Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't Every Developer Understand English?
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.'"
... 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, 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.
My work here is dung.
Yes, almost certainly. You need to understand English to develop in programming languages where the syntax and reserved words are in English.
Next question?
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
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.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Ja wird das Sprechen von englisch fast angefordert, aber in der Lage seiend zu denken und Arbeit in vielen Sprachen ist besser.
ed duval the very last person
...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.
Here's a response from an American in China with some good considerations on where to draw the line: http://odwks.com/2009/03/mandarin-chinese-programmer-communites/
Unpleasantries.
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!
Of course programmers should speak English. I'm not saying only English speakers can be good programmers, but let's be honest -- English is the most common spoken language on the planet (I didn't say first language.) So, it's almost like a "standard" for communication, which is pretty key for geographically-distributed collaborate development (i.e., programming, especially in FOSS land.)
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...
everything in moderation
Are there any programming languages that have non-English reserved words?
... the learned had to be able to read and write in Latin. Historically, this ended quite recently. Or maybe it didn't since a lot of scientific and medical terms are still based on Latin.
How is this different?
~AA
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
Every programmer should have to learn Lojban.
English and perl.
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.
English has become the de-facto language for air travel and academic research as well. When efficient, accurate communication is required, there needs to be a common language that is used. The choice of the language isn't so important, as long as the community comes to a consensus (whether explicitly or implicitly).
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.
My work here is dung.
I lead a small software development team. The people on this team have Finnish, Swedish or English as their first language. We comment our code and do all technical documentation in English. It just makes more sense.
Two reasons:
1. In an increasingly globalized world it makes little sense to use comparatively "tiny" languages to document code. Especially when we all know English anyway.
2. Programing languages tend to stem from English keyword-wise. Context switching between pseudo-English (code) and something completely different is much harder than between pseudo-English and English.
That being said, we do use our respective first languages for verbal communication and describing ideas. That feels more natural, just as English feels more natural for code documentation and detailed technical specs.
.: Max Romantschuk
All the main programming languages were invented in the English speaking world, by English speakers for English speakers. I wonder if this is revealed in the syntax and logic when compared with what say a Chinese developer might come up with if they were tasked with developing a language? And does anyone who's native tongue is not English and has a knowledge of programming syntax want to comment on this?
Many people learning a second language report there is a stage where they start to 'think' in the language they have learned.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
...won't this be a burden to those of us who barely learned English as our native language?
Does fluency in code really correspond to fluency in any natural language?
I, for one, welcome our new ulgy American overlords...
All your base are belong to us!
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!
everything in moderation
The vocabulary in programming languages is actually really small.
It helps of course, to know the some English, but it's not necessary.
When working together with English speakers, there is obviously a hurdle: they might not know other languages; some may even think that knowledge of English is obligatory.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
The ugly American thinks that only Americans speak English.
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.
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.
De que hablas willis?
I live in Mexico, and i can tell you, here is very important if you are in the computer field. I have seen many people which very poor english having problems when doing some cooding or design because they cannot read technical papers or most common news, they get out of the most blogsphere because most of the blogs, news, and technical information available is in english. Is not uncommon to have manuals for software in english (yes we RTFM).
Wouldn't a language that is parsable itself be ideal in programming? The only issue I've noticed is the apostrophe is used extensively in the regular words, so it is sometimes listed as an 'h' (not a letter in lojban). Maybe the Singularity will hit before lojban takes off (feel free to mod me down or ignore me because I mention the Singularity).
Every software developer planning on cooperating with developers in the Western world? Sure. Ultimately, however, as the south starts becoming more computer literate, a choice will be faced -- especially by developers who have experienced first hand the long-lasting effects of colonization. If developers wish to remain autonomous actors outside of the first world, I don't see how that causes some sort of problem.
Agreeing with the statement that every developer should know English is making an enormous amount of assumptions regarding the goals and aspirations of developers, and the markets that they serve.
Also, I can't help but point out that software companies globalizing development is often synonymous with the exploitation of developers who aren't in the west (in the form of small wages, etc.) and tends to contribute to the problem of brain drain -- "even if I am educated here, I still can't make money. So I will get educated here and leave." If anything, having non-english speaking developers hurts the process of predatory globalization... which some would say is a good thing.
will never be localized!
Practically every Finn under the age of 30 is bilingual, and the vast majority of those under 50 are bilingual.
We have subtitles instead of dubs which VASTLY helps with learning the language. That, and games. Games are in english, and we play a lot of games.
However, regarding the original post, I think that knowing ANY language by heart is the most important tool for a coder. Let it be your mother tongue, or any other, as long as you know one language throughoutly, you'll be that much better as a coder. The logic for this is hard to explain, but once you understand how languages, in general, work, it's that much easier to learn a new one (were it foreign language, or a programming language).
However, having a common language (with English being the most reasonable one since it's taught and talked throughout the globe) is vitally important for Coders, in general, to learn more efficiently and to communicate with eachother. Comments are naturally a way of communication.
Of course programmers should speak English. I'm not saying only English speakers can be good programmers, but let's be honest -- English is the most common spoken language on the planet...
That is by prevalence of geography, of course. Per capita Mandarin obliterates English.
I hate to agree but it is true. For this wonderful freely available in your own native language happy-land to work out like Ubuntu is working on, there absolutely must be consistent communication between developers. Polylingualism is spectacular, great for translations, especially when commenting code (no harm in commenting code in more than one language as long as the characters don't break the compiler).
It really is terribly obvious, and it's a little chauvinist but English has the benefit of being everywhere already.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
boolean hecho=falso;
mientras !hecho{
doWork();
}
Being proficient in English is a mainstay of work. Common sense shows that using a mix-up of national standards can be quite costly and very retarded (remember the english/SI unit mixup with the space probe?).
If someone wants to code something in a different language, by all means let them. Just realize that if you as a developer code in something other than English, you are limiting your audience to people proficient in that particular language, the rest of the developers in the world are not going to take the time to learn your language simply to work with you, that is of course unless you offer them copious amounts of money.
Everyone should use English. It's the lingua franca of the world now.
*ducks, runs*
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I read an anecdote somewhere that went something like this:
-rozzin.
In my case I learned English due to my enthusiasm for IT, lots of movies and music.
:P
I didn't even have to study for my English classes.
My constant interaction with computers and the internet was what made me fluent.
I totally agree with the guy though.
Funny story, for my proficiency "Speaking" exam the subject was on-line privacy.
It was like giving me the certification as soon as I sat down.
This certainly wouldn't be the first time English was agreed on as a global language.
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.
Meine Nase ist aber schon wider nicht weggeflogen?
This is not unthinkable, it's already fact. If you want to work in large corporations, in scientific development or on open source projects, you have to speak English in any case.
However, even if you just work on your own private projects at home: EVERYTHING these days originates in English. Keywords, documentation, online forums, code comments, function names, etc... Practically all the large conferences are held in English as well. Not using English as your development language will just make you context switch that much more often.
The French are supposed to be speaking English too. It was forced upon them by a presidential mandate.
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.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
What language is "{" anyway?
I would accept that in order to build a global community of cooperating developers contributing to a collection of related projects, a common language would be pretty much essential. The software world is much more diverse than that. You don't need to be fluent in any particular language to understand the symbols in a programming language, even if they do use the Latin alphabet and resemble English words. Besides, is "vsprintf" really intrinsically any more comprehensible to English speakers than to anyone else?
I've had the dubious pleasure to learn LSE almost 3 decades ago, an atrocious language with keywords all in french. If a bastardization of Basic is even possible, this is it ! Oh, and its creator was one of my computer science professors a good decade later... It was hard not to scoff when he was going on a tangent 'that's why when we conceived LSE we did it that way...'
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I feel it is very natural to use English, not just for the comments but also for all the identifiers and file names. I do this both in the office and for my private projects. In the office, with only Dutch, we even use English for all our technical documentation and in our bug-tracking system. When we write emails to each other, we use Dutch.
Maybe it also is related to the fact that almost all good computer science related books are in English. I had a hard time in high school with mastering English, but once I entered university more than half of the books we used, where in English, and my knowledge of English quickly grew.
> If that makes me an ugly American programmer, so be it.
You might want to read the book and find out who the Ugly American really was.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If your country/culture is good at something, you get to name stuff.
That's why stars have Arabic names. I am sorry, but this is just the case with computer science.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
You insensitive eejits!
This is similar to how all pilots who expect to fly internationally (and probably all commercial pilots regardless) are required to speak English. It is the standard language of air traffic control and such.
If you expect anyone else to work with or see your code, you should probably be writing it (and commenting it) in English. Not because it is a better language than your native language, but because it has basically become the modern Lingua Franca and tends to have the greatest chance of 'common ground' between nationalities.
What kind of reply do you expect on Slashdot? An English-Only Website?
Why bother when it has already become de-facto reality? It's not even pointless - it's a counterproductive troll.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
but let's be honest -- English is the most common spoken language on the planet (I didn't say first language.)
[citation needed]
Disclaimers:
1. I think Jeff Atwood is full of himself and he's a Visual Basic fanboi. 'Nuff said.
2. I work for a very large Japanese technology company.
First, I didn't grow up speaking C#, C++, Java, x86 Assembler, SmallTalk, etc. Neither did anyone else. They're computer languages.
I work with Japanese programmers on a daily basis and I can tell you that they don't think "English" when they're coding. They think C, C++, and Assembly. Heck, most of them can't speak English; they don't comment in English; and they don't use English tools. The only English they're exposed to on a regular basis is a handful of keywords, which could easily be changed to any other language and mean the same thing if the compiler understood them.
