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.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool, that sounds interesting. Upon what will you base your argument? Or have you confused "argue" and "assert?" An unfounded, unbased assertion is not an argument. HTH!
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Well, as a Finn I can tell that most of the programs in our TV, movies in theatres, etc. are still in english. All that are made outside Finland except for most of the ones meant for children under 10. They have finnish subtitles but we feel that dubbing them as most countries do would be just stupid. It does improve our english.
However, the main reason why finns speak pretty decent english is our school system. Studying english is mandatory from grades 3 to 9 in the elementary schoo and any route you continue from there also requires you to study english. We believe that in the modern world it is just a basic requirement for everyone to understand the same language.
Why Torvalds speaks good english is not because we think that programmers need that but because we feel that everyone needs that. I agree that everyone should speak english but disagree that programmers have much extra reason to do so.
I visited St. Petersburg in Russia a week ago and nobody spoke english well. People on the streets weren't able to help us with directions when we needed some, we could ask nothing at the shops, etc... Even the staff at MacDonalds couldn't understand words like "Meal" or "Fries" in english. It sucked pretty much.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a native English speaker living in England, it's pretty easy to find young people who can't even hold a simple conversation in English.
Let's face it, even if an education system offers it doesn't mean everyone will take it up/do well at it. I would imagine that those who go on to be capable programmers will have done better in their education though.
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Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Funny)
Try German. Just about anything that requires a sentence in English can be said with one 14-syllable German word. :D
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Mein Auto gibt mir eine Spassestreibendafahrvergnugen!
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Funny)
And all these years I thought all functions were written in German:
"GetStringLen()"
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I again recommend Rhabarberbarbara [youtube.com] as a funny example of this. ^^
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:4, Insightful)
Try German. Just about anything that requires a sentence in English can be said with one 14-syllable German word. :D
Sounds a bit like Haskell =)
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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
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Speaking as a native English speaker living in the USA, it's almost impossible to find a young person who can hold a simple conversation in English. Most of them are so ADHD they can't complete a sentence.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Funny)
Except, apparently...in customer support call centers.
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)
>>>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:4, Funny)
I've been told that the best way to get the French to speak English is to speak French... badly.
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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.
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:Quebeqois and French (Score:5, Informative)
I speak French reasonably well, and learned mostly from Quebecers, and I'm a linguist, so here's a few answers that will get you going (most of these are not final or very detailed, though):
I believe nearly all Spanish monolinguals in Barcelona can understand Catalan to a moderate degree, since it's not extremely different from Spanish. They can't speak it, though.
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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
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever people say "The French are rude", when the inevitably really mean is "People in Paris are rude". Once you get out to the countryside, folks seem quite nice.
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Actually, Americans are more likely to tell you that you need to speak English. I can't think of a single store in America where someone's going to try to find you a translator; most people simply don't have time for that level of customer service.
I even had an experience with a Japanese friend at a bank trying to cash a traveler's check, and the cashier wouldn't accept it because she had signed and countersigned in Japanese. The lady insisted that she needed to write her name "in English".
The thing is, t
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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:4, Insightful)
This is they key (french guy speaking).
Trying to show people that you cared enough to learn "Bonjour", a few words (whatever the quality) and then switching when you've shown enough interest to the local place goes a long tway to show people you're not snubbing THEM.
And I try to learn a few words as well when I go to a foreign country before switching to english.
Money is *the* universal language (Score:5, Funny)
Even while in Paris, it does not matter whether your card's native currency is Euros, Dollars, Pounds or whatever because in all of my worldly travels everyone I have asked has understood what I meant when I held up my card and said "ATM?"
> Now, try talking to an Italian who learned
> English from a Scotsman. GFL deciphering _that_
Funny, once while working in Hawaii, I caught up with a couple making their way down the sidewalk and realized they were speaking German. I slowed and eavesdropped to see how much I could still understand(it had been years since I had practiced). Anyway it turns out they are staying in the same hotel as I. It becomes clear that they think they are having a private conversation. ;-) I follow them onto the elevator, stand next to them with a blank expression as they continue to converse about their intimate plans in front of me, and when they got off I said "Guten abend". They froze, turned pale, and turned around and looked at me in horror. I smiled as the doors closed. Then the man burst out laughing as the car carried me away.
