The Ugly American Programmer

An article in English being read by people who know English? It’s not surprising that most people here agree with you.

As Marie Antoniette said, Let them have cake.

Ha! If we wouldn’t let have the English take over New York a few hundred years ago, you’d all be speaking my native language (Dutch).

I have worked for customers who demanded that all our source code (class names, method names, comments etc.) was all written in Dutch.

This is what you would have been writing:

gebruik Systeem;
naamruimte TekstvensterToepassing1
{
klasse Programma
{
statisch leeg Hoofd(tekenreeks[] argumenten)
{
Tekstvenster.Uit(Hallo Wereld!);
}
}
}

This isn’t the ugly American. There are a few other countries out there where English is the main language.

There is a reason why Chinese Python exists:

http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english.html

Remember the times when localization of applications and having i18n built into your app was considered laughable?

English as a set of words for instructions and function names is as good as any other language.
It’s the standard, so be it.

However concepts MUST be translated in ANY native language existing on Earth and beyond.

Because then you learn them several times and you get a different understanding each time.
Yes, it’s harder. Yes, it takes longer.
But the reward at the end is becoming a richer human with deeper thoughts.

It’s like being bilingual.
If you learn one concept in english and the same concept again in portuguese you do understand it better because you got two point of views about it.

The books and documentations we’re talking about are usually very poor to explain concepts and abstractions.

It’s only my opinion of course. There is no truth here.

Oh, tired, tired cliches!

In the first place, Americans do not speak English. We speak American. Notice the differences between UK/Australian English and American (color/colour, restroom/loo gas/petrol).

In the second place, I haven’t met as many native-born Americans that were anything past toddler-level literate in English, American, or anything, as I have met foreign-born citizens who could speak and write flawlessly. Americans may yet standardize on 1337TXT text-message language before long, judging by the battle against illiteracy that we lose (NOT loose!) every day.

In the third place, (don’t tell the bigots!) English is actually derived from West Germanic, and borrows a sizable chunk of its vocabulary from Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and French. So English is actually kind of an amalgam of Western world languages, and it is thus very appropriate that world communication technology would standardize at least partly upon it. But don’t forget about Asia!

@martin The best part about English is that it is a mongeral language. It has been influenced by many, many languages and has retained a word for almost everything, where each word has a unique meaning. There are many words that are in English but not in other languages. Therefore, it becomes vastly more descriptive than almost any language. And what happens when there is a term not used in English but is used in other languages? It’s normal to add that word straight into an English sentence as is. I think that’s Uber flexible.

What’s more, for all the complexities of English, it can be distilled into a very small subset of English (International English), that can is simple to learn and use to conduct almost any communication between people who don’t speak English natively.

This is one of the reasons that this has become the language of commerce in places like Asia. I studied with Indians who say that English has been one of the most handy languages to know when traveling through India! You don’t need to know much to communicate in English.

It’s these two reasons, capability to describe almost anything and capability to be distilled into a simple form, that have pushed English forward as the lingua franka.

Also, I’m not dismissing the US influence, but don’t forget it was the English that had an empire so large that the sun litterally never set on their soil! It was the English that spread their language to every corner of the globe, but I agree that the US culture has been the promoting force in the last century.

WOW! look at all the comments…
So american programmers are ugly…

Arrrggh, you arrogant Americans don’t even speak English!

this just in…
According to jeff…
american programmers are ugly…
:slight_smile:

It also annoys me that .NET exceptions so eagerly want to use you local language.

I can’t copy paste crap like that in Google, I won’t find anything useful.

Please everything in English Microsoft.

In addition my sister has a Dutch copy of Adobe Photoshop. It’s absolutely horrible. All tutorials on the net are useless as the Dutch terminology doesn’t make any sense at all…

ATC controllers everywhere use American English. It’s not Queen (or the even worse Queenie), it’s Quebec.

Small airports will let it slide, but the other pilots will sometimes make fun of you. Large airports don’t appreciate a grammatical argument during approach and will politely remind you over the air…

Center, Two-Four-Kilo-Queen turning final.
Two-Four-Kilo-QUEBEC clear, One-Six left.

Frenchmen do everything in French when they can, but they can’t design a proper airframe in any case, so I wouldn’t want to follow their example - they use lowercase, uppercase, AND greek letters in their wiring diagrams, rendering them unreadable. Work on an A350 and you’ll know what I’m talking about…

que?

A logical extension of this argument is that all programming should be in PHP and JavaScript because there are more examples, programmers and learning materials ;0)

Perhaps also programmers who are not native English speakers are better programmers because they understand languages better ;'0

English is understood by English speaking countries and western minorities (as mine: Italian).

I don’t think Chinese programmers care about English. Maybe Russian do that much neither.

English thinking hackers could even be the reason behind current programming languages design: full of inconsistencies, just as English language is.

Not fair. Other natural languages would have equivalent influence.

Python designing by a Dutch programmer is not a coincidence.

I live in Venezuela, my native language is spanish.

of all my coworkers, in this company, and in the affiliates coding caves which we share services, I might the only who actually speaks english. The rest just… Well basically they munch it and destroy it with every word uttered.

They also have this muscle memory exercise, where they try to find first the answer to a problem in Spanish. Most likely the odds of sucess are about 1%. If they don’t they have to go and try in english. And this is where it gets ugly. Most people don’t get the technical lingo used in the internet these days.

English, is a must in the Developers Land, No matter your language, translations to spanish are horribly textual, and lack meaning (usually translated by novel readers instead of engineers)

Coding and commenting in English comes naturally after you have read all the books and tutorials in said language.

But thinking in English? No way! Here’s a native born Finn which loves the expressiveness of Finnish language. I honestly do believe that it is one of the most adaptable languages for solving abstract problems. The words are just starting points which can be decorated with suffixes.

Here’s an example: (Kirja being a base word)
kirja a book,
kirjain a letter (of the alphabet),
kirje a piece of correspondence, a letter,
kirjasto a library,
kirjailija an author,
kirjallisuus literature,
kirjoittaa to write,
kirjoittaja a writer,
kirjuri a scribe, a clerk,
kirjallinen something in written form,
kirjata to write down, register, record,
kirjasin a font,
… and the list goes on…

Finnish has a much smaller core vocabulary than english and that’s because we can ‘make words on the fly’ =).

Every time you talk about coding in Visual Basic you lose one nerd point.

But the language point is a good one. Back in the COBOL days my dad was asked directions in San Diego by a couple of Japanese guys who he knew were programmers. They didn’t understand him when he gave directions in English… so he translated the directions into COBOL-esque statements, and they understood him.