The VBA part of the meme is real, VBA is (was?) localized. Turns out it’s a horrible idea: some keywords are badly translated, some are not translated at all. Googling localized error messages is useless, so you need to guess the original error message from the translation. Want to copy/paste a function from SO? Not so fast, you need to translate the keywords first! And the variable names as well while you’re at it.
Ironically, you end up spending a lot of time on translation-related issues. I’ve worked on a french-VBA app, and it was a miserable experience (well, even more miserable than english VBA).
Yeah, one time I helped out an HR person with an Excel formula. It took like 5 minutes to write the formula on my laptop. Then I sent it to them and it took another 5 minutes to translate it into the local language…
The VBA part of the meme is real, VBA is (was?) localized. Turns out it’s a horrible idea: some keywords are badly translated, some are not translated at all. Googling localized error messages is useless, so you need to guess the original error message from the translation. Want to copy/paste a function from SO? Not so fast, you need to translate the keywords first! And the variable names as well while you’re at it.
Ironically, you end up spending a lot of time on translation-related issues. I’ve worked on a french-VBA app, and it was a miserable experience (well, even more miserable than english VBA).
Yeah, one time I helped out an HR person with an Excel formula. It took like 5 minutes to write the formula on my laptop. Then I sent it to them and it took another 5 minutes to translate it into the local language…