The conversation that led to Ruby being called Ruby

[patio11]

I took the liberty of rewriting this in slightly more idiomatic English:

http://pastebin.com/tHDPJsUt

It is tricky: Japanese chat logs don't have all that much context to go on, and you have to make a judgment call as to what sort of "voice" they'd be speaking with. I gave them fairly informal young American programmer personalities but with just as much reason I could rewrite this to loko like it was two frat boys.

Disclaimer: I don't exactly go all-out for accuracy when translating to procrastinate about going to sleep.

[ejames]

I always enjoy (from an intellectual perspective) seeing two translations of the same thing...

When I compare your rewrite to mine, I notice that I semi-unconsciously had Matz and Keiju writing some lines as full sentences with correct English capitalization, and others as fragments starting with lowercase letters. That's often how English chatlogs look, after all. I have a Skype chatlog in my other window, talking with my product manager, that has a similar feel - I don't capitalize when I'm continuing the thought from a previous chat message.

And of course, I missed a few things you didn't - I'm not as conversant with tech-related Japanese.

It's tricky to come up with an idiomatic way to show two people discussing in Japanese an English play on words. Not to mention the Japanese "how is that spelled?" question that doesn't make sense in written English.

[GrooveStomp]

Thanks! The one linked in the headline read like to chatbots randomly writing stuff at each other.

[zach]

  keiju> But, perl is related to a shell.
  matz> Oh, I don't know that
  matz> never noticed that

Whoa. So today I learned that. Never noticed that either, all this time.

[bitops]

Can you explain? I didn't understand this part of the conversation.

[dpapathanasiou]

Was that a happy coincidence after the fact?

I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

At least that's according to the man pages on my linux machine.

[ayanb]

Wow, So Ruby was almost named Coral. Imagine programming in Coral on curtails.

Incidentally, there is actually a language named Coral ( a general purpose programming language based on ALGOL-60 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_66 )

[andrewflnr]

Maybe you would call the framework "Reef". That would have been pretty cool.

[jarin]

  keiju> ruby 
  keiju> a jewelry name after all 
  matz> put it alongside kanji?

Just FYI, this refers to the simpler hiragana characters sometimes put next to kanji characters (for people who don't read kanji very well). This is also often a source of confusion for people who see the <ruby> HTML5 tag and think that it's for the Ruby language.

[threedaymonk]

[Pedantic note] They're not just for people who can't read kanji well: they're also used to provide a phonetic gloss for proper names (where the pronunciation is ambiguous or unique), or in literary contexts to indicate the intended pronunciation where unorthodox kanji are used for nuance.

[9999]

So I'll be saying "What's the heck?" a lot for the rest of my life.

[wccrawford]

Am I the only one who wanted to read the original Japanese?

[ejames]

A link to the original (scroll down a bit):

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-dev/5...

I might try my hand at a translation with better flow... although, remember, the original is a chat log. Chat logs read in retrospect usually don't flow as well as natural conversation!

[xonev]

Reading the original Japanese wouldn't have helped me, but I did desire a better translation. It's barely understandable as it is.

[contextfree]

There's already a link to it on the page. Click on "[ruby-dev:5173]"

[seagaia]

Certainly if one is fluent, that's a perfectly reasonable desire - I'm not, but I'm sure there's a significant amount lost in that translation process.