Comment by _jal
4 years ago
No, "diacritics don't kill people, people kill people" is not an important life lesson. It is a reductive just-so generalization of basic common sense that obscures more than it enlightens.
The important thing for engineers to note is a technical shortcoming caused a tragic misunderstanding. Focusing instead on the well-known fact that some people have poor impulse control, knowing full well that is a non-controllable input, instead makes an excuse for poor engineering and implicitly expresses powerlessness to do anything about the problem.
I am all for good localization efforts. I've been something of a champion for that whenever I've been around user facing code and people working on it. I also am a bit of a language nerd and not monolingual.
But yes, misunderstanding or not, we should not kill people.
The story in the sibling comment is about a man attacking his daughter's ex because the ex came to apologize about a confusion over the Turkish dotless I. That's still a violent attack that the father could have kept his emotions in check. I don't condone calling the daughter names, even accidentally, but it is not a crime and the right response is not attempted murder.
> but it is not a crime and the right response
I don't know who you're arguing with, but it isn't me. Nobody is saying it was.
I'm saying it is an irrelevant non sequitur.
Imagine that Dad instead misunderstood an instruction related to a financial transaction and lost a ton of money. Would you now be discounting the technical problem that caused the misunderstanding and berating Dad for being foolish?
I'm not discounting the technical problem.
If I were on a code review and I spotted an issue affecting Turkish dotless I, I assure you I would rant about it more than is reasonable.