What language are the VCR buttons written in?
Esperanto wouldnât do the job for the reasons articulately pointed out in
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
English has the huge network advantage of gaining more new users in the computer-literate world each year than the aggregate number of speakers of all but a few languages. English is, as Jeff says reluctantly, PRACTICAL, and it is the world interlanguage of the twenty-first century and on course to continue to be the world interlanguage for a long time.
To stay on top, you have to get to docs before translator. If (when?) cutting edge tech will come from China, we all will have to learn mandarin. Or may be, we should invest in better automated translators and documentation standards now to save some headaches later.
I predict in 200-300 years software developers are required to learn a dead language (English) so that they can maintain the legacy systems that run our technology infrastructure.
Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as a second language use it in technical discussions even when they share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons, translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all).
Iâve NEVAR observed this. Most english tech vocabulary gets incorporated into native language simply because itâs already established and most geeks understand it to a certain degree. However, expressing thoughts in English takes considerably more time and yields an inferior result for most non native speakers. They express themselves in English for one simple reason: To be understood by an international audience. So no right tool for the right job bullshit. Forcing non native devs to document in english will generally result in a loss of precision and productivity for a gain in potential maintainabilty. Sometimes this is justified.
There is nothing imperialistic about this issue. And English is not American only either. And we, programmers, never care a damn about our geo-political identity anyway !
Ahem, the language of hackers is that script-kiddie leetspeek (ugh, whereâs my brain-bleach). Thereâs a story I once heard that Grace Hopper at a computing conference in the 60âs, got over the language barrier for the Japanese delegation by writing out instructions to the hotel or restaurant in COBOL pseudocode. Could be apocryphal though.
Hello from Hellas (Europe). Hereâs my personal experience on the matter:
When I started software development as a profession, I used to comment my code in Greek. It was a bit difficult to have to continuously Alt-Tabm since some terms had quite bad sounding or even outright funny (albeit accurate) translations.
I followed this practice when I moved to .net v1.0, only to find out that NDoc wouldnât render my otherwise perfectly normal Unicode Greek characters. That was the day I decided to move to using English and only English as my documentation language.
That was before I even had to work with other people and for projects that would have been unlikely that any other eyes apart from my own would ever set sight to that code. Since then, Iâd moved to a larger company where I had 2 co-programmers who agreed (albeit reluctantly) to implement this practice for our new projects.
Now that Iâve started my own business implementing software the documentation of which will certainly be sought and used by other people while also having to co-operate with others, I still retain the old habit. I donât think I could or would change anymore, even though I have to correct syntactical mistakes sometimes.
I speak 4 languages including my own*. There are languages that have close bonds with specific parts of our culture (eg. Greek is widely used for some scientific fields including medical science), US English is the undisputed leader in computers, which I believe is very beneficial.
- One good thing about speaking a language most of the world doesnât really give a damn about (Ancient Greek does not count, itâs almost completely different) is that your are forced to learn other languages.
Well I did it again. Change that your to you in that last sentence. Jeff, getting used to Natural Keyboard 4000 is a bit of a challenge! 
This not only effects software but also the products of software. We translate our documentation into many languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and so on). We used to start with French and used various translation softwares to covert them. The results were horrible. A couple of year ago we decided to create the documentation in English and then translate in to the various languages. We could not believe how much better the translation were. The software was simply better at translating English then at translating French.
âReminds me I learned some written English words as a kid (before I started courses in school) playing games on my parentsâ Macintosh SE⊠Beginner, Advanced, Begin and a few others were part of my initial English vocabulary.â - StĂ©phane
mine were: swashbuckler, cutthroat, bucaneer and merchantman, thanks to playing lots of sid meiers pirates!. but if-then-else, for, while and until came soon after.
my writing in english is terrible, but for reading (technical and most fiction) i prefer english. having to use programs in their translated german versions slows me down significantly, because i canât find nothing (and itâs annoying as hell).
the problem: because of my coworkers i sometimes have to comment my code in german. but the habit! so often the comments and sometimes even front-end texts on websites get mixed up. and ⊠nobody really cares if the lightbox button for closing reads schlieĂen or close anyway.
