Shouldn't Every Developer Understand English? 1077
Pickens writes "Jeff Atwood has an interesting post that begins by noting that with the Internet, whatever country you live in or language you speak, a growing percentage of the accumulated knowledge of the world can and should be available in your native language; but that the rules are different for programmers. 'So much so that I'm going to ask the unthinkable: shouldn't every software developer understand English?' Atwood argues that 'It's nothing more than great hackers collectively realizing that sticking to English for technical discussion makes it easier to get stuff done. It's a meritocracy of code, not language, and nobody (or at least nobody who is sane, anyway) localizes programming languages.' Eric Raymond in his essay 'How to be a Hacker' says that functional English is required for true hackers and notes that 'Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.' Although it may sound like The Ugly American and be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism, 'advocating the adoption of English as the de-facto standard language of software development is simple pragmatism, the most virtuous of all hacker traits,' writes Atwood. 'If that makes me an ugly American programmer, so be it.'"
Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingualism (Score:5, Interesting)
... notes that 'Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise).
I thought I had read/heard somewhere (might have even been the documentary Revolution OS) that Finns & Swedes grow up with English Sesame Street available to them and as a result many of them are bilingual from a young age.
I've also ready that being bilingual or a polyglot is beneficial to thinking and memory skills. So I would caution thinking that because Linus Torvalds chooses comments in English for any reason other than more people speak it than Finnish. I would also caution you to assume that Linus learned English in order to increase his hacking skills. And I might even be inclined to argue that Linus' bilingualism aided or enabled him to reach such great heights with programming languages.
After toying with tools like ANTLR [antlr.org], it's not too far of a jump to say that understanding another language (even a dead one like Latin) helps you understand that information & logic can be portrayed multiple different ways with different vocabularies & grammar rules. Thus priming you for many software languages.
I cannot attest as to whether or not English buys you anything over Russian or Chinese as far as resources available on the web but I will argue that someone who has Russian as a first language and Chinese as a second will most likely be better off to code than someone with merely English as a first language (Disclaimer: I am the latter).
'advocating the adoption of English as the de-facto standard language of software development is simple pragmatism, the most virtuous of all hacker traits'
I don't think that makes you an 'ugly American programmer' but I sure do think it sets you up for some surprises in life.
Ja (Score:3, Interesting)
Medical commnuity in other countries... (Score:5, Interesting)
...use English. Working for a firm that did medical education for Saudi Arabian doctors and nurses, everything was written in English - the default for the medical community. We had to be careful not to write above a 6th grade level, though, to reach the widest audience.
Different Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
"Unthinkable?" how about "obvious?" (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't so much a case of someone being so "bold" as to "ask the unthinkable" as it is someone asking a question with an obvious answer by which some (silly and offen-sensitive) people will be offended. Maybe a troll for blog hits/ad impressions?
Heck, even many of the most popular programming languages use English keywords! Not much to see here, move along at whatever pace you find most comfortable...
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
...and you don't even imagine how computer language with non-English keywords looks awkward and funny to native speakers.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen a little discussion of this around the net, and I've talked to my own friends and colleagues from France, Korea, India, Brazil and China (just the sample I happened to have available). The most surprising thing to me is how NON-controversial this is. American programmers tend to feel a little sheepish about it, but the programmers who have to learn English in order to do their jobs effectively are -- from what I've seen -- absolutely matter-of-fact about the issue.
I've even noticed an interesting phenomenon that, while far from universal, is also not all that rare: programmers who share a common non-English first language using English among themselves to engage in technical discussions. When I pointed out the oddity of that choice, I was told that even if they used their native language (Portuguese, in this case), that the conversation would be peppered with English words anyway, so it was just as easy to use English for the whole discussion. And why would the discussion be peppered with English? Because there's less agreement on the appropriate choices of Portuguese words for particular technical concepts, so the English terms are more precise and better-understood.
Just last week I was speaking with a Korean developer and I was trying very gently suggest that it would be better if she commented her code in English, not Korean, because we have an international team and English is the only language we all have in common. I expected somewhat-grudging acceptance of my point. What she actually expressed was extreme embarrassment; she was quick to point out that she didn't write *any* of the Korean comments in the codebase and that she was very surprised when she saw them. In her mind it was a surprise that any of her fellows would comment in anything other than English. She was embarrassed because she hadn't yet managed to translate them all to English.
And even those who wrote comments in Korean chose English class, method and variable names, which is another definite trend that I've noticed. Perhaps it's just so that the names read well with the English keywords, but in my experience it's pretty rare to find non-English names, even when all of the comments and documentation are in another language.