Atwood's assertion is just too ridiculous. Spoken like a true imbecile.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
You either need to know the language of your target user, or trust a translator for assistance in gui/input issues
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
Nobody HAS argued that Linus comments in English for any reason other than more people speak English (or that language syntax and libraries tend to be written in English)
1) I have been very impressed with the English skills of European technical people, especially the Dutch. Taiwanese... not so much. My Italian friend took the standard US SAT and got better verbal scores than over a third of US students -- which doesn't say a lot for our educational system. 2) I skimmed through a Pascal user manual written in German once. Most of the variable names in the examples exceeded 80 characters. Although English can easily be ambiguous, at least it is terse. 3) At least Open Source code which is being maintained by volunteers from all over the world should be documented in English. 4) I don't see any correlation between the ability to learn natural languages and the ability to learn computer languages. I know dozens of computer languages, but I'm still working on my first human language (English). Computer languages have much simpler syntax, much smaller vocabularies, and little or no dependence on context (there are no heteronyms in computer languages). Translation from one computer language to another is a fairly straightforward mechanical process. Translation of human languages is an art which requires intimate knowledge of the cultural context of both the source and the destination language.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I don't see it as an "ugly American" issue (especially since so many computer pioneers were British). It's just realistic. I don't think anyone is saying that programmers must be fluent in English, but certainly it's a good thing to be familiar with it. There are parallels in other languages. You can't expect to be a master chef without some familiarity with French. Composers are well advised to have some familiarity with Italian. Lawyers -- Latin. Physicians -- Greek.
Proverbs 21:19
Having multiple spoken languages on this planet causes a great deal of confusion and often hinders successful communication. There should be only one spoken language (not necessarily English) to make global communication more efficient. As computers are tools used for specific tasks, having multiple symbol sets for specific problems seems appropriate. In other words, multiple computer languages are OK by me. Think about math symbols for a different take on a task-specific language.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
First, let me say this: set aside your hatred for USAsians and english-speaking Canadians which, anyway, probably only started because of a few english-speaking assholes, just like everywhere else on the planet. This includes Québec, where even pro-french nutjobs might hate you because you can speak english as a second language, even if french is your primary language.
Let me say that yes, not only is english "required" to be a developer (of any level, from HTML/CSS to bare-metal hardcore assembly) but it's also nice. Besides, french comments and french variable names always end up being too long, etc.
Last, it's just nice to be able to read and watch things in their native languages without having to wait for weeks, months or even years before someone makes a half-assed translated/dubbed version of it. Or worst, make a fucking mistake like converting the title of a movie like "A Time to Kill" to "Non coupable" in french (means "Not guilty", which gives away the end of the movie in the fucking title).
sigh so add "among programmers." No offense to starving peasants but I don't think they need to be included in the set of current or soon-to-be programmers.
everything in moderation
If I recall correctly from my graduate-level psychology of language course, children can't learn a language from TV. They need to interact with speakers, in the language in question, to learn it.
Are you adequate?
Pilots and ATC do the same thing. Its because the guarantee of pilots being able to communicate with each other and with ground control is much more important than the alternative, for obvious reasons. Whether this argument applies to all coders might be subject to some debate, but I imagine for mission critical software like for medical devices or say, ATC, its a no brainer.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
It's 2009. A black man is president of the united states. And you insist on stereotyping beaners as lazy. Grow up.
It looks like English superficially, but the reserved words in a computer language are really just arbitrary strings. Sure, they might have been selected at some point for their mnemonic qualities, but confusing one for the other is a bad idea. Comments are a different matter.
As for programming languages using English syntax, they don't, and most common languages aren't even superficially similar.
I'm fluent in Javascript as well as Klingon.
Standardizing on English makes sense, as most APIs use english method names.
I have an inherent advantage because I know what GetNextItemFromStack(&stack) or System.Collections.Generic.List(of System.Data.SqlClient) means (generally) just by knowing English even if I have little programming or API knowledge. In the past, everyone had to figure out what sprintf meant, and the playing field was a little more even. I'd be the first to admit I'd be at a hige dissadvantage if the API I worked in had a German style method name like ErhaltenSiefolgendesEinzelteilvomStapel() (thx babel fish). If I was an API developer, I would think it would be incredibly unfruitful to translate my entire API to most common languages, when learning a foreign language is a fruitful experience for the users who want to use my English API. I don't know anyone who has regreted learning another language, even if they were forced to against their will (e.g. for a college general ed requirement).
You could argue it is anglo-centric to insist all programming knowledge be in english, but it is a whole other matter to assert that programmers who speak english have much greater access to the body of knowledge that already exists, and that the APIs already out there will make more sense. I know that because I want to be a good programmer, I'd learn German or Japanese, or whatever if that is what the ad-hoc standard for programming documentation/API definition was.
Biologists standardized on Latin, which aside from mass and opera, is rarely used in conversation. The IOC standardized on English/French. So this isn't too terribly novel of a concept. I can't speak for the difficulty of other character-sets like kanji/katakana but I think English is a good choice because as far as most of the languages who use the Latin-1 character set, english has little/no accent marks on characters, and has relatively shorter words than some of the other Germanic languages.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
:%s/english/common/g
done :-)
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but IIRC, Finnish is also very similar in structure and sound to English. Much like Spanish and Portuguese for example. Not to the point of automatic mutual intelligibility, but to the point where if you know one then learning the other isn't as major a leap as learning, say, Chinese.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
/...
Chinese might become the language of course... but I'm not sure the chinese government really wants a large successful hacker community.
The Indians have many languages, but share english.
The rest of the world is a mish-mash of languages.
I think having different languages promotes different ideas for solutions.
No idea what the hacker culture is like these days. My hacking/cracking days ended with "Pest Patrol" on the Apple IIe. To avoid looping to update a page of graphics, they had 184 repetitions of one line update code... in assembly. Was kinda cool.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Its a stupid thing to nit pick I know, but 'dune coons' != 'indian'. I find it amusing that people with such blatantly racists attitudes apparently can't wrap their heads around the concept that 'brown' is not an ethnic group.
Shit! No wonder I couldn't find any programmers in the Home Depot parking lot!
I view code and documentation and ideas (and research and literature) written in languages other than english as 'closed source': for whatever reason, you have deliberately chosen to exclude others from understanding you and using or enjoying your work. So, I am opposed to it.
Long live Esperanto!
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
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?"
I doubt Finn's are speaking English because of Sesame Street - perhaps more to do with the fact that it's one of the most popular languages.
I'm sure most developers DO speak English, because being able to develop is the sort of skill which someone who speaks English would have available to them. But I don't think that 'should' is the word I'd use, as it implies a moral necessity to do something, and there's no reason morally why someone should speak English. A team of Chinese, Danish or Peruvian developers are unlikely to talk in English amongst themselves, even while developing.
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
There are still enough people who don't get it and will try to rape a programming language/framework into their language no matter how hard it struggles against it.
Proof, a bunch of Ruby on Rails projects I know are written in German. "But hold on," you ask, "doesn't Rails pluralize things using English pluralization rules? And isn't that one of the killer features anyway?"
Well, you're right. So the program ends up being in German with English pluralization and English flow control statements. It's a joy to maintain and extend.
And has anyone mentioned all the localized variations of Visual Basic yet? There is hell. About heaven, I'm not sure.
Ergo, it's sort of an English coup d'etat.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
"English" -not even "American English" - is such a mish-mash of other languages. It's like a giant ball of gum that everyone who passed by it added another wad to the mess. UrbanDictionary.com is further proof of this. :)
No, but the ones there will write your essays (or ese's).
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
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.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
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.
stuff |
I didn't even think to check if anybody mentioned it before posting. By the way, mentioned the Singularity a lot as well--we need interesting memes here.
I've often wondered why there isn't an option in programming languages for "while", "if", "else", "for", "do" and "function" to be written in foreign languages.
tandis que, si, d'autre, pour, faire et la fonction
I think you're thinking of Dutch.
They guy's just bitter that someone ripped off his website and made a copy in Chinese. Making a long-winded blog post trying to justify being angry at that without ever mentioning it outright is pretty sad.
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 thought that was the point. Not that English in and of itself is necessarily a technically superior language, but rather that it's one of the more widely spoken languages in the world, with an especial dominance among the programming community.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
>English is the most common spoken language on the planet (I didn't say first language.)
English might be the most common second language, and more likely if you don't consider separate Chinese dialects as separate languages (which you do at your peril). English is probably the third most commonly spoken native language.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Finnish is also very similar in structure and sound to English
Hahahahaha! HAHAHAHAHA!
Consider that a correction, vittu :)
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
In my country, we speak dutch, french and german. Speaking the wrong language at the wrong place here is a very sensitive issue. This means I can either write all my documentation three times, or write it in (bad) English. Guess which one I took?
There's a precedent for English requirement in air traffic control. They have a limited subset of English that they must understand. A programmer's version of this should encompass that, and add some technical terms.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Of course, the only reason he is concerned is because he wants his English only website to be -the- question and answer programming website, and if programmers were to instead congregate on sites dedicated to their native languages it hurts his bottom line.
In my experience, academics are the only ones that still need to understand this. Most "real programmers" learn everything from english books, but a lot of kids coming out of public universities here use all kinds of weird spanish translations that nobody understand for technical terms. They learn quickly tho, once they go into the "real world".
English is pretty easy to learn, lots of short words.. That's why the whole outsourcing craze wasn't that surprising for most of the world.. we can buy the same cheap computers, and we can learn from the same books.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
The predecessor language to both Finnish and Hungarian is thought to be Mongolian, AFAIK. If Khan hadn't died when he did and everyone ran back to fight over the throne, all European languages might have had similar influences. The wonder is that Russian didn't similarly get subsumed by Mongolian lingual influences during the occupation.
