Ruby Best Practices

Conclusions

The process of multilingualization and localization is something that has been overlooked by programmers for far too long. This is mostly due to the fact that accomplishing any level of globalized support in software systems was until fairly recently a highly complex task. The demand for such functionality was also considerably lower before networked software dominated our ecosystem, due to the fact that software user bases typically were not globalized themselves.

In 2009, it is a whole different scene. If we want to write software that can be used comfortably by people all around the world, we need to rise to the occasion and make our code capable of speaking (or at least processing) the myriad collection languages that people are comfortable with. With Ruby 1.9, we have a powerful system for writing code that respects the cultural influences of our users, and we should take advantage of it whenever we can. The techniques shown in this chapter will help you make your software more accessible, whether it is open source or commercial. However, this chapter does not attempt to teach m17n, L10n in general, or the gritty details of how everything fits together in the context of Ruby. I strongly encourage you to read up on those topics before trying to apply any of the ideas you’ve gained here.