What do you do if you need a quick reference to Visual BASIC and the only available reference is in Romanian? Let us consider this logically:
First off, you do not wonder, “Why is there a Visual BASIC manual in Romanian sitting on my desk? I can neither read nor write Romanian.” This is obviously the wrong question, as the person putting it on the desk was probably thinking, “Oh, a Visual BASIC book. I don’t do Visual BASIC, so I’ll give it to someone who might be able to use it.”
Second, you do not think: “But I don’t program in Visual BASIC.” This is silly. If you know how to program at all, everyone thinks, “Oh, yes, that guy [“guy” is gender neutral in this case] is a programmer.” It doesn’t make any difference what the programming language might be. It could be COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, Snobol, Algol, Pascal, Ada, APL, PL/1, Swift, or, apparently, Romanian. Which isn’t a programming language at all.
What really happened: something broke. I didn’t create the broken thing. I don’t know Visual BASIC, but nobody who knew Visual BASIC was handy. There was a Visual BASIC book lying around, albeit in Romanian. Fun fact: Visual BASIC, and almost all other programming languages, is based on English.
In short: by simply ignoring the explanatory text and looking at several pages of code, I found the problem, and blackmailed someone else into fixing it.
I probably won’t press my luck and try this again.