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Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Funny)
No, you guys should all learn English. And if you foreigners have trouble understanding our code, we American programmers can be helpful and WE CAN WRITE OUR COMMENTS LOUDER, BY TYPING IN ALL CAPS.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Funny)
For years after those days, I talked in my sleep. My wife told me that one night I told her I loved her, but I defined my variables first and the syntax was recognisably FORTRAN. I'm lucky I guess, I don't think a non-programmer spouse would have understood.
(Sigh) sometimes I think I work too hard.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Informative)
I think I'll have to jump in with a correction here. Finnish is considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn, while english is considered one of the easiest.
If you look for a language similar to finnish, try hungarian (for some weird reason, both nations have a common offspring, no idea why one ended up in the north of Europe and the other in the southeast, maybe they don't like each other much ;-) Mika Hakinnen used to have a large fan crowd at the Hungarian Grand Prix for exactly this reason.
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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: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!
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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
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Informative)
You're as wrong as you can be. Finnish [wikipedia.org] is an ugro-finnic language, meaning its closest relatives are Estonian and (far away) Hungarian. It is not even indoeuropean: English is closer to Sanskrit, Russian and Farsi than Finnish. Finnish does not have articles, has 15 or 16 cases depending on dialect, has a completely different set of sounds, and sports oddities such as lacking a verb for "to have".
The only thing in common is the Latin alphabet, which the Finns use much better than English speakers since their language is much easier to spell.
The closest language to English is French. Even though it is not a Germanic language, most of the words (and spelling horrors) in English come from French, and English grammar is fairly easy to pick up anyway. This means that language proximity is fairly irrelevant when there is no application in study of the language.
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Informative)
German is a lot closer to English than French is. Dutch is even closer. French provides a lot of English vocabulary, but not the grammar and almost none of the most common words.
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Being Flemmish (Northern part of Belgium, go look it up if you want =) my mother-language is Dutch and French is my second language. That said I daresay my English is way more fluent than my French simply because I use it a lot more (at work, hobbies, media, etc...).
Saying that English is closer to Dutch strikes me as odd. Sure there are similarities, but French and English are MUCH closer than Dutch is vocabulary wise.
As for your example : "ik lijk het huis" indeed sounds a lot like "I like the house", but
Why Scandinavians speak English: (Score:3, Insightful)
I have gathered considerable information about why Scandinavians speak English. This is the story, using the Finns as an example:
Since so few people want to learn Finnish, they had to choose some other language, or not be able to communicate w
Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual (Score:5, Funny)
I can confirm that linux is bi. My girlfriend and I had a threesome with him. I thought it would be cool to watch him fuck my girlfriend ...
Sounds like you have a completely fair scheduler enabled.
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
Yes (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, almost certainly. You need to understand English to develop in programming languages where the syntax and reserved words are in English.
Next question?
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. Not much different than learning French a century or three ago if you wanted to go into nternational diplomacy and handle high government legal affairs.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Or learning German a century ago if you wanted to be a scientist / mathematician. English is the lingua franca, so if you want a job in the technical/scientific field, you almost need to understand it. Maybe in another century, everyone will understand written Chinese.
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:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
That's pretty stupid (unless you're joking). It's not like you have to know English just to understand the few words in programming languages. Of course there are other reasons for knowing English. There are a lot more programming books in English and if you are googleing you'd want to search in English and be able to read the information.
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...and you don't even imagine how computer language with non-English keywords looks awkward and funny to native speakers.
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Next question?
American English or British English?
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.
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There is no such thing as "British English". There is either English, or any other variant of - American English, Australian English etc.
Well, I tend to agree actually; except that in the context of the discussion of variants, saying "British English" rather than solely "English" shows that you *mean* British English, and not instead a collection of all English variants.
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.
Selection Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA has many comments on its own page that agree with you, saying that this is a non issue. Of course, all of those people can already speak English, or else they wouldn't have been able to read the article. The millions of programmers who only speak Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, etc. are unlikely to chime in here to argue against you. You probably didn't have a conversation just last week with a developer who only speaks Korean.
I'm only sort of disagreeing. If I were a non-English speaking programmer with the time and resources to learn English, I probably would. I'm just saying that its hard to have a useful discussion about this, since the people most likely to have opposing views can't understand what we're saying.
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As a Brazilian programmer who knows English pretty well even before entering programming let me light somethings that I watch in here:
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
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.