Anyway, bottom line is that this seems to really be a complete non-issue. Programmers work in English, and there's no significant disagreement on the point.
Re:English thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm Russian, and computer languages with Russian keywords look very awkward to me.
First, there's a problem with grammatical cases ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case [wikipedia.org] ). A lot of languages with Russian keywords suffer from it (1C, I'm looking at you!).
Second, Russian words are usually longer than their English counterparts.
Third, Russian keyboard layout clashes with some useful characters (keys '', '[', ']', ';', '"' are used for Russian symbols). And I can't remember a language with less letters than English :)
Of course, some of these objections may not apply to other languages.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
American English or British English?
Ha! I'm from the UK, so I use - of course - British English. However, occasionally there is a need to compromise. When I wrote colordiff [sf.net] I decided to use US-style 'color' in the project name (since colorgcc, colormake and other utilities already existed and I felt that made more sense) but to use UK-style 'colour' in all the documentation.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who learned english from computer manuals and TV shows at the age of nine I feel the need to call bullshit. I don't think I learned any english at all in school and as a kid I was constantly confused by those of my classmates who seemed to speak worse english at 15 than I did at nine, later I realized that a possible explanation for this might have been that I was exposed to the english language on a daily basis from an early age while most of my friends never encountered it outside of class until they were in their teens, and even then they preferred to read the subtitles in movies rather than just listen. So yes, I do believe just hearing and reading english can be enough to learn quite a lot.
/Mikael
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't count on the latter (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps if China had gone for the model that Japan has taken, with a significant domestic technical literature in their native language, it would be the case that within a few decades written Chinese would become a major language, at least for academia. But at least on present trends they don't seem to be doing that: to the contrary, the most prestigious domestic Chinese journals (excepting those specifically on Chinese history and literature) are written in English. That might change, but I don't see evidence of it happening yet. The fact that English has become the de facto standard for Indian scientists and academics (again, excepting some specific fields like Hindi literature) also helps bolster its dominance.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Interesting)
In my time in Paris (only a week), I didn't meet a single person who spoke English outside of museums or stores close to them.
That's quite likely. I doubt you met anybody who couldn't speak English, but you would meet a lot who didn't. Especially in the holiday season. When I was working in Paris I found that almost everyone spoke English until the tourists arrived, and then nobody did.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Interesting)
bilingualism increases cognitive and memory skills (it does)
Is this proven at all? It would seem obvious to me that those with better cognitive and memory skills are more likely as a result to be bilingual... but if there is evidence that bilingualism causes better cognition and memory I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:2, Interesting)
I visited St. Petersburg in Russia a week ago and nobody spoke english well.
Unfortunately this is so. I'm from St. Petersburg originally, and recently worked there briefly as a developer. Developers in Russia are actually the most English-literate group (other than linguists?) - they have the most incentive to be immersed in any sort of English-speaking medium.
The problem is simple - dubbing. More than half of TV and movies shown in Russia are from English-speaking countries, like everywhere else, but they are all overdubbed with Russian speech. Change that to subtitles and at least the structure and intonations of the English language become internalized as you grow up, making the acquisition of English a piece of cake.
My cousin in Israel grew up perfectly trilingual, because she was from a Russian family and all of TV was in English.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>I found that almost everyone spoke English until the tourists arrived, and then nobody did.
In other words the French are rude. When someone from a foreign country walks into an American store, we do our best to help them, like finding a translator. We certainly don't snub them & pretend to not hear them.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words the French are rude
Oh, you have no idea.
Being Canadian, I was forced to take French in high school, so I can read it fluently and converse somewhat.
However, my "French" has a strong Québecois accent. On the French I-spit-upon-you scale, that makes you more of a target than even Algerians.
By day 3 of my first visit to France I decided I'd get along with the natives much better pretending to not speak a word of French.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really. Both languages do belong into the Finno-Ugric family of the Uralic languages, but Mongolian is an Altaic language and the rare coincidences in vocabulary are nowadays considered accidental and attributed to language contact, not genetic relationship.
The closest living language to Hungarian is Mansi. There is a (to me) pretty sound theory that due to sound shifts, Mansi is actually the same word as Magyar. Try the Wiki [wikipedia.org] for comparison. There is, however, a kind of revisionist history in the making in Hungary, because some Hungarians really don't want to be related to Mansi people who smell of fish and construct elaborate theories about being related to noble warriors like Turks, Scythians and Mongols instead. Those theories are refuted in the scientific community, but the revisionists aren't really keen to listen.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:3, Interesting)
I speak both Hungarian and Finnish, and let me tell you; those two languages have almost NOTHING in common, except for a similarity in how the grammar works as a system - but the cases and the tenses are formed in drastically different ways, and there is no correspondence of tenses. And the vocabulary is completely different, except for a handful (about two dozen) words.