E pluribus unum
Finnish isn't all that similar to Hungarian. Yes they have common roots, but as a Finn I don't understand a word of Hungarian. Something close to Finnish would be Estonian, where I can understand bits and pieces.
The reason there was a lot of Mika HÃkkinen fans at the Hungarian GP is that it's by far the cheapest GP, at least when counting travel from Finland and it was in the middle of the typical Finnish summer vacation. Nothing to do with languages etc.
Air traffic controllers also operate in English. It's not ugly Americanism, it's just common sense that a world-wide system should choose a single language.
Of course, no one should use reverse polish. It's just ugly, lazy and completely unnecessary.
Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong -- and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to.
Who is this guy to tell every other one in the planet what you have to do to be a 'true hacker'? 'We've found the correlation to be strong'?. Go recompile your kernel or something.
In belgium, there are two (well actually three, but German isn't that wide-spread) national languages: dutch (also referred to as flemish) and french. (for the record, I'm speaking as a Flemish person)
You start learning French at school at about 10 years of age, so people usually grow up speaking both flemish and french to some degree. In high school, they usually throw in a bit of german or spanish. English is also usually a big factor in high school, but even if it's not, it's becoming very widespread amongst the younger generations.
That multilingual nature is rather deeply entrenched in our culture. On the train the other day a couple was alternating between dutch and french during a conversation. In casual conversation it's not unusual (especially online) to switch between say dutch and english. Lectures at college are sometimes in different languages as well. For example, sometimes the course material is in english, but the teacher speaks dutch, or the other way around. Or the teacher teaches in english, but takes questions in dutch.
I have never (thank science!) seen a dubbed movie, they are simply accompanied by subtitles (in theaters the subtitles are both in french and flemish at the same time: top one is french, bottom one is flemish).
The language of science since WW2 is English. This is a reality based on the need to have an international language. That happens to be English.
I think all people should learn the current international language: English. However, Americans would do well if they learned Spanish. It would certainly help them better understand their neighbors and a great part of their own population. The US is the only non-multilingual country in the world that I know of (and I've lived in most continents).
But I digress..
The truth is that it is very expensive and slow to translate scientific/technical information. So to have an edge the "official" language is necessary. And as many have pointed out.. these translations can be very error prone.
Other carreers have similar issues. The truth is most research happens in English so it is natural that if you want to stay on top you need to know English. It used to be German and French, and Latin before that, and Arabic before that.. but today it is English.
I think that his argument was based on his preceding statements. He said that bilingualism increases cognitive and memory skills (it does), and from that he noted that a bilingual programmer will probably be a bit better off than somebody with only 1 language under their belt. Just because you state your claim after the evidence doesn't make it any less of an argument.
This kind of depends. It's easy to find monolingual people here, but I'd still wager that a majority of Finnish kids can get their message across in English. That's far from being multilingual though, so that much is true.
The mandatory Swedish is an another thing altogether. Most of us never need to use Swedish anywhere (or think that they never do, which for people generally amounts for the same thing), and the fact that it's mandatory doesn't inspire much passion in teenagers, which I guess is just normal...
English is the de facto language in IT globally, so it's natural that for example programmers should be fluent with it. And to follow this up, I usually comment my code in Finnish, but that's because I'm not a real coder. What I code is generally only for my own use for a specific purpose so there's no need to comment in English. Naturally if I'm required to do something someone else might use sometime, I'll comment it in English.
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
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_speakers
i read about it in a blog once
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.
You're as wrong as you can be. Finnish 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.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Absolutely not! Finnish is in a whole other language group slightly connected to Estonian and distantly to Hungarian, but nothing Germanic or Romance about...
Disclaimer: My first language was English, learned growing up in the USA.
English is a horrible language. It has an early mover advantage and a lot of market momentum. But seriously, it stinks--badly. It is a beast to learn and worse to teach. Every rule has so many exceptions that you end up having to memorize every individual case to claim any fluency. Too many words can't be read/pronounced/understood without parsing the entire sentence for context. Their^H^H^H They're^H^H^H There are to^H^H too many weighs^H^H^H ways too^H^H^H to confuse things. And the spoken and written languages are too radically different.
Unfortunately, I don't know many other natural languages. Of those I do know fluently, Japanese stands out as the most programmer-friendly. It has rules and it follows the rules. It has very consistent markup built into the language.
There may be better languages for programmers. I don't know enough German, Chinese, Polish, Afrikaans, etc. to really compare.
But programmers should be smart enough not to hobble themselves with legacy compatibility problems right from the start. If you have a chance for a clean start from the ground up, give English the boot.
Strangely, native English speakers used to be better educated in other languages. French fluency used to be more common in England. Latin exposure used to be required in the U.S. But Americans have become self-obsessed, and lost their interest in others. I cannot speak for other English-speaking countries. But outside of Utah, any polyglot you encounter in the U.S. is probably not native to the U.S., or is the first generation of their family to be so.
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...the ones who forced through French words, where English ones threatened the language's purity. Octet? Ordinateur? With the IT people I work with in Europe - excepting France - English is the language of choice.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The point is that it is irrelevant to speak English for programming software. Real programmers talk Lojban.
You are wrong, so I am correcting you, as requested. Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language, related to Hungarian and Estonian, and like Hungarian it is an agglutinative language, which makes it as different from English as you can possibly get, at least as far as structure is concerned.
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
My ex-wife, currently living in Kemi, attending a university there, and learning the language, would disagree with you.
Actually, so would I, otherwise I'd find it easier to understand what Tarja Turunen is singing as she performs "Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan."
Be who you are...and be it in style!
You're wrong.
Finnish is one of the furthest removed languages from English.
I speak Swedish, English fluently.
I read Norwegian and Danish without problem.
I read German and Dutch, but not as well as I'd like.
I've tried learning a bit of Finnish, but I find it /impossible/.
YMMV.
That's because outside of Helsinki (and inside as well) it's pretty easy to find young people who can't hold a conversation at all, let alone in another language. :)
English was good enough for Jesus to speak in the Bible, it should be good enough for programmers to use.
Consider yourself corrected. Finnish fits easily into no language group - the claimed similarity with Hungarian is largely down to 3-400 shared word families, rather than any morphological or phonetic similarity.
Yes, here's details on the English Language Proficiency Requirements for pilots:
http://www.anglo-continental.com/en/uk/courses/Aviation/aviation-english-division.htm#Standards
http://www.icao.int/icao/en/trivia/peltrgFAQ.htm
Right so, English is a virus. Cmp. Ireland, they still stick to the colonial language.
It is better when people stick to their mother tongue. It is all about culture.
The ATC decision is based on several things, such as the fact that pilots (by definition) do a lot of traveling, and the real-time safety aspects.
If you had a mission critical piece of software coded with Swahili names and constructs, you could, theoretically, still qualify it for use. But the real question would be: why would you go there in the first place?
Well, the language keywords (in this case Fortran) were still English, but the comments were not (French). These days I'm just run it through a translater, perhaps, but this was back in 1991.
You learned to see patterns, and to change things as you went through the program to English equivalents. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
A real coder should be able to write code that he understands, code that does not need comments. No one care for Eric Raymond and his language nazis.
Although I prefer Esperanto.
...has substantially influenced the world of programming languages, and he is not a native English speaker. Granted, he specifically avoided producing languages for commercial use.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Unfortunately, you are completely wrong here. Finnish belongs to the Ugro-finnish language family, its closest relative in Europe being Hungarian. Even Swedes, Danes and Norwegians do not understand Finnish, despite living in the same region and Swedish, Danish and Norwegian being mutually intelligible for the most part. Finnish is not even close to English, period.
I have two horrible examples of localization gone wrong. First one is excel, which uses translated function names, which makes it impossible for me using a swedish excel installation to google for some tips how to use a function. The second one might be limited to swedish, I don't really know, but is the legacy of using , instead of . to separate integers from fractions. This is really irritating when I try to cut'n'paste data between some language/program that honors the localization (calc, excel) and some that doesn't. That's one of the reasons I prefer to have my locale set to english on all my systems.
in fact, you are wrong.
Finnish is closest related to Hungarian, and is part of the Uralic language family:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages
It is rather NOT related to Latin or Germanic languages (which includes Anglo Saxon "English").
True, the difference between Finnish and English is likely smaller than English to Chinese, but still more significant than e.g. French to English.
I'd like to correct you in this. Finnish is so not similar to any other language ;)
Actually it belongs to the same family as e.g. Turkish, but not to the family of indo-germanic like English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, etc.
If you know more than one of the latter you'll likely find it much easier to learn a third or fourth of these, but it won't help you at all with Turkish or Finnish.
Anyway, even myself being from Germany, I do write all my comments, variable names and user documentation in English, even in code which is never intended to be seen by anyone else or the documentation is likely to be read only by Germans.
A lot of my programming colleagues share that behaviour but there are others (usually less professional) who don't.
I grew up in a country with dubbing (all TV was in Italian) and lived for a longer time in a place where all TV was in English (or whatever the original language was), subtitled in Norwegian. I agree that that alone is not sufficient, but once a kid has learnt the grammatical basis at school it is an immense booster. Pronunciation especially improves enormously, but also fluency in common figures of speech and filler words. Yes, filler is important—unless you know that, like, y'know, stuff don't really mean anything, you actually try and waste time trying to figure out how they fit in the sentence.
Unless one lives in an English speaking country outright, school is never going to be sufficient to learn a workable English—there is simply not enough time for practice. That's valid for English and any other language.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Speaking as a south american living in the US, I have to say that I'm glad english is the main programming language. I don't know about other languages, but with spanish, you have too many words to say the same thing. A code in english would probably gain a few hundred lines if it was written in spanish hehe
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but IIRC, Finnish is also very similar in structure and sound to English.