Here in Canada, we have 2 official languages - French and English. As such, you can watch TV in both languages.
Back in the 80ies, there was a computer programming program that taught BASIC in french. I do not mean that the presenter spoke in french (which is obvious) but that all the keywords were ALSO in french.
As such, it was not really BASIC any more. In fact, it was quite incomprehensible. I found myself wondering Why would you bother??. If you learn this particular version of basic, you were commiting yourself to a skill set that simply would not let you work ANYWHERE except the small geographical region that developed it and then only in businesses that used it.
If your goal was to find a niche market, here it was. I am quite sure, however, that the actual market for those skills was so small that the presenter of the show was the only one to ever find meaningful employment in it.
If you think C# and VB.Net examples are hard to interchange - just imagine that every example you found for your language did not work because it wasnât actually in your language.
If you wonder what language you should code in - just ask yourself when the last time you saw a copy of french basic or why the GNU compiler doesnât have a French/Spanish/Russian/etc version of C. (Actually, I have a theory that C is as popular as it is because it has so few english key words compared to other languages like Pascal)
(side note: If you are not aware, the french culture in Canada suffers from a considerable complex. A cultural chip on its shoulder so to speak that dates back several hundred years to when England and France were still world powers fighting over the new world.)
As a native French speaker, I have to second. As one of my CS teacher told us, You should master a foreign language, and english is not a foreign language. English is your patois (patois being an untranslatable world for the dozens of dialects that existed in France before the language was unified, /history-lesson).
Still, one warning : we should never forget about all those others citizens of the Internet that do not speak english (like, pretty much everyone using the Internet on a non-english speaking country, also known as âmy monâ). I always feel very bad when marketing people use bad versions of english words or catchphrases to sound cooler, whereas I have always struggled not to use any english word when explaining how a computer works to my mom.
(But then, I learned BASIC on a German computer, so I was screwed from the beginning)
Are âenglish-sounding-computer-related-human-unfriendlyâ words accepted in other countries as well, or do you try and translate everything properly (like Iâve heard french-canadians do ?)
One of the better arguments against English is that itâs a difficult language to learn.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=492 is an interesting article on the difficulties of language acquisition in English. Itâs notably harder than most other Indo-European languages. However, the deep vocabulary in English is a big advantage in a technical field, as itâs an easier language to create neologisms in than many others.
The problem is that the native speakers of English are both numerous and wealthy. The only languages in the same league in numbers are Spanish and Chinese, and the acquisition problems for Chinese are worse than English. If weâre talking about nonnative acquisition, then Chinese is worse, in that few non-native Chinese speakers speak a Sino-Tibetan language, while many non-native English speakers speak Indo-European languages, so the proximity is better. Of course, Spanish is an Indo-European language too, and is a language that has lots of native speakers, and is much easier to acquire than English.
If we were to switch, (New World) Spanish is the only language that can seriously be argued as a better option as a world language.
There are a number of reasons why people would like to oppose making English a de-facto standard. These days its all about making programming language-independent and platform-independent. Why exactly should the trend be contradicted by making it culturally-specific? Translations might provide hindrances to comprehension, but this proposal halts the development of the legions of programmers who do not and Should not be asked to import a language to understand a program.
(Would it be so much easier if we all used the Windows + IE stack?)
Esperanto!
I think your claim is too strong. Yes, in order to be an above average software developer, you will have to understand English. There just too much code and documentation in English that is unavailable to you otherwise. However, if you are an average Chinese, Indian Russian programmer, thereâs still a reasonable amount of resources in Chinese, Indian or Russian available to you. They will run into English roadblocks sometimes, but I doubt that is a real problem for many of them. For decades to come, there will be non-English speaking programmers.
I went on a caribbean cruise 2 weeks ago, and found out through idle chatter with the cruise director that the entire bridge staff on Carnival Cruise Lines is required to speak fluent Italian, for whatever reason. It happens.