Hungarians have just as hard a time to learn Finnish as do Brits or Icelanders. And vice-versa for Hungarian.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't surprise me.
However, when I went to Paris last summer as a tourist, I quickly found that almost everybody spoke English. The trick was to open the conversation in French and such is my expertise in that language that pretty soon they'd switch to English.
I think you only need to demonstrate a willingness to try to speak French to get the French on side.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think Finnish or Hungarian are difficult, you should play around with the languages spoken by some of the native north americans... Imagine infixes, where you split apart a word and stick a new syllable in between the two halves to conjugate... and those conjugations are based on the physical position in space the speaker is to the object, and which direction he's facing!!! And that doesn't even take into account the tones and the respect-level modifiers!
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:1, Interesting)
Speaking as a native English speaker resident in Finland, the idea that all young Finns are so wonderfully multilingual is unfortunately not the case. Especially outside of Helsinki, it's pretty easy to find young people who can't even hold a simple conversation in English, and the average Finns has about as much passion for the still-obligatory Swedish as Hungarians or Romanians did for Russian in the times of Communism. There are plenty of monolingual Finns.
The GP here again.
I disagree with you there. Granted, I've lived my whole life near the capital area but... So does over fifth of finns. :D
Yes, the still obligatory swedish is spoken poorly but not only are people unmotivated but it is taught several years less than english. So it hardly matters here.
As to people not being able to properly converse in english... I can believe that to be true for some, perhaps fourth or fifth of the young people.
However, many people "unable to converse" in your eyes wouldn't likely be unable to converse. Rather... Uncomfortable. I can write good enough english (and yes, it could be better than what I am writing at /. after 1 am if I put my mind into it) and speak decently when I have to but I haven't actually spoke it all that much.
So I don't feel confident when I speak it. Add the finnish shyness to that and you have people who avoid starting a conversation in english or engaging one. I am sure that they could converse better if they absolutely needed to, if it was written or if you happened to be really nice young woman who they wanted to make a contact to...
Re:Selection Bias (Score:3, Interesting)
As a Brazilian programmer who knows English pretty well even before entering programming let me light somethings that I watch in here:
So, I agree with you that it was a case of Selection Bias. GP dealt with a part of our programming force that is used to deal with International programmers, and probably comes from the highest and best universities. These are the ones that will prefer English both in comments and in variable names. But to be sincere, I see your anecdote and raise the fact that I never saw people actually "discuss" programming in English among themselves.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing about the Quebec accent is it's the French equivalent to "redneck" English, and it often triggers similar responses. Even within Quebec, if you go to an area where the accent is less slangy than yours, people will tend to act a bit snobbish.
The result is that many educated Quebecers wind up developing two dialects, one for the pubs, and a more refined elocution for business. It's not quite Parisian French, but a hybrid somewhere in the middle.
Re:Yes, pilots (Score:3, Interesting)
My wife is a pilot, and she tells me that (oddly enough) it is American ATC who are the worse offenders for not using ICAO-standard English. The ICAO standard may be to say "Turn left 30 degrees to enter a circular holding pattern", but the American ATC will be the ones to say "Ya'll hang a left now and hang around over the island until we're ready for ya, OK?"
When people get confused, they blame the damn foreigners for not understanding English, instead of their own ATC for not using the standard terms which the pilots are required to know.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:2, Interesting)
So I don't feel confident when I speak it. Add the finnish shyness to that and you have people who avoid starting a conversation in english or engaging one. I am sure that they could converse better if they absolutely needed to, if it was written or if you happened to be really nice young woman who they wanted to make a contact to...
I've been a Finland a fair number of times, and I think this lack of confidence is quite common. I took a tour of a castle, and I was the only native English speaker in the group - the tour was advertised as being in English. The guide spoke wonderful English, and the whole group, (including some Spanish, German, Italian and a Finn) could all understand it. But she kept looking over to me asking me to correct her or supply a better word.
I think that although the Finns can understand English very well (because of the TV and movies already mentioned) outside of the big cities they don't get much practise to speak it. And, this is key, they don't realise how globalised English is these days; a typical native English speaker hears English in a wide variety of accents, and so is used to non-perfect English. But I think minority languages (Including French! :-)) are not so used to this, and thusly speakers of those languages feel a great lack in confidence because they can only speak English 80% as well as they can speak their own language.