You're wrong here. Finnish is NOT like English in either structure or sound.
From wikipedia: "Finnish is a member of the Baltic-Finnic subgroup of the Finno-Ugric group of languages which in turn is a member of the Uralic family of languages. The Baltic-Finnic subgroup also includes Estonian and other minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea."
Except, apparently...in customer support call centers.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Being Dutch (close to English), I concur. As a child me and my friends saw and heard quite a bit of English on TV or through music. We could never understand (nor really care) except a handful of words we were taught. When "singing" some popular song, we just mimicked the sounds and used Dutch words or syllables to replace them. Words which often made zero sense. But that did not matter.
Finnish is nearly as different from English as Chinese. English belongs to the huge Indo-European language family while Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language.
As a person from Sweden I don't understand a word of what they say -- we resort to English for mutual communication, unless the other person has a Finnish/Swedish family background like Linus Torvalds has.
Linus is probably at least trilingual (Finnish-Swedish-English), or more likely partially quadrilingual since he almost certainly took classes in a second foreign language in school. I can imagine it might help to know several distinctly and fundamentally different natural languages, if you want to excel at programming languages.
I do agree that English should be among the tools used by every serious programmer. (I am not a native English speaker.)
I do not agree that pragmatism is the most virtuous of all hacker traits.
It's funny, I find the same thing about most countries where "everyone speaks English" that I have been to.
If you spend a little time just a touch outside of the beaten tourist path, you quickly find people don't speak English.
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. Of the people that did speak a different language Italian was most popular.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I'm from italy, and usually here the english lessons aren't so good. I mean, take for example torvalds, it's from finn, but they've as second language english.. here in italy there is first of all some kind of different language/dialect for every region, which some of them are completly different from italian (south italy in particular), then there is italian.... and if everything is ok then there is english, but the problem is that everyone just want everything in italian, not in english, it could be a movie, a book or anything else. :) :(
Ok, after this you've to take some programmers and then teach them first of all to write in correct english, and then the computer languages themself...... i don't know if they'd willing to do it
Actually i'd love to know a better english too... (considering that i read only english books and watch only english movies)
In the Finnish language version of Excel, all the function names (to be used in spreadsheet formulas) are in Finnish. It's horrible! To search for help or examples from Internet one has to use a table to translate the function names.
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So since when does using English make one an "Ugly American". An an ex-pat I'd say A) Americans both north and south, do not speak English.
b) The folks in the UK would be VERY upset that use of English makes one ANY kind of American. Bloody yanks and canuks.
You can find those people everywhere, not only in Finland.
No conversation at all unless some vodka (or whatever with some strength) is added, and then you get conversation without meaning instead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Disney movies (etc) are dubbed for children too young to read subtitles at full speed. Once they're deemed old enough, they are shown the subbed versions which are available to the rest of us.
This in the Netherlands, but I'm sure Belgium will be no different :)
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I read your comment and the comments below yours. There is a misunderstanding. In July of 2009, there will be only an estimated 5,250,275 people in Finland. The entire country has the population of one large city. Much of what they have comes from somewhere else.
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 with the rest of the world. What other language should they choose? Not German, since the Germans made so much trouble for everyone in World War Two. Not French, since the French treat people who can't speak French perfectly as social inferiors. Not Italian, since you have to be passionate to be Italian, and besides, Italians are so self-defeating.
In the late 1800s, the chosen language was French. But, a little at a time, the arrogance of the French caused people to choose a lesser evil: English. It's not that the English were wonderful, it's just that the English were the least annoying. Also, the English had been engaged in violent empire-building, so anyone who knew English could go anywhere in the empire to do business.
It helped that people in the United States spoke English. There was a huge amount of material available in English, because it was spoken in two populous countries. So choosing English gave more benefits than other languages.
There are other reasons, but I have to go back to work.
Considering that some Chinese dialects are mutually incomprehensible, in a discussion like this that is significant. However, more significant is how practical is written Chinese as a language for writing comments in a computer program?
I don't know the answer, but my impression is that written Chinese would be problematical as a base for programming.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
But I didn't state a claim about language!? I simply asked for the basis for his. My only "claim" was thAT "An unfounded, unbased assertion is not an argument" -- are you disputing that? I can back it up if needed....since it's a tautology and all.
everything in moderation
OK, go learn the programming language Fjölnir, that will require the knowledge of Icelandic.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
English is the 'official' language of ICAO, and all pilotes and air traffic controllers on international routes for any member nation are required to speak the language (http://www.relta.org/icao.html).
A friend who flies for UPS was telling me that you should never greet an air traffic controller in their native tounge as the controller will assume that you are fluent and switch from English.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Real programmers speak in 0s and 1s.
An unfounded, unbased assertion is not an argument
Yes, it is!
We obviously need Esperanto here. Coding in Esperanto is magical, like a unicorn under a rainbow. It's so natural.
I am sorry to say that most of the native English speakers on /. can't even hold a simple conversation in English. After all, it requires the dreaded social skills.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
It just fits some of the requirements.
You need a language that is only semi-agglutinative(you can stick words together, but it isn't preferred past a certain length)
You need a language/culture that can either invent or steal words, either to cover a new concept or add definition/shades of meaning to an existing concept. This also keeps agglutinated words from getting too long.
Similarly, concepts/words/symbols should be composed of subsymbols that are amenable to composing new symbols without necesarily carrying their own meaning. Having the glyph for home composed of the glyphs man+woman+house only goes so far before the subsymbols lose meaning or get really hard to write. I can make "xkcd" or "jkliop" mean something without it have a underlying symbolic meaning that relates to or constructs that meaning.
The language's grammar should accept sloppiness and alternative phrasing but not require it.
I could come up with more, but, basically, the language should be flexible and detailed without being cluttered or strict. English isn't that language, but it has features of it. With some functional changes and some cultural changes, many existing languages could serve this purpose.
The real thing English has going is network effects from British imperialism & American commercialism, similar to how French and Latin used to be prevalent due to diplomacy & trade.
Finns has about as much passion for the still-obligatory Swedish as Hungarians or Romanians did for Russian in the times of Communism.
Ah, those mandatory Russian classes back in communist Hungary. We studied Russian for years, yet I can't even ask for a glass of water.
We hated the language with passion, because it was obligatory for everyone.
Finnish is definitely not very similar to much else than Hungarian. I think that there may be some area in the former Soviet Union that also shares that heritage, but I'm not sure.
The other Scandinavian languages Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are a lot closer to English in structure and shares a lot of similar words, but there are also differences in both words and pronunciation.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
You bastards ought to learn to spell colour correctly.
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.
Since Linus' native tongue is Swedish (being of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland), he's likely to be fluent in Finnish as well (hard to get by there without it). Hence, trilingual is more like it, not counting any other language he might have studied in school.
but I think English tends to be the least common denominator. From my experience there's a greater chance the non-US individual knows English as opposed to the US individual (generally me) knowing whatever language that person is from. I deal with third-party libraries from both Sweden and France. The Sweden folks sometimes seem to know English better than I do and all classes, sample code, and documentation is in English. The French stuff though is not. The documentation gets translated (sometimes poorly), the class names are all based on French abbreviations and what not. Even the registry keys have French names. From this small, statistically insignificant sample group, 2 of the groups code and speak in English whereas the 3 can speak in English, but code and put the documentation in French first (though to be honest, the Swedes may be translating the documentation too and just doing a fantastic job with it). So, we have English: 2+, French: 1, Swedish: 1. I use the "+" to denote that all 3 can speak it, but only two code in it. So, English would be the common sense choice.
This is completely anecdotal evidence, but from what I can tell, on average, Americans can barely speak English let alone another language. So unless you want to cut them out of the loop for the time being, English would seem to make sense. This ignores any discussion between two non-English speaking countries of course. Though again, on some of my travels, I've met a strangely high number of English speaking natives.
The closest language to English is French.
I would disagree. Dutch is much more similar to English than French. The grammar is almost exactly the same, and a lot of words are the same. Ik lijk het huis. I like the house. It's almost readable even if you don't know it.
I wanted to translate "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." on Google Translate, but it's down for me right now. Try it yourself, and I bet it's fairly readable.
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In terms of sheer numbers, Mandarin Chinese is the most common spoken language on the planet.
Yes, but the French are well know for their obstinate defense of their language and culture; frequently refusing to adopt foreign words, technologies, and culture until a french equivalent is re-created from scratch.
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.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Try Finnish (or related languages) - they concatenate things that English puts in multiple words, so you end up with less words than English.
Maybe you would want to try learning one? Just a suggestion...
It's a common business language; that's all. Latin, Spanish, and French all had turns at one point in history. English as a business language is fortunate for English speakers, especially US citizens. I need to learn Spanish now...
The party's over
Speaking as a native English speaker who is learning Spanish, it's one of the things that hit you most from Spanish - much more so than English, Spanish relies on context to understand meaning. I don't think English has a verb used for quite as many meanings as, say, "quedar". The other thing that strikes me is this. All my computers are now set to Spanish, and so when I do a Google search, it returns Spanish language stuff first, but any technical search brings back about 1/2 the results in English still.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The closest language to English is French.
Actually, linguists reckon the languages closest to English are the Frisian languages. But of the ones folks here will have heard of French is high on the list.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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.
The key question (IMHO, of course) is what you define as "programming". If it is "formal" coding in the sense of a programming language, fine, I 100% agree.
However, although they *totally* botched the implementation, MS did actually have a point when they made language changes in VBA (donning flameproof gear). Hear me out on this.
For: it allowed people to write formulae in their own language - the language in which they learned math at school. As someone who has studied in multiple languages I can very much understand the need to read something in your mother tongue, so from that angle I would be inclined to offer a 3rd suggestion to "yes" or "no": make it possible to choose the language.