I can vouch for that. Years ago, I was speaking to a friend from Brazil over aim. He doesn't speak English, so the entire conversation was in Portuguese. However, when we started talking about technical things, I simply didn't have the necessary Portuguese vocabulary. So I started trying literal translations and hoping it would get close enough to the real term that he'd recognize it. Specifically, I was trying to find the word for "firewall" and the conversation went something like this:
Me: "Parede de incendio?" ("wall for fires?")
Him: "nao." ("no")
Me: "Parede a prova de fogo?" ("fireproofed wall?")
Him: "Estamos falando de computadores, certo?" ("We're talking about computers, right?")
me: "Parede de fogo?" ("wall of fire")
Him: "que??" ("what??")
Me: "A coisa que protege computadores de acesso externo!" ("The thing that protects computers from external access"--I didn't want to introduce other terms like "ports" in the discussion, because I also didn't know how to translate that)
Him: "Ah, quer dizer um firewall." ("Ah, you mean a firewall.")
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
well, the French ... (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't expect anything different, in fact it would have surprised me if such a comment wouldn't have popped up.
Let's rephrase the Subject: "Shouldn't Every Developer (but the French) Understand English?"
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"It's the French have a different word for EVERYTHING!!"
--With apologies to Steve Martin
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
downright wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
a MINORITY of french, particularly a few academic and minister with nothing else to do do that. But most french could not care less. I never used couriel or whatever it is called, and everybody I know use email as word.
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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
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You must be talking about Ç++
Re:Yes, pilots (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 wh
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a mexican programmer, living in México, and I agree that every developer should at least read English, not because the actual programming language, but because of the vast information written in English and also the fact that most translated books are already outdated by the time they got published.
(Cue to jokes saying that you don't need to know english syntax to post in slashdot in 3..2..1..)
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"Assembler" is not a language, but a software tool [wikipedia.org] that operates on an assembly language. There is not a language called "Assembly," but a distinct assembly language exists for at least each CPU architecture. Many (most?) assembly languages use mnemonics that are simply abbreviated English words or phrases (MOV, jmpl, ADD, CALL).
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. I had the joy of debugging perl code written in Russian a few years back. Not fun.
I can imagine that it was especially hard for Perl since the ruble doesn't seem to have a standard dedicated symbol. Finding a suitable substitute for all of the "$" characters must have been a real pain.
Way to extreme, but then there is ATC (Score:5, Informative)
I think 'programmers' are much to diverse to think that we need anything like this. I read somewhere that Air Traffic Control has English as the 'official' language, so that global flights maintain communication clearly, but I'm not sure we have to worry about that with coding.
Ja (Score:3, Interesting)
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Let me translate for those that don't speak German:
Chief Inspector Lee:"Do you understand the words that are a-coming out of my mouth?"
Detective James Carter:"Don't nobody understand the words that are comin' out of your mouth!"
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.
Re:Medical commnuity in other countries... (Score:5, Funny)
...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.
That's not English, it's American.
Re:Medical commnuity in other countries... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Medical commnuity in other countries... (Score:5, Funny)
... Working for a firm that did medical education ... everything was written in English ... We had to be careful not to write above a 6th grade level...
"Hello, Sir. I looked at the see-through pictures of your boo-boo, and it makes me sad. You will have to sleep here for longer, we need to look for more things. We might have to find a new red thingy from a person who doesn't need their red thingy anymore, and it may hurt for a while. We have these little pills you will need to eat. Please lay down for a while, and i will use this pokey tube to make you sleep while I cut."
Oh, wait, that was pre-school english, my bad.
-Taylor
Different Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Functional English (Score:5, Funny)
Why does it have to be *functional* English? Most of the world is procedural English with some OO English here and there... I shouldn't have to learn a new programming paradigm just to communicate!
"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...
I live in Mexico... (Score:3, Informative)
Mexico has been a country where the Internet has reached the majority of the population. Internet Cafes are practically on every corner of Mexico City, people know about youtube, etc.
And yet, I'm constantly asked by younger relatives or friends to help them with some task (usually their homework). I ask them to search the wikipedia, and they say that they can't find what they're looking for. I ask: Did you search the ENGLISH wikipedia?
Turns out they don't know English and are too lazy to learn.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not just for programming (Score:4, Insightful)
I, for one.. (Score:3, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our new ulgy American overlords...
