There is really nothing surprising here - domain-specific communication languages have existed in many areas, e.g. Latin in medicine, French in 19th century diplomacy, classical Greek in philosophy (later replaced by German), Chinese and Japanese in martial arts. This comes from the fact that a given area is developed either in a given culture/region (such as Silicon Valley), or when a given language is popular (Latin in many areas).
Thus there is nothing wrong with telling people This is the domain language. Learn it to communicate with other specialists. In fact, as has been pointed out above, it is beneficial.
Airline pilots are required to speak English, for the purpose of having a universal or common language between controller and pilots. The French, of course, play by their own rules.
There was a question about this on Stack Overflow a while back.
I think thereās a strong correlation between an individualās English skills and programming skills. One might argue that this is merely because the schools that provide a good English education also provide a good programming education, and I could agree, but only to a certain point.
Even the best programming education is no match for self-improvement and experience. Being a good programmer requires constant study and improvement during and after school, and most of the material is in English.
I donāt think this is necessarily because English is a better language for technical conversation, but because itās a very flexible language that can easily acommodate the needs of any subject.
On a side note, I donāt think programming (or Computer Science) is alone in this respect. English is the lingua franca for almost all sciences, especially engineering and natural sciences.
Finally, thereās the C argument you had on the podcast. Just as you donāt necessarily have to learn C to become a programmer, you also donāt have to learn English. Will you be a good programmer without English or C? I donāt think so.
@Markus Well iām working it big companies and major players in the web industry, I was in Switzerland before and never had the issue of not speaking german arise, but here? oh boyā¦
Iām not sure what youāre advocating, and more importantly, to whom exactly?
Since a lot of online content is published in English, it makes sense to learn it if you need access to that information. This isnāt in any way limited to programming-related information.
Comments in the code should be written in a way that makes them easy to understand for people who are going to read it. The language of the message should be the most appropriate for its audience.
I use English for labels and comments in code because I like it that way. If I was working with other Polish programmers, and they didnāt know English very well, it would probably make sense to use Polish.
I would also like to remind you, that the ability to read English is far more common than the ability to write English, hence they really shouldnāt be lumped together as using English. For example, if someone knows English well enough to be able to research an issue online, that doesnāt necessarily mean his vocabulary is good enough to come up with meaningful function/variable names in English.
Iām working at a software company where all programmers share the same birth tongue, and that is not English. So we could use this language everywhere: comments, documentation, commit messages, etc. However, we donāt. All our comments, all our documentation, even our commit messages are always English. Why? Is it easier to write all this stuff in English? I donāt think so. The standard argument is should we ever hire a programmer that does not speak the same birth tongue, heāll certainly have enough English knowledge to read that stuff. Have we ever hired such a programmer? No. We had foreign employees in other departments, but no developer so far. Is it likely that we ever will hire such a programmer? I donāt think so. I doubt it will ever happen. However, that is not the point. The point is that we COULD if we wanted to and thus we keep everything in English
This entry reminds me to ask whatever happened to Googleās big project to exponentially improve language translation by building an ultra high quality phrase library from UN documents which are translated by hand into dozens of languages.
I can imagine that thereāll be some indignant backlash on this American-centric attitude, but while others are grousing about it, students in India are quietly efficiently learning English and moving forward en masse.
I only wish we could adopt as pragmatic an approach to default spoken written language here in the U.S. Itās insane that we have street signs only posted in English, yet we feel some ridiculous (politically-correct) obligation to offer forms at the DMV in Spanish. Likewise with employment, tax, and other official government forms - people are capable of reading enough English to get a drivers license, purchase a car, and navigate themselves to the county courthouse or other local government building, yet they canāt handle enough English to complete a form?
Pies: Comments in the code should be written in a way that makes them easy to understand for people who are going to read it. The language of the message should be the most appropriate for its audience.
But how can you really tell whoās going to read it in the future?
What really ticks my off is people who cannot even speak their native language. Germans have really let themselves go. Youāll hear biologists everywhere speak of DNA (even when conversing/writing in German). Only ten years ago, nobody would have thought of abbreviating āDesoxyribonukleinsƤureā as D-N-A (instead, they used the perfectly sane āDNSā). Itās perfectly ridiculous and in my opinion, it betrays a very sloppy attitude (not only towards language, which is, to be fair, rather arbitrary). That said, languages exist to make ourselves understood. Why impose artificial, unnecessary limits? Using a language other than English in programming-related publications (that includes source code, obviously) only serves the confusion of languages.
If Americans were as multilingual as other developed nations then perhaps you wouldnāt have posted this.
I know a lot of people in other countries who I speak with through both voice and text. They all speak some variant of English fluently. I could learn another language, but where would I use it? Much as I would love to learn another language, I would forget it all through disuse.
I think this is the dilemma weāre in. The world wants us to learn their languages, but they wonāt stop talking in ours long enough to give us the incentive and opportunity to learn.
Good point! So, our programming language is english, and we will keep it that way. But what about our domain model. Jeff, if I hired you to write a program for a dutch airport (letās say Schiphol) would you design a class named Airplane, or a class named Vliegtuig?
sorry for being anally retentive but this really really peeves me. Americans are not nor will they ever be native English speakers. Iām quite happy and willing to accept American English. i love you all to bits and this is nothing personal.
In fact, i think the IT industry speaks and communicates in American English!! that is why all sorts of stuff goes wrong when you set your your language to UK English instead of American.
And i believe air traffic controllers use international English which is to say words agreed upon.
i think the choice of language is driven by the major contributors and as such i am glad a certain helpdesk/outsource country has big emphasis on itās future work force learning English (queens English we call it here)
Iām a native speaker of one of the worlds most difficult to learn languages (Hungarian) and pride of my nations culture.
But I insist to code in English, document in English, and read about my profession in English as this has nothing to do with culture an wonāt help to decide who is smarter.
The last book I bought in Czech was Code Complete. Didnāt want to wait for Amazon delivery.
And while the translation is of higher quality than is usual, there are errors clearly introduced by the translation process and some technical terms just donāt feel right.
IĀ“m from Germany and I use the web almost exclusivly in English. Do I think that it would be cool if every programmer would understand English? Yes. But is it realistic? No.
On my dayjob I have 2 co-workers who are 45 and 50 years old. They canĀ“t speak English and IĀ“m sure they will not start to learn another language now.
I think itĀ“s dangerous if people who are learning a new language take part in programming discussions on the web. People could think they know what they say, but say something else and give wrong advice.
The problem with documentations are the translators, not the languages