Against: IF you go for such a choice option, please avoid what MS did in VBA. Why MS decided that formulae weren't tokenized so the VBA "programs" (sorry for the insult to the concept) would work in ANY language and simply changed presentation is a mystery to me. As I work in multiple languages I occasionally get spreadsheets that are not in English, and some of them have some basic formulae - which will not work because my system runs in English. It's fantastically unbelievably stupid to do things this way, so from this angle I would be all for a 100% English environment. And for thumbscrews for whoever came up with that implementation.
I'm with Torvalds on commenting - I never even thought to comment in another language too when coding. That has IMHO a simple cause: most people who speak a language also then THINK in that language, so commenting in another language would mean switching back and forth. Not impossible, but usually not worth the effort.
PS: in case someone wants to comment that all is done more intelligently in OpenOffice: sorry, such a change won't happen just yet, especially now marketing has discovered the shading and 3D tinsel in Powerpoint. Sigh.
Insert
There's nothing ugly about Americans using English. We're quite glad you're learning our language. Some of you are getting fairly good at it.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It's the world most spoken second language. This is partially due to British imperialism, partially due to American media, partially due to a lot of things. Point is if you take two people from random different countries, odds are neither speaks the other's native language. However, if they do speak a second language, odds are also that it is English.
Thus, English is the international language. In some cases it is official (like air traffic control) in other cases it is just defacto, but it is the most likely candidate as a language spoken by two people.
Now in the area of computers, it is additionally a good choice since many (most? all?) computer languages are "pseudo English." What I mean is their commands and abbreviations are derived from English. Things like the "print" command, or variations thereof, that are in so many languages. To a non-English speaker, it would probably just be a random sequence of characters to memorize. To an English speaker, it is sensible since it "prints" text.
So not only is English useful in that it is the international second language, but it is also useful since you are likely to encounter it in the languages you use to program the computer.
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.
The cake is a pie
Well, French, Spanish and Portuguese are all Romance languages (descendants of Latin), and since English is a Germanic Language with heavily borrowed French vocabulary, learning those languages is less difficult because we use many similar words. The same is true for English speakers learning German. However all of those languages rely on heavier grammatical inflexion than English, which has lost most of its inflexions. So while we speak of English words using the grammatical terms like Nominative and Genitive etc, in most cases the English word changes little if at all, whereas in all of the above languages, a noun in the genitive case is likely to undergo some changes. These sorts of changes can prove difficult to English speakers. Those languages also have gender for nouns, another thing English has almost lost.
Finnish on the other hand is from the Finno-Ugric branch of Indo-European Languages, and has far less in common with English, other than some recently imported loan words (many of which undergo changes such that we as English speakers would not recognize them).
To quote Wikipedia:
"Moreover, Finnish and English have a considerably different grammar, phonology and phonotactics, discouraging direct borrowing. English loan words in Finnish slang include for example pleikkari "PlayStation", hodari "hot dog", and hedari "headache". Often these loanwords are distinctly identified as slang or jargon, rarely being used in a negative mood or in formal language. Since English and Finnish grammar, pronunciation and phonetics differ considerably, most loan words are inevitably sooner or later calqued â" translated into native Finnish â" retaining the semantic meaning."
- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Language
Finnish thus resembles English pretty much not at all. I expect it would be more work to learn Finnish for an English speaker, than it would be to learn French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, or German etc.
Now I grant it will be likely easier to learn Finnish that say Chinese but that's primarily due to the difficulty non-tone-language speakers have in trying to pick up a tonal language. When their are, say, 8 different ways to pronounce the word /yi/ us poor English speakers are going to get easily confused when trying to remember them. Someone who grew up speaking a tone language would be more aware of the tones themselves and probably have an easier time learning things. That said, I believe Chinese (although as a non-speaker I am not sure) is pretty simple grammatically, so if you can get past the tones, the language is probably not that hard to learn. The writing system is of course another matter and undoubtedly represents a considerable barrier to learning any variety of Chinese. Finnish on the other hand probably has a lot of grammatical inflections to master, and the words will not resemble anything you know in English or other romance languages.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I had a chance to look this up. From First Language Acquisition, by Eve Clark.
The first example cited (p. 46) is deaf parents turning the TV on for their hearing children to be exposed to the community's spoken language. The second one concerns Sesame Street directly:
The page with the Snow et al. 1976 reference is missing from the Google book preview.
Are you adequate?
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I learned English from TV (the TV where I lived was subtitled not overdubbed), games, and reading books. I also I have a better than average understanding of Italian from (I assume) watching Italian TV without subtitles as a kid. I can understand most Italian (90%) but cannot string together a single phrase. My native language is Romanian and as such is 70% percent similar to Italian. However, I know a lot of people who do not understand Italian even though they speak Romanian as a native language. In English I am very fluent - better than the average native speaker from test scores and interaction with native speakers. So I think TV, books, games, etc do help even in the absence of native speakers.
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
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.
Most linguists would still consider English Germanic more than Romance. The structure of the language is Germanic, and most of the basic vocabulary is as well. Most of the Romance-based words entered the language in bursts after 1066, and during an obsession with the ancient Greeks/Romans in the 1700s. Also, more of the French words are more "window dressing" or 10-dollar words rather than the basic building blocks of language.
... notes that 'Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise).
Just a little factual correction - it is true that Linus was born in Finland, but he was born in the Swedish family and his first language was Swedish. No doubt he also speaks Finnish, though.
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As a Swede with Finnish relatives, who has visited regularly for decades, I can tell you that although as some others have commented, there are still plenty of young Finns who speak poor English (or just dare not use what they know), things have become much much much better than 20 years ago; in those days, it was way easier to find a Swedish-speaking person to help you than to find anyone who could say "sure, I speak English". Finland has changed a lot in recent years, become more open and friendly, and I like it.
I looked at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_speakers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
and some of their references.
English is either number one or two looking at number of speakers, fighting for first place with Chinese, depending on how one counts. Notably, this also lumps all Chinese "dialects" together, even though there are good arguments as to why different Chinese "dialects" should be called "languages", which would then be counted separately.
Having gone travelling recently, many English dialects are mutually incomprehensible. Some within a 20 mile radius.
While admittedly current programming languages are developed with English speakers in mind and thus use English in their design, what is to prevent say the Chinese government with evolving a new programming language based on Mandarin for use inside China? They are an ever growing economic, political and population base, it wouldn't be impractical at all for someone to do this - and it would leave the rest of the programming world (or rather those who don't speak Mandarin) pretty much out in the cold.
It might even be possible that basing a programming language on a different spoken language might encourage different approaches to programming language design and concept?
Its a mildly interesting thought, luckily for me I grew up speaking English :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
We should all be using Sumerian.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
claim:
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
evidence:
being bilingual or a polyglot is beneficial to thinking and memory skills
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
your reading comprehension:
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa
Microsoft Excel would be the exception. The formula expressions there is localized which always confuses me a bit since my brain is usually not really register what the locale of my computer is.
Americans speak English? Colour me shocked. I'm honoured by the former colonies finally deciding they should speak English instead of that polyglot mishmash of deliberately misspelled mis-applied words.
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
Where do you get the notion that English is an easy language to learn? Yes, it might be omni present in the media, which helps, but this is just the availability of material, not the ease at which the language can be learned. In fact I would assert that English is a difficult language. For example, right and write sound the same. On top of that right can mean (at least) to things.
Why would Chinese be any more problematic for comments than any other non-latin character set?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Try German. Just about anything that requires a sentence in English can be said with one 14-syllable German word. :D
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
I should have added to my reply: from your story, it sounds like you made concentrated, deliberate efforts to learn English, at a relatively late age where you've already mastered one language. You didn't learn English by some sort of metaphorical osmosis at age three from watching Sesame Street.
Remember that I'm responding to a very narrow claim: the idea that airing Sesame Street in English in local TV contributes to Finnish children learning English. There is precious little evidence that young children, at the age that Sesame Street targets, learn anything from watching it in a different language. To the extent that Finnish children learn English, I don't think Sesame Street in English has much to do with it.
Are you adequate?
it's true that some idioms take longer to say in spanish than in english, but that's hardly the case for all of them. and even if it were, english is by no means the most economic of languages in the world. should we consider word economy as the determining aspect, english would fare a lot worse than, say, japanese.
if you are into ridiculous examples, take your very own comment: in english it took you 59 words to say that (as per OOo) whereas in spanish you can say the same thing in 57:
things are a lot more balanced than what you might think.
Personally, I don't care what language other programmers use. That's their personal choice. If I were to go into a field where 95% of the documentation and information was in a certain language, I would feel it necessary to learn that language. But that would be my choice because being good at what I do is important to me.
You can be a good programmer without learning English, but you're certainly limiting your ability to acquire knowledge about programming, if you don't learn it.
Lots of physcists and chemists learned German back when it was the predominant language of published papers. It's simply a matter of practicality.
Instead of dwelving into the general dominance of English as a business language lets have a look at what this means to programmers. Is it more difficult for non native english speakers to read code than for native speakers? Would there be a better choice than english to use to derive a programming language?
In context of Linus's language skills, it's irrelevant to compare English and Finnish, because Linus is natively swedish speaking, not finnish. Swedish is closer to English than finnish.
quedar
get
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.
Hahah, nice. Unfortunately, they're both quite clearly mere claims. Your posts all completely lack evidence. Maybe you should look up a few definitions before trying again.
everything in moderation
Mein Auto gibt mir eine Spassestreibendafahrvergnugen!
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
Um no, English is considered one of the hardest to learn. It is of Germanic decent, but has so many influences that it has a lot of convoluted rules.
