When you’re designing and developing new software, it’s easy to get laser-focused on getting it functional and into the market or deployed as soon as possible. Thus, many engineering teams develop software that supports their native language first, postponing support for other languages until “later,” when they think they will have the bandwidth. In other words, they don’t plan ahead. The problem with this approach, which experienced developers have found out the hard way, is that it sacrifices budget, time, and opportunity.

Redesigning and rebuilding a different edition of your software for each and every language or market can be a colossal effort. As this computer science course will demonstrate, planning ahead is far more efficient, and the marginal cost of supporting multiple languages from the get go is less than you may think. Harnessing international functionality in operating systems and programming languages makes writing code that works for multiple languages and markets much simpler than retrofitting existing code.