DD" and "DD/MM" are indistinguishable when expanded and that may lead to data loss, security loss, or just confusion.

I'd argue that every case where you want to supply your own pattern is a case where you should not attempt to internationalize that pattern. I also recognize that it's just my opinion.

I've been working on ECMA-402 for the last 6 years on behalf of Mozilla. I'm excited to see it showcased on HN! We have an amazing, inclusive and open community of engineers, linguists and standardization exports from all of the World from largest corporations to smallest non profits and maintainers of open source little libraries.

If you'd like to see what we're working on, see https://github.com/tc39/proposals/blob/master/ecma402/README...

If you'd like to join us, please check out https://github.com/tc39/ecma402/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Our biggest challenge now is to make sure that anyone can use ECMA-402 - either with a well supported JS engine (V8, SpiderMonkey, JSShell etc.) or via library. To achieve that we're working on Rust project called ICU4X which aims to be able to back ECMA-402 in web browsers, on servers, in client solutions and offer FFI to many programming languages including to JS over WASM.

If you'd like to help us with that, there's tons of work and we're very eager to grow our community! Check out https://github.com/unicode-org/icu4x/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.... and https://github.com/unicode-org/icu4x/tree/main/docs

If you have any questions, AMA!

I can see an appeal for it, and I wouldn't mind `Date` or `Temporal` to have such pattern-driven formatting, but it is critical to recognize that it is not internationalization and thus doesn't belong there.

In particular, if you use `strftime` like formatting you're doing the opposite - you're hardcoding the formatting into a single pattern. It may be the right thing for your project, but it definitely is not i18n :)

We hope to eventually back SpiderMonkey (Firefox JS engine) implementation with it, but we also want to target WASM and in result expose it as a polyfill for any browser to use.

I don't know if by the time ICU4X is 1.0 IE11 will still matter, but it may be possible to compile it to asm.js and run in IE11 maybe?

Thank you for writing a user land library for it. It's a thankless task and a very important one and I think such a complex problem deserves a userland solution!

We could definitely use some help :)

So they want "do the right thing" for 103 out of 104 locales, but "do what I told you" for "MY" locale.

This is a bit of a conundrum because we don't want to treat any locale as "special". To translate it to code you'd write something like:

  if (currentLocale == "THE_ONE_UX_CREATED_MOCKS_FOR") {
    let value = formatToUXProvidedPattern(data);
  } else {
    let value = data.toLocaleString(currentLocale);
  }

I'm not trying to hype you up, but I think that there's a lot of utility happening outside of your bubble. Some of that happens in countries you don't live in, other use cases appear between banking systems which remain opaque to you. That's not the same as "no utility".

Gold's current value is not related to its function as a material for jewelry, but from a myth that it is a store of value. If people would stop believing the myth, the cost of gold would plummet and stabilize around the value it provides as a material for jewelry.

Similarly, "art is lovely" is a really stretched argument. If you want, you could print your transaction block hash and consider it pretty as a math-art concept.

So yes, bitcoin needs people to believe in its value to remain valuable, much like everything else that is not a raw utility - nations, religions, money, corporations, gold, baseball cards, and so on.

Heck, even Ferraris would become much cheaper if people only valued them for their function. They cost a lot primarily because we value them highly due to myths and scarcity.

It's not all that black/white. I'm also on a similar journey to David (volunteer for Mozilla since I was 16, I'm 37 now), with a lot of passion for the project and invested in some large projects there.

AMA, and don't let other people's journeys decide on yours.

It's possible that we already have a bug reported against this particular crash and we need someone who can reproduce it to help us find a way to fix it! I'll look to find such bug and contact you with the people who may be able to fix it. My email is my hackernews handle `@` `mozilla.com`.

Thank you!