We should change to a more "neutral" language.
I'd say Latin, as it's used in law and biology and isn't changing. Of course that makes it hard to add technical terms.
We could look to other languages. I think cuniform would be good. I think Egyptian or Myan heiroglyphs would be a good "universal" language because they're all pictures (and computers are fast enough to render them now).
If we wanted to geek-out we could use Stargate's Ancient Alteran (with the benefit of being easy to OCR) but Klingon is more widely spoken in the tech community.
i'm having a hard time reading this.
if you are saying that finnish and english are as different as can be based on a) their different language families, b) their different phonological inventories, and c) their difference in terms of grammatical categories available...
then how on earth can you possibly say that "the closest language to English is French" if they a) come from different language families [one is romanic, the other is germanic], b) have different phonological inventories, and c) have very different grammatical systems [for starters, french has articles and genders, whereas english doesn't].
and even though orthography is hardly worth considering when talking about similarities between languages, the above paragraph doesn't even mention how incredibly different the use of the latin alphabet is in french and in english! (have you ever noticed the diacritics on top of french letters?)
Not true -- when I grew up it was called Svenska Sesam and I remember being surprised when I learned they had made an english version. But you study the language from age ten or earlier, and TV for teens and grownups is just subtitled.
Make that trilingual, since he's of the swedish-speaking minority in .fi.
I don't know whether bilingualism is good for the brain. Perhaps. What makes a difference is being part of a programmer culture. Everything of value is written in English, from the JARGON file to Usenet, to all the good books, the man pages. Being cut away from that would be like trying to be a scholar in the 18th century and not know Latin -- you'd reinvent a few wheels and then get stuck.
>>>It is better when people stick to their mother tongue. It is all about culture.
So does that mean everyone should stop speaking Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, et cetera and switch to speaking Latin again? That was the original mother tongue of Western Europe.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You don't have to feel bad about it. English is simply the new Latin. 300 years ago, scholars would often hold their discussions partially in Latin even if they all spoke the same native language - it ensured that everyone was using the same terminology. (Now all we need is the fall of the American empire to complete the picture...)
Yes, you have the advantage of it being your mother tongue - which gives you endless opportunities to hear the language you love being mangled daily by people from all over the world. I don't envy you. Also, most non-native English "users" are semi-fluent in technical discussions, but are totally useless in a dinner conversation, so it's even debatable if "bilingual" is the right word here. Hence, don't worry that you don't remember much of that German you took in school; it's probably about as much as most Germans remember of the Spanish or French they took.
Maybe you should tell those idiots at Stanford. That'll show them.
Iz a amrkin progrmr. Iz only spk LOLCAT. Kthxbye.
Have you ever encountered XML with Mandarin tags? It's out there. There was once French COBOL, with French word order, but that seems to have died out. There were some Russian programming languages from the USSR's aerospace community.
One would expect something in Mandarin, perhaps with one glyph for each reserved primitive. Other than a Forth-like hack, that hasn't happened.
There are headaches with a big-character-set programming language. In Unicode, there are strings that look the same but are not identical. This is a pain in a programming language. Programming languages work better if what you see is what you've got, because absolute string equality matters so much. Unicode is fairly recent; much of the Han world is still struggling with "Big5", "GB", and similar hacks to handle a big character set. Because the character set is the vocabulary, there are occasional updates, which is inconvenient. ASCII has been stable for 40 years.
Accented languages are also inconvenient for programming, because the accents are somewhat optional. English has essentially dumped accents. (English has dumped a lot of baggage - accents, dual letters, gender, and case, none of which really contributed to communication.) Most other languages still baggage which is inconvenient when programming.
(I just wish we could get the Web down to using ASCII (0..127) with HTML escapes, or Unicode. We need to get rid of "upper code pages", "GB", "Big5", "Shift JIS", and "KS X 1001". Then at least everything would display for everybody, we wouldn't have mode issues, and all Unicode tools could parse everything.)
but Americans don't speak English so how can it be cultural Imperialism?
Finnish is considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn, while english is considered one of the easiest.
By who?
No doubt that whoever asserted that was a native speaker of an Indo-European language, quite probably a Germanic one.
English is a Indo-European and a Germanic language. Finnish, on the other hand, is a Finno-Ugric language, pretty much entirely unrelated.
So of course for someone who speaks *any* Indo-European language, English is going to be (much) easier to learn than Finnish. The converse would also be true, but there's not that many other extant Finno-Ugric languages, especially not ones with large amounts of speakers.
If you don't practise you wont learn? You don't need to understand Sesame Street, but it's very important if you want to know what to poke at 53280.
>>>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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
English has become the Lingua Franca in science and engineering. I spare you the historical causes of that development. You may find the information in a famous online lexicon.
English is the most common second language on this planet. And it is at least for a European easy to learn. Its grammar is simple, it is a lower German language and therefore related Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian. Also it has common links to Latin (like many European languages) and French (thanks to the Normans).
And due to the fact it is already so wide spread, it is the logical choice for a common language of science. Just like Latin was in the Roman Empire.
Right so, English is a virus. Cmp. Ireland, they still stick to the colonial language.
English won out through centuries of systematic cultural repression, not by superiority of language. (Disclaimer, my Catholic ancestors moved from Ireland to Scotland during the famine and never went back.)
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Using english in the open source world is THE way to go, but in commercial applications that aren't distributed world-wide, in an area where everyone speaks the same language, why would they be "forced" to use english.
Here at work, even though we program in c++, we often have French variable names or French comments, because that more appropriate for us and it represents the concepts that we are more familiar with. But a while loop stays a while loop...
Um, he said he will argue it, silly, not that he did.
Are you adequate?
If I recall correctly from my own early childhood, your graduate-level psychology of language course may very well be wrong :)
Obviously, you won't have 10 year olds running around speaking perfect english, but they can easily get good enough to follow what happens in the movies they watch, and that's a huge step.
Furthermore, english expressions will be much more commmon in a community where average english levels are high, so they will be able to interact with speakers in the language in question.
As everyone said, Finnish is of course very different from English. However, I would just like to point out that Torvalds is a Swedish-speaking Finn; Swedish and English are relatively similar. They both belong to the Germanic language family, and they share a lot of cognates: hus/house, katt/cat, man/man, öppna/open, dörr/door, skit/shit, is/ice, tuff/tough, etc. Some other words' similarity with English isn't striking at first but it makes sense once you get a grasp of how the language sounds, e.g. stjäla/steal, lätt/light, etc.
As an expatriate in Sweden, I think Swedish isn't that daunting to pick up at first, although the pronunciation is kinda tough.
Mastering a language, however similar it is to your native language, still requires a lot of work.
And all these years I thought all functions were written in German:
"GetStringLen()"
For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing-you who dread knowledge-I am the man who will now tell you.â The chief engineer was the only one able to move; he ran to a television set and struggled frantically with its dials. But the screen remained empty; the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of the country-of the world, thought the chief engineer-sounding as if he were speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind.
"You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man's sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.
"You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish.
"Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man's mind.
"Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn't. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren't.
"While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem-I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality-mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.
"All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don't. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.
"We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.
"There is a difference between our strike and all those you've practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to e
It's funny how people from US or UK think they still are the "owners" of the English language. As a programmer I use it to reach a worldwide audience - not to reach people in UK or US especially. I couldn't care less where the language originated or who used it first as long as I can use it to communicate with the widest possible audience.&o
Besides, as a likely descendant of some Viking, I feel ownership of the English language just as much as anybody else, with as many words in modern English coming from my old language as the other way around.
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.
I found that simply saying something like "let's go back to XX and buy it, they could speak English there" worked wonders. Although, it was quite easy to pick up enough French for basic commerce, dining, and bodily functions.
Outside the snooty city limits, folks are often eager to practice their English with you, or on you, depending how bad it is. Still, their Crappy English was better than my atrocious French.
Now, try talking to an Italian who learned English from a Scotsman. GFL deciphering _that_.
In Spain all the American TV shows are dubbed and almost no one speaks English, and even those who do have a strong Spanish accent. Here in Portugal only the shows for children are dubbed, every other content is subtitled, and although I don't speak or write very well in English, I think I've learned much more from using the Internet and listening to US shows than from school.
And yes, people *should* learn English, and code comments *should* be written in English, and that's even more true in Open Source programs.
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It was? I thought Latin was bastardised into localised forms and after a while it replaced the local native languages. It failed to do so uniformly, see German and other today's Germanic languages, but the creole replaced some Celtic languages and became Old French, Old Spanish (or Castilian), Old Portuguese etc. It also influenced English later on, but only indirectly. Latin was never the universal mother tongue outside Rome. Even Italian, the closest relative, is mostly a mix of many local dialects with some Latin influence thrown in.
in Sweden back in the '80s, called Compis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compis
They basically just took CP/M and transcoded every word into swedish.
It sucked, and it was stupid.
The language is older than that... it goes back to 1000 B.C. and comes from the Volga River area. The Hungarian language was somewhat influenced by the Latin-speaking Roman Empire, while Finnish was not.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The closest language to English is French.
Not true. Frisian is.
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
This is correct. However, todays German borrowed its grammar from Latin, that's why it is such a mess to learn. But the basic vocabulary like to have and to be are shared in both languages. And most English grammar constructs can be mapped to German grammar without a problem, however the other way often doesn't work. ;-)
If I could have gotten a copy of that german cobot like code in english it would have knocked weeks off development.
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.
I am not a developer, I'm just a hobbyst who learned almost everything I know about computers from the internet (python, c#, php, javascript, html, css, databases, graphics software, etc, etc...).
I'm a native spanish speaker living in Argentina, and I'm sure that my (limited) knowledge of English has been the key. The quantity and quality of English material on these subjects far exceeds those available in any other languages.