One language (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's a more general statement: "All programmers should understand and be reasonably fluent in one common language.". It just makes collaboration easier if there's one language everybody can use when they need to talk to each other. It just so happens that English happens to be the one language with the largest "market share", because of the way computer programming started off. Personally I don't think English should get primacy just because it's English, but at the moment it probably involves the fewest people having to learn a language they don't already know. Plus, as noted, it's such a mongrel. As the joke goes, it doesn't so much borrow from other langauges as chase them down a dark alley, whack them up the back of the head and riffle their pockets for vocabulary. English is probably the best language out there when it comes to having short, direct ways of saying technical things. To me, those things give English the best claim to the position.
Unilaterally speaking... (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone should use English. It's the lingua franca of the world now.
*ducks, runs*
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Everyone should use English. It's the lingua franca of the world now.
*ducks, runs*
More like "English is the x86 of the natural languages".
(now excuse me while my karma goes down the drain...)
Musical vocabulary is Italian.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I read an anecdote somewhere that went something like this:
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And speaking of music in German, putting H on the scale between A and C makes no sense whatsoever; what the hell is wrong with them?
So that you could use B - A - C - H in a piece of music.
Why not (Score:5, Informative)
English is also the international language of aviation. When a Swiss airplane is landing in Egypt, the pilot speaks English to the tower. Why? Because the US and England had the first major commercial air industries.
At the turn of the last century, if you wanted a science or engineering degree, you had to learn German, as all the best journals were printed in that language.
Re:Why not (Score:5, Funny)
Why? Because the US and England had the first major commercial air industries.
or, alternatively (quoting from: http://www.businessballs.com/airtrafficcontrollersfunnyquotes.htm [businessballs.com])
Allegedly, a Pan Am 727 flight waiting for start clearance in Munich overheard the following:
Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."
Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At the turn of the last century, if you wanted a science or engineering degree, you had to learn German, as all the best journals were printed in that language.
The allied victory in WWII basically sealed the fate of German as the academic and technical lingua franca. The British/American development of the first stored-program computers, based in part upon the previous work of Charles Babbage and later Alan Turing (who worked at Bletchley Park on the Colossus among other things), further sealed the deal in the decades following WWII (especially with the Soviets walling themselves off behind the Iron Curtain).
no need to make the point, its automatic (Score:5, Insightful)
jeff atwood is proposing a nonsolution to a nonproblem
for historical reasons, english has become the de facto language of business worldwide, and programming as a global profession simply follows this proclivity, no questions asked, no need to underline the point
a non-english speaking programmer knows he or she is limiting their options career-wise simply by ignoring the largest resource available to them: other programmers, who are undoubtedly speaking english, even if they themselves are not native english speakers. and so there is no need to insist programmers speak english, as it is self inclusivity (of those who choose to speak english freely) that is the prime motivator here, not esternally applied exclusivity (insisting someone speak english... that already knows its important)
if a programmer self-excludes by choosing not to speak english, who cares? its there choice. let them program in english language isolation. how does that effect you? its not like you are going to an english language symposium and run into someone who insists you speak hindi to them, or comment on an english language programming tip site, and run into a comment in mandarin, or sit next to a programmer in the office, who only speaks spanish. the hindi speaker would have never gone to the symposium in the first place: its in english, announced up front. the mandarin speaker would not comment in the english language programming site: all the other content is a sea of english, what's the point? and the spanish-only speaker would never have been hired in the most probably english-speaking place of business in the first place, you would never run into such a person
in other words, jeff is pointing out a nonexistent problem, that even if it existed, has a solution proposed which is pointless
Every programmer should be able to read code (Score:3, Insightful)
Idiot programmers make the same idiot mistakes regardless of what language they speak. I'd much rather work with a brilliant, non-English speaker who can read and understand code (i.e. my code or anyone else's) vs. an English speaker that can't read code and is perpetually inserting screw-ups that I have to go in and mop up later.
Shouldn't every developer speak Klingon? (Score:4, Funny)
Although I prefer Esperanto.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Any choice really? (Score:5, Informative)
Not only do they exist, Wikipedia has a (probably incomplete) list of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages [wikipedia.org]
I remember running across a reference to one additional language - IIRC, its name began with symbol used for the unit angstrom, and it was developed in one of the Scandinavian countries.
Re:more then Americans (Score:4, Funny)
The ugly American thinks that Americans only speak English.
Fixed that for you.
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.