[mattbasta]

The only thing that turns me off to a product more than a poor website is poor English in the documentation. If English isn't your primary language, PLEASE get someone that speaks it fluently to either write your docs, translate your docs, or edit what you've written.

[nakovet]

They are nice to write the documentation in poor English, they could launch the product only with Polish documentation and then you would never be able to use it before someones translates it.

[cabalamat]

> they could launch the product only with Polish documentation and then you would never be able to use it before someones translates it

This is true. It is also true that I am not able to use it at present because I don't understand the documentation.

A large part of modern programming is getting one's code to work with external libraries. For this to be a joy (and not a pain) the library's API should be simple and the documentation well-written.

I'm sure I could understand this library, if I put effort into it. However doing that has added problems -- I might subtly misunderstand it in ways that my code works most of the time but not always. And why should I bother? Python comes with multiple ways of storing data, such as sqlite, which I've used before and like.

This is not to knock the people behind CodernityDB which for all I know might be an excellent product. But at the moment it's not one I would consider using.

[pyre]

While this is true, it's to the detriment of their project not to have at least some English docs. It grants them the largest possible audience[1] for their project. Generating interest in their tool is one of the things that they need to do if they want it to be a successful open source project.

[1]: I guess it's possible that 'Chinese' might be close too, but I have no idea how the different dialects (Mandarin/Cantonese) would affect this.

[saraid216]

> [1]: I guess it's possible that 'Chinese' might be close too, but I have no idea how the different dialects (Mandarin/Cantonese) would affect this.

Cantonese isn't written down, strictly speaking; when you write Chinese, there aren't dialectic differences.

[francesca]

nginx didn't have english docs until 2 years after the project launched. Full story from Igor Here: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/151853

Also: Don't blame people for english lang proficiency.

[dbecker]

I forked the documentation this morning. I'll edit it and submit a pull request tonight.

[t1m]

pretty rude. why don't you offer to help?

[andrewflnr]

Probably because he has other things he cares about more. I won't deny that his original statement was rude, but we have to be able to point out flaws in things without feeling obligated to try to fix them. Otherwise, we won't be able to give most kinds of constructive criticism, which is bad for everyone.

Of course, if we won't help with problem in an open source project, we shouldn't feel entitled to a fix either.