Thank you from Blockly!
Thank you, Ellen. I have to take care about editorial work and community. I thought about community of Russian users but translators could be a part of such community. Regarding "brief and informal" it's easier to say than enforce :-). Whereas some content intended for very beginners, other is related to quite formal mathematical and programming concepts. My approach is using most expressive and informal words in situations which are not in area of established formality but otherwise I feel obliged to follow formal approach as much as I could. For example, I can't afford 'function without output'. As we would say in Russia, "function even in Africa is function": function by definition, both in math and programming, returns a value. Sure, in programming you have a trick to define function which always returns null but it would still return something. So, I used 'procedure' there. I'm not fond of teaching 'somehow', with future 're-teaching'. Programming is not just a toy but mass profession, and kids, as soon as they pass initial barrier, should be used to formality and strictness, imho.
We have debated at length whether to use "procedure" or "function" in English, with disagreement and tears. This is indeed a contentious area.
The Blockly philosophy is to make things as simple as possible for beginners, even if that will confuse experts or cause trouble later. That's why we use 1-based indexing, for example.
I wish I knew in advance about the philosophy: I had to develop my approach myself. I share that philosophy but only to some extent. I'm not a native English speaker, and function and procedure in English looks for me equally abstract, and 'function without output' is simply formally incorrect. I wonder how function could win. I also would like to ask your opinion about some decisions I made, which were actually not in line with the philosophy. First, I tried to change English 1.0 to Russian 1,0 but somehow that appeared again as untranslated. Thus, I decided there were some limits for localization, and I decided to keep special characters, according to English tradition. Along with decimal ',', I did avoid Russian sign for #. Is it allowed to replace it?
Sorry. I will modify the instructions page to make it clearer.
Please do use the Russian replacement for "#" and anything else that will make using Blockly easier for beginners.
I don't think it's possible for a translator to replace periods with commas in numbers. Does Russian use a comma where English uses a decimal point?
We added support for having a sign after ordinal numbers for Hungarian. Let me know if it is needed for Russian.
Thank you for all of the care you are taking.
Not sure about ordinal numbers. To the best of my knowledge, it's quite abstract generalization of natural numbers, and such notion should not be presented in general programming system at all. ... Just get it! You are talking about regular meaning of the word, not about special math term (Hungary is famous for math school, and I was afraid they tried to overload the system with math). We have № before ordinal numbers but it's not math sign but rather bureaucratic. I believe it may serve for replacement of #. Probably in some context we may not need special mark for ordinals, I need a fresh look.
And Yes, we use comma in place of decimal point in English. Another place where I was probably mistaken: I followed English in expressions like if block, whereas in Russian it would be more natural to quote "if". I even changed somebody's translations.
Ellen, one more technical question: what can I do with sign for division: it's way too domestic, we use : instead. And more widely accepted / may work internationally I believe.