I believe that different languages have different characteristics and advantages. For example, English is very flexible, succint and expressive, most of its words are onomatopoeias (crash, boom, punch, blast, etc), so it's very easy to associate words with their meaning.
It's kind of an orthogonal language. By combining two small words you can express an entirely different meaning (look up, take down, etc), whilst Spanish, for example can express more with only one word, but then you need to know more words to express your ideas.
Languages also explain to some extent the idiosyncrasy of their speakers. For example, in German, the last word of a sentence can modify completely its meaning. Therefore, when a German starts speaking, he already knows exactly what heÂs going to say. On the other hand, latin speakers are more prone to improvise while chaining words one after another.
I would rather someone be a polymath than a polyglut when hiring for a position. Anyone can learn a few languages if exposed early enough in life, not everyone can learn a few sciences.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Ik lijk het huis.
I'm sorry, you incorrectly misspelled 'the' as 'het' when in fact, everyone knows that the proper way to misspell 'the' is 'teh'.
If my post were a car, this sig would be its bumper-sticker.
I learned my first programming language, before I was able to speak any sentence in English. I learned for example the commands:
GOTO, PRINT, INPUT and other terminals like , ; . + - / =
I didn't need to understand what the real English meaning of these words were, I just read the documentation and used it.
I don't know.
I had a lot of pantomimish conversations, and stumbled around in Spanish some (a weak second language for me.
I had the impression that the staff at the laundry mat and the couple bars I went to really didn't speak English.
Everybody was incredibly polite and helpful, and at the laundry mat we had a good time exchanging words that were gibberish (kind of like in Ghost Dog). It certainly wasn't a strategy to avoid me, as it prolonged things longer than it needed to be.
And unlike what my sibling poster said, I found the people to be incredibly polite about the whole situation. The only person I had a problem with was a guy who appeared to be living on the street who smelled tourist and used it as an excuse to say sexually explicit things to my girlfriend (who was actually fluent in French) and quickly retreated when he realized he was understood.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The Irish and the English language. A funny relationship. We (Irish) hate our own language (pretty much) but are in love the way we use the English language. We love our own language when we are drunk and wish we had better command of it, but that's always short lived. May Peig Sayers be damned I tells ya!
We have issues. But now cannot afford therapy of course...
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but IIRC, Finnish is also very similar in structure and sound to English.
You couldn't be furthest from reality, or you are simply confusing Finland and Sweden like every American would probably do ... :-)
Much like Spanish and Portuguese for example.
Spanish and Portuguese are Latin-derived languages, but they are close to each other as much they are with Italian and French (ie, no, if you speak just Portuguese you do *not* understand Spanish, nor Italian, nor French)
Not to the point of automatic mutual intelligibility, but to the point where if you know one then learning the other isn't as major a leap as learning, say, Chinese.
FAIL! :-)
Finnish is not an easy language, both the words and the grammar are not similar to any other European language except Estonian and Hungarian.
(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages)
Although I wouldn't say that Finnish is more difficult to learn then, say, German, Latin or Ancient Greek.
But its grammar is certainly more complex than modern English.
Um, you're setting yourself up for confusing with this comment, because on the one hand you say that French is the "closest" language to English, and on the other, you cite the reason precisely by which it isn't so, in the sense that most people will understand for "closest" in this case.
The other replies did a good job of setting out the linguistic taxonomy issues, so I'll just limit myself to making what I think is a deeper point: a language is not a bag of words, it's a system for forming and using sentences; i.e., a grammar. This is one of the key insights that distinguishes a true linguist from a layperson with a passing interest in languages. For example, some people often ask me (as a linguist) why is it that English is classified as a Germanic language, despite such a large amount of its vocabulary coming from Romance. The answer to that one is that the proportion of words from Romance vs. Germanic is just irrelevant. The language is a grammar.
Now, having pointed that out, let's focus on grammatical issues:
Are you adequate?
I spent a couple hours in a port in Scottland (having taken a fairy from Northern Ireland), and I didn't know they spoke English there until I asked what language was spoken in Scotland the next day.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
Now if only you Americans would learn how to spell colour correctly.
Let's just go through your post and see where the words came from; whether French or not:
24 and 1/2 of them come from French, of a total of 148 or 149 (depending on whether you count "you're" as 1 or 2 words).
List of origins, whether "French" or "not" (I would have made it neater, but Slashdot has something against "too few characters per line"):
You = not; are = not as = not; wrong = Not; as = Not; you = Not; can = not; be = not; Finnish = not; is = not; an = not; ugro-finnic = not; language = French; meaning = not; its = not; closest = French; relatives = French; are = not; Estonian = not; and = not; far = not; away = not; Hungarian = not; it = not; is = not; not = not; even = not; indo-european = not; english = not; is = not; closer = French; to = not; Sanskrit = not; Russian = not; Farsi = not; than = not; finnish = not; finnish = not; does = not; not = not; have = not; articles = French; has = not; 15 = not; or = not; 16 = not; cases = French; depending = French; on = not; dialect = not; has = not; a = not; completely = French; different = French; set = not; of = not; sounds = French; and = not; sports = French; oddities = (odd = not, -ity suffix = French); such = not (coolest sound English word IMO); as = not; lacking = not; a = not; verb = French; for = not; to = not; have = not; The = not; only = not; thing = not; in = not; common = French; is = not; the = not; Latin = not; alphabet = not; which = not; the = not; Finns = not; use = not; much = not; better = not; than = not; English = not; speakers = not; since = not; their = not; language = not; is = not; much = not; easier = French; to = not; spell = not; the = not; closest = French; language = French; to = not; English = not; is = not; French = not (believe it or not); even = not; though = not; it = not; a = not; germanic = not; language = French; most = not; of = not; the = not; words = not; and = not; spelling = not; horrors = French; in = not; English = not; come = not; from = not; French = not; and = not; English = not; grammar = French; is = not; fairly = not; easy = French; to = not; pick = not; up = not; anyway = not; this = not; means = not; that = not; language = French; proximity = not (comes directly from Latin); is = not; fairly = not; irrelevant = not (comes directly from Latin); when = not; there = not; is = not; no = not; application = French; in = not; study = French; of = not; the = not; language = French;
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 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.
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 it doesn't make sense, it translates more or less into : "I corpse the house" (!?!). It's actually funny to see how French & English people can fail so miserably at understanding each other; while written both languages share a lot of words but they simply pronounce them completely different.
As for translating your example in Dutch : /.)
"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."
would become something along the lines of
"Het enige gemeenschappelijk is het Latijns alfabet, dat de Finnen veel beter gebruiken dan de Engelstaligen aangezien hun taal veel eenvoudiger te spellen is."
In French it would be (very rough, my french is *extremely* rusty) :
"La seule chose en commun est l'alphabet Latin, ce que les Finlandais employent beaucoup mieux parce-que leur langue est plus facille a epeller"
(someone should spell-check and fix the grammar I suppose, I had to leave out accents since this is
PS: I must agree that for that sentence, Dutch is more close than English is... but still similarities can be found towards the French one too. From a practical point of view I've found myself in countless situations where I had to find a word in English by mentally going via French, or vice versa.
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
Google Translate writes in a language that is close to, but not quite the same as the requested language. Were I to engage in your proposed exercise, I would still need a native dutch speaker to evaluate Google Translate's output before making any conclusions about the readability of Dutch.
Is
Het enige wat in het algemeen is het Latijnse alfabet, dat de Finnen gebruiken veel beter dan het Engels luidsprekers sinds hun taal is veel makkelijker te spellen
good dutch?
Translating it back results in this:
The only thing in general, the Latin alphabet, which the Finns use a lot better than English speakers in their language is much easier to spell
Not inspiring. The words are the same, but the meaning is clouded. I'm not sure if I could trust code that was commented via Google Translate.
The number of cognates is absolutely irrelevant. The criterion that establishes the relationship is systematic sound correspondences; read up on the comparative method.
Finnish fits quite uncontroversially into the Uralic family.
Are you adequate?
That's what I thought when I read the original title. It's only a matter of time.
Btw. my mother tongue is Dutch.
On top of that right can mean (at least) to things.
There are more than two ways to write to, too ;)
please don't be on any of my projects.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Like the script language in excel that happened to be localized (and as result is nog portable)
> An unfounded, unbased assertion is not an argument. HTH!
You have obviously never been in a bar.
I'm always rolling my eyes when I see someone claim that all X people should do Y. What's the universal consequence of not doing Y? If some Japanese game programmer produces the next great iPhone game and comments all his code in Japanese and doesn't know a lick of English, - what, do we deride him or something? This has nothing more to do with programming than any other skill or field, so I find the whole premise silly.
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.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I think it is all up to interpretation, forgive the horrendous pun, it was the first thing that came to mind. I have a working knowledge of English (I have been speaking it twenty-eight years), and at one point had a working knowledge of Spanish (no one around here speaks Castillian Spanish so sadly I have lost a significant amount). From a linguistic standpoint, I found that Spanish was a more concise language when I first studied it because of the simple fact that I was learning what small children would learn in Spain. As one grows, hopefully their command of the language grows. This results in being able to say the same thing in different ways. A native speaker of any language will likely find a new language to be more concise, until they have spent a significant amount of time learning the various idioms to express things differently. Idioms and other figures of speech should not appear in development comments; the comment should be as concise as possible, while still explaining what the code is for.
I cut it three times, and it's still too short.
