Okay, another post in the tour of skipped over noteworthy things I’ve been a part of. Previously, I wrote about writing programs in other human languages (among other things). Here, I’m talking about the talk Tim and I gave last year at Clojure/conj 2023, which is about transpiling a program from one programming language to another (among other things). Ha! No, it’s not the same at all. And our talk is actually the important lessons that we learned from our work, and we crafted our presentation content & style to be accessible. Hopefully, you will come away with at least one useful insight, even if you don’t know programming, or scroll further down this post for my written “director’s cut commentary”:
Category: i18n
I’ve accidentally skipped writing here about things that I’ve done here and there. It’s easy to to not follow up after someone puts up a post or a video that is easy to point to, in the thought that the content speaks for itself. But in reality, there’s usually more to say. Often times, you just have to dig under the surface, ask questions, and look for connections. Anyhoo, here’s one such set of things that are related to each other (and related by design!).
I’m happy that Unicode’s first Unicode Technology Workshop a month ago went well. The video recordings from the event are still being processed, but should be up soon. I’m looking forward to sending out my presentation to people, and working on a prototype for Malayalam next (and who knows what’s after, Devanagari? Balinese?) The event was so good that I defied my instincts and posted something on a social media platform (LinkedIn) after it was over:
Here is a collection of more links to learn about internationalization, beyond the really good videos from the recent Unicode event and other links that I mentioned along with them. I might continually update this space to organize all of the links for learning about internationalization, organized by what might be most useful to total beginners.
- Getting Started with Internationalization – A quick, well-written intro to basic terms and concepts with illustrative pictures
- Unicode Demystified by Rich Gillam – a book written in simple language that explains the technical aspects of Unicode, gives a survey of writing systems / languages, and an overview of the higher level things. You should probably read this before reading the Unicode core specification, if you ever need to do that.
The Unicode Consortium had its online event last week entitled “Overview of Internationalization and Unicode Projects”. The 6 videos have an average runtime less than 15 minutes and create a nice, gradual explanation of the internationalization / Unicode ecosystem that nicely builds upon itself. The videos are also embedded below.
A colleague asked me a good way to get a background of internationalization. Here is what I told that person:
Sequenced Thoughts from C/S 