From Tsuguya Sasaki’s “Thunderbird: Guide for the Perplexed”:
Please Metricate Thunderbird!
- United States, the guardian of English as the putative universal language of computers and the Internet, is one of the three countries in the world (!) that do not use the metric system (aka international system of units), the universal language of measurement.
- Why do developers of Thunderbird (as well as a number of other open source programs), the majority of whom seem to be US citizens, continue to impose upon us an inferior non-universal (“Imperial”) unit of measurement (for length such as print margins and internal calculation) in its original US English version with no option of switching to the metric system, if they really advocate universal, open source software?!
- There is nothing more irrational and absurd than the continued use of this parochial system in open source software, and it is in a sense even worse than proprietary software they deride. The original US English version of Thunderbird should be metricated as soon as possible in order to be a truly open source mailer!
The original article is here: www.ts-cyberia.net/thunderbird.html.
Ahem, we had the same discussions with many software authors back in 1986; when we used } { | ] [ \ to mean å ä ö Å Ä Ö. Things have improved since then, but I can only agree with Tsuguya Sasaki. This is not by any means intended as US-bashing, it’s a mere fact that the US is using a system of units in disharmony with most other places on the globe. But things may be looking up, I mean even Hollywood is beginning to make movies where the actors use words like “meters” to indicate distance (roughly a yard).
ASCII is dead, long live ASCII 🙂