As a good friend of mine (who is a linguist and speaks 4 languages fluently and several others enough to be able to struggle through a novel) put it: "The French language is always spoken perfectly, but the English people need to suffer people torturing their language".
Quebeqois and French (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this really true? I grew up in Massachusetts and studied French there. Most people there don't realize that the country on the other side of the border is a French speaking one. I was amazed and surprised the first time that I hitchhiked to Quebec. No, seriously, I didn't know that not only was a Quebec a Francophone nation, it was a strictly francophone nation. English just ...stops... about two meters from the border.
Having two years of high-school French helped offset the culture shock somewhat. But only now am I beginning to be able to understand anything that anyone says to me in French. People understand what I say to them: I just don't understand anything that is said to me. Being in a place (Oregon) that is 3000 kilometers from any French speaking people doesn't help. I can get Montreal radio stations in French through steaming FM audio, but I can only understand about one word in ten.
DVDs help. Due to the insistance of the Parti Quebecqois, French is an official language of the NAFTA alliance. Even though there are 350 million English speakers, 120 million Spanish speakers, and only 7 million French speakers in the NAFTA countries. All the DVDs of newer Hollywood movies are translated twice into French. Unfortunately, the audio translation and the subtitle translations NEVER match each other. You can't select French audio and French subtitles, focus on the spoken words and follow them with the subtitles the way that you can with the English subtitles (that are available for deaf people). It would be fantastic for language learning if this were possible, especially for vowel-rich languages like French and Spanish that are spoken about twice as fast as English.
By the way, I've never been able to hear any difference between Quebecqois French and Parisian French. People have told me that "people in Quebec don't speak French, they speak some French-like dialect". That is nonsense.
Just how different is Quebec French from Parisian French? Are vowel sounds elongated, as in the difference between North Carolina English and 'Omaha' (television standard) English? Is the rhthym and the vocabulary markedly different, like Jamica English and 'Omaha' English?
Are they nearly mutually incomprehensible, like Spanish from Madrid vs that of Barcelona?
Any chance that I can get a few semi-serious replies instead of being mod'ed down to -1?
Re:downright wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
But most french could not care less. I never used couriel or whatever it is called, and everybody I know use email as word.
According to my French teachers in college, this has gone back and forth for years. For example, when Sony introduced the portable stereo in France, it was known by the brand name Walkman. Later, as "walkman" became a genericized word in English (whether Sony liked it or not), a movement in France began to create a unique generic for Francophone people -- thus, "baladeur." But more recently this practice has been downplayed -- particularly by young people, whether it's to seem more hip and in-sync with the U.S. or for some other reason is not clear -- and many Francophones now just say "walkman" again.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
You must be talking about Ç++
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:3, Interesting)
As a native English speaker who's learned to speak Spanish, my personal opinion is that I'd prefer for everyone to speak Spanish. It has the advantage of being much simpler to learn than English due mostly to its adherence to rules (fewer irregular verbs and such) and it's a lot more pleasant to listen to all day than English. And there's something to be said for a language that makes it simple to write what you hear and say what you read regardless of whether you understand the words or not...as a Spanish teacher of mine was fond of saying, "There are no Spanish spelling bees."
I also find the "how long it takes to say" argument to be relatively pointless. Unless you're doing policy debate or having to record the disclaimer at the end of a commercial, I don't think the speed at which you talk is governed by how long it takes to say the words. For me, at least, once I became fluent, I was able to speak at the same rate that I could form the thoughts I needed to express in both English and Spanish.
But it seems that English will be the x86 of languages. There are better alternatives, but since everyone targets the most popular one, everyone else needs to target that one. There are also other advantages to English that are inherently technical. For example, if source code is encoded in UTF-8, each accented character would take up 2 bytes. Using English in source code means never having encoding issues. So I begrudgingly agree with the article's premise, if only because it's useful to standardize on something.
Re:Quebeqois and French (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know about the french in Quebec, but I would assume it is a conserved 200 year old french. And in so far it is noticeable different from modern french in France, or especially in Paris.
Are they nearly mutually incomprehensible, like Spanish from Madrid vs that of Barcelona?
Hehe ... in Madrid they speak gacilian ... the dialect which is basically spoken in Mexico or Argentinia. In Barcelona they speak katalan.
This are two different languages Gacilian (sp?) and katalan differ like dutch and german do or like german and danish.
In spain they have roughly 5 distinct languages and several noticeable dialects.
angel'o'sphere
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:3, Interesting)