Thanks, I'm a decades-long user of gettext from both developer and translator point of view, and have encountered several of the drawbacks to some extent.
It's very good, and has certainly been good enough for most practical purposes, but innovation needs to happen, and things can certainly get better. Thanks for your work in this direction!
Yeah, some sort of pluralization support is pretty much the second most important feature in any message localization tool, right after the ability to substitute externally-defined strings in the first place. Even in a monolingual application, spamming plural formatting logic in application code isn't exactly the best practice.
It's not hard to make a case against gettext, despite its maturity and large ecosystem.
IMHO pluralization is a prime example, with an API that only cleanly handles the English case, requires the developer to be aware of translation gotchas, and honnestly confusing documentation and format. Compare that to MessageFormat's pluralization example (https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/blob/main/s...) which is very easy to understand and fully in the translator's hands.
zbraniecki|13 days ago
We (authors of Fluent and collaborators on MessageFormat 2.0) wrote this explainer which you may find informative - https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-vs-gette...
pferde|12 days ago
It's very good, and has certainly been good enough for most practical purposes, but innovation needs to happen, and things can certainly get better. Thanks for your work in this direction!
Muromec|13 days ago
Sharlin|13 days ago
iririririr|13 days ago
if alternatives don't start with a very strong case why gettext wasn't a good option, it's already a good indicator of not-invented-here syndrome.
moltonel|13 days ago
IMHO pluralization is a prime example, with an API that only cleanly handles the English case, requires the developer to be aware of translation gotchas, and honnestly confusing documentation and format. Compare that to MessageFormat's pluralization example (https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/blob/main/s...) which is very easy to understand and fully in the translator's hands.