Simple software things that are actually very complicated
A lot of the complexity in this article isn't so much that the task is very complex, but that if you want to support every single language, culture, format, then it becomes a very long task.I do wonder if we will end up just moving towards more unified formats and doing away with the need for all this complexity. I could be very wrong on this, but it seems like for the smaller to mid scale software projects, I18n is just not worth it. Throwing a bunch of YAML files over the wall to a translation company and then just dropping them in the app does not work and the end result is so bad that native speakers would rather just use the app in correct English than broken native language.Now you don't have to care about how to wrap or hyphenate a word in an obscure language which doesn't support it, and you don't have to worry about vertical text. Your problem space just got a lot smaller. And if you are building a tool at Google scale then you should have the resources to just make the problem go away anyway.