Most APIs are based on English so this makes a very messy combination. And yet people do it often, hindering the possibility of foreigners to contribute.
A recent example I've run into is the WYSIWYG editing extension for ShareJS, with all comments in Russian. I'd love to reuse it, but this just keeps me away:
https://github.com/rizzoma/ShareJS/blob/master/src/client/ri...
(note: I can read Cyrillic characters and do understand some Russian, but still)
Wikipedia: > The German company StarDivision in Lüneburg (founded by 16-year-old Marco Börries in 1984) wrote the original components of StarOffice
as detected by Miklos' nice bin/find-german-comments script
bin/german-and-comment
English version for our rich editor will be launched after supporting of most browsers be ready.
I can't wait to see what the talented LibreOffice developers decide to do once they have finished cleaning up legacy code and can focus almost exclusively on those things that impact user experience the most.
LibreOffice's usability, performance, and looks are likely to improve dramatically over the next couple of years.
In fact, most spreadsheets today are created using OOXML, so it might be easier (notionally speaking) than the binary XLS format.
I daresay, there is a very, very large market for this - especially in Asia. I dont need the same for Word or Powerpoint - PDFs work fine in an emergency. For spreadsheets, I dont have an alternative.
OOXML is a beastly specification, because it's not just a description of how to create a document or spreadsheet -- it includes artifacts to maintain compatibility with MS Office software from the early 90's.
Now, thats's an idea for a Kickstarter. This is the kind of thing that goes on to transform businesses in third world countries - Excel is what prevents the move to Linux more than ANYTHING else.
Not to mention the various versions of it (e.g ECMA vs ISO, and their revisions) which led to differing and incompatible implementations, numerous areas where things are ambiguous or undefined, and things that are defined by referencing the undisclosed DOC/XLS spec.
Same with Softmaker.
"Unfortunately, for one reason and another, despite a delay for a fourth release candidate, there are still some circumstances where an upgrade will not re-register some built-in extensions, and silently exit on first launch (just re-run it). On the down-side that can affect spell-checking dictionaries, and (for some) on the up-side disables Auto-COrrection too."
I'm wondering if it is significant that the second letter in "COrrection" is capitalized? Like, the feature that automatically corrects TWo INitial CAps will be disabled? But some people find that auto-correction annoying and will consider it an "up-side" that it's disabled? Doesn't really make sense to me, but it's all I can think of here.