Putting your money on locales at NooK
← Back to cvAt Nook 2019 I held a talk in german language titled putting your money on locales.
In it I recounted a story of discovering details about currency formatting for specific locales in the browser. The talk description went like this:
Quasi über Nacht hatte sich etwas an den Schweitzer Franken geändert. Es war unklar was genau, und auch ob vorher oder nachher besser war. Aber erst mal war es anders. Inkonsistent.
Wer legt eigentlich fest wie lokalisiert wird? Woher weiß unsere Software wie Nachkommastellen in deiner Lieblingssprache aussehen?
Wir haben es mit einem ausgewachsenen Nischenproblem zu tun.
I’d roughly translate the description like this:
Almost overnight, something had changed regarding Swiss francs. It was unclear what exactly, and whether before or after was better. But first of all it was different. Inconsistent.
Who decides how to localize? How does our software know what decimal places look like in your favorite language?
We’re dealing with a full-fledged niche problem.
The slides for this talk are available at github.com/runjak/nook2019.
The code to compare locale formatting between glibc and icu is available at github.com/runjak/ideal-goggles.