Re: Is marketing speak in Ada wikibook o.K.?

[Manuel Gomez <mgrojo@gmail.com>]

16/10/12 19:18, Adam Beneschan wrote:
 > On Tuesday, October 16, 2012 7:14:42 AM UTC-7, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
 >> The following two sentences are from the wikibook on Ada
 >> Programming (which seems somewhat prominent). They start the
 >> section on generics.
 >>
 >> "The idea of code reusability arises because of the necessity to
 >> construct programs on the basis of well established building
 >> blocks that can be combined to form an ampler and complex system.
 >> The reusability of code improves the productivity and the quality
 >> of software."
 >>
 >> No offense intended, but do they actually say much at all? Do they
 >> teach generics, specifically? To me, they sound almost---without
 >> wanting to rebuke authors--like having been dropped from Gautier's
 >> CBSG.

That's my fault. I translated that paragraph from the equivalent Ada
wikibook in Spanish. You'r right, the original is a bit pompous (I hope
this translates well from "ampuloso") and my translation is even worse,
due to lack of language skill.

 > I don't have a problem with it.  Too much "cheerleading" would be
 > embarrassing, but this doesn't seem like too much, and it can't hurt
 > to remind programmers to try to write code in a way that parts of it
 > can be reused.  I do have a problem with the word "ampler", though,
 > which is not a word I've ever heard or seen used in English--and I'm
 > a native (American) English speaker, 51 years old.  It looked like a
 > typo at first.  Even when I figured out that it wasn't a typo and
 > figured out what the word was, it still was confusing.

 > My guess is that this was written by a non-native English speaker,

You guessed right! Much of the wikibook have been written by non-native 
English speakers. English is nowadays the lingua franca for engineering. 
Please, forgive our mistakes. It is difficult to write or speak a 
foreign language. You are lucky!

 > and they just meant "bigger" but perhaps tried to use a thesaurus to
 > come up with a more interesting word, which doesn't always work if
 > you don't have a good understanding of the connotations.

Ampler is my poor translation of "m�s amplio". What do you think of 
writing "wider" instead?

By the way, Wikipedia and Wikibooks culture says: be bold in editing!
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Be_bold