I've been told that the best way to get the French to speak English is to speak French... badly.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Speaking as a non-Finnish speaking immigrant to Finland, I can attest that about 99.9% of young finns DO speak english - and moreover, even many of the old generation finns (80+) do speak a good to excellent english. The latter was the most surpriseing/shocking discovery about finns and the english language, I had.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I again recommend Rhabarberbarbara as a funny example of this. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The Irish and English. A funny relationship. We (Irish) hate our own language (pretty much)but love the way we use English. We love our own language when we are drunk and wish we had better command of it, but that's always short lived. May Peig Sayers be damned I tells ya!
[My bold] Sure it is, but what takes time when learning a language (I got 2 1/2 to an acceptable level under my belt) is not the basic vocabulary; you learn that fast enough to learn that in school. For instance, the word "vocabulary" itself is not basic vocabulary, and, say, a Japanese would have to learn the spelling and pronunciation of a fairly long word. A French simply takes "vocabulaire", applies a standard -aire -> -ary transformation, et voila, here is English. This helps enormously in memorisation (because there is little to actually memorise) and ability to improvise. Considering how vast the English vocabulary is, this advantage is much more important than having a similar grammar, which can anyway be learnt in a matter of a few months.
There is an enormous amount of Romance words in English, more so than e.g. in German (can't really say anything about Dutch, which others mentioned); note that I speak Italian as a mother language, fluent Norwegian and a German still subject to improvement, so I do have some hands-on comparative experience on this.
French or French-related words used in this post: Sure, language, acceptable, level, basic, vocabulary, school, instance, Japanese (well at least the -ese suffix), suffix, pronunciation, simply, applies, standard, transformation, enormously, memorisation, because (the "cause" part), part, actually, memorise, ability, improvise, Considering, vast, advantage, important, similar, grammar, matter, amount, Romance, German (yup, that's actually the Latin word for it), really, others (maybe a cognate? anyway recognizable), cognate, recognizable, mentioned, note, Italian, fluent, subject, improvement, comparative, experience, post.
Whew! I swear I was not writing to maximise the amount of French words. Oh damn: maximise, amount, damn
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
There's no clear evidence that different human languages are radically different in expressiveness or utility for various tasks. With programming languages, there are good reasons to be fluent in several. Even with human languages, fluency in several can certainly help you communicate and think... But once you've done that, it's not obvious that switching between them gives you a huge win in expressiveness. You don't find yourself writing a book and think "well, Latin's a great choice for the introduction, but I really need to use French for the first chapter because it's closer to the problem space."
On the other hand, the cost of using multiple human languages for a project is MUCH higher than the cost of using several programming languages -- and the cost of learning a new human language is much, much, higher than the cost of learning a new programming language.
So, pragmatically, it becomes useful to pick a single standard language and use it as much as possible. It's like which side of the road you drive on; either answer can work fine, but life's easier if all the cars in a given area agree.
I think English won simply because everything's in it, and none of the other languages offer unambiguous improvements, let alone unambiguous improvements sufficient to justify the cost of trying to transition.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Technically English is from England, not from US.
And English has 40% of its roots in French.
That what I tell myself whenever I read about English being the dominant language == American imperialism.
That said, using a programming language in English and using variable names and comments in another language helps a lot the casual reader understand what is part of the language and what is part of the program.
Signed: a French coward in Paris who spends 10 hours a day talking and writing in English, but wishes French was the dominant language ;)
You're right... fairly readable.
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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
OK, go learn the programming language FjÃlnir [wikipedia.org], that will require the knowledge of Icelandic.
Only if it involves Bjork somehow.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Finnish has many much closer relatives than Hungarian with which it has had no contact for many millennia. Although both are Uralic languages, one of them is from the Finnic and the other from the Ugric branch. As for the relatives, there is the second biggest Finnic language Estonian, then there's Sami and depending on where you draw the line between a language and a dialect, in the geographical area there are at least 10 minor Finno-Ugric languages or dialects that are close to Finnish, often mutually intelligible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic-Finnic_languages for quick reference.
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.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
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.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Actually, Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than either is to French or Italian. Spanish and Portuguese grammar are also nearly identical; there's a big pile of small differences. The biggest difference by far is pronunciation.
Portuguese and Spanish speakers can conduct moderately simple conversations very easily. This is also true to some extent between them and Italian, but not nearly as much.
Also, the most effective method for teaching Spanish or Portuguese to a speaker of the other language is by contrast ("such-and-such in Portuguese corresponds to such-and-such in Spanish"); the students' knowledge of how sentences are formed in one language mostly transfers to the other, as does about 90% of the vocabulary after adjusting for pronunciation. I've seen Brazilian teachers who don't speak Spanish fluently teach Portuguese to Spanish speakers, in Portuguese.
Are you adequate?
It is as you have said.
I dont mean 'just reading and hearing', as you said in your last sentence, but constant/prolonged exposure (or much more than just inside laguage class anyway)
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!
I dead body the house... Right
With English letters: Hoovah Suomi!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Knowing a few German words (very few) and using Ubiquity translate command, I'd have to agree that Dutch is closer than French, but we can still blame the French for the awful spelling and vowel sounds, right?
Yes, I am obsessed with ellipses.
I'd rather prefer programming in english than my native language (spanish), because it's easier to write any source code (and much more shorter).
Spanish language is much better than english at semantics, but more complicated in technology world. You can almost create any new meaning with one or two combined words, that's why almost everybody can speak a little, because it's really easy to understand.
Why would developers might want to speak/understand English?
1) For communication with fellow developers regarding assistance and collaboration
2) Write better code
Good programming style, which includes good comments(in whatever language that code will be maintained), and code that is easy to read and modify is just that - good code. Someone writing in C# in Russia or Korea, if they write good code, anyone in Brazil or US would be able to read their program and understand what its doing.
I've seen code that is unreadable and unmodifiable written by English speaking contractors right here, on the American soil. And their ability to grok English didn't impact the goodness of their code.
And whether you speak and understand English you can write either good or crappy code.
I know (with varying degree of competance) English, Chinese, French, and Japanese, and I have to say, English is the best language out of all of those for programming. If you have had the pleasure of using a system that is multiligual, much less programming on one, you will quickly see why.
The reason? English is the only language in the world that can be expressed and displayed with ASCII and entered in on a generic keyboard.
Call it a relic of the history of computers or whatever, but the fact stands: to a computer, it's either in English, or it's in unicode, and unicode is still a jumbled pile of mess.
Even for some European languages that can be expressed with extended ASCII, I would kill if I had to type alt-135 everytime I want to write garcon the proper way.
There is no standard method for recognizing unicode, even if the program that you're running _is_ unicode compliant. For webpages, you need to mess around with the encodings. Under windows, you need to set the default unicode encoding (and have to reboot). Even to this day, I can't figure out why ssh won't display the chinese for "insert mode" right, rather than pushing the whole screen up one line and messing up the whole display.
When you're doing the programming for an international audience, you're _supposed_ to use TCHAR, and _t("hello world") for strings. But of course, not everyone does this, and if you're getting weird errors from your program (yes, many programs have refused to run because of ascii/unicode) you gotta go through the whole program and figure out where someone forgot to use unicode strings/functions.
I always get freaked out from someone using another language to comment code or use as string literals. Who knows if the unicode will contain some encodings that if interpreted as ascii will give the program a really hard to find bug. (prolly not, but you never know if some text editor will give you some funky outputs)
I don't buy the idea that English is more concise, but at least it doesn't have multiple conjugations for verbs like in french/russian/spanish (for naming conventions for functions), or have same sounds for many different words like in chinese/japanese, or require dynamic display when typing in like korean/chinese/japanese. And if you're using a language for the naming convention, and to comment the code, it's good for everyone if you know that language well.
Excellent post, I agree almost 100% with all of it. Now, regarding this quote:
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.
Do you know why that is (or appears to be)? Because of Latin - the Romans came all the way up to old Albion and left a lasting legacy also in the English language. But when the Roman rule ended, the Germanic tribes invaded and then it was their turn to fuck around a bit :) and then some time after this, the language of the nobility was German, while the peasentry spoke some sort of Latin - this was a transitional period, after which the modern English language was molded to what has become Shakespeare's and now our common and beloved language. This language has as much Latin influences as it has German-Saxon ones; it's a true blend.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
What the French seem to dislike is the arrogant type of tourist, often English or American, who assumes that the French person should speak English. It works better if you learn a few basic words of French, then what tends to happen is you ask, they reply, you look blank, and they will say something like "maybe my English is better" and you go on in English. The point is of course, you are in France so maybe you should try to use their language first.
Actually you can get by pretty wellanywhere by learning 4 words in the local language...hello, goodbye, please, thank you. The rest you point at things, do little charades, and so on, while smiling a lot and keeping your cool. They are good at this sort of thing in Europe, they have had practice.
Ignore where the words come from. English is a total vocabulary whore, and has stolen words from all the Romantic languages, from Russian, from Scandinavian, from Swahili, from Hebrew, etc.
English follows other languages into dark alleys, clubs them over the head, and rifles their pockets for loose vocabulary.
But grammatically (regardless of the actual origin of its words), it's German.
Finnish is considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn, while english is considered one of the easiest.
Bwah? The only people I know who think English is an easy language to learn are native English speakers. Our structures are complex and arbitrary, many of the words have not just two, but several different meanings dependent upon context. The only real advantage English has over some other languages is that we don't have masculine and feminine objects, but sadly that's not enough to save it from being a hideous language.
However, Pig Latin seems to come very easily to many English speakers.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
... notes that 'Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise).
There is an additional reason to use English besides those already mentioned. My native tongue, which is Swedish, contain non-ASCII letters that sometimes cause problems with software applications that are not adapted to handle non-ASCII character sets.
This isn't so much a problem anymore with the common support for Unicode, but in the past, dealing with non-ASCII characters meant dealing with multiple character encoding systems, which is just a big hassle.
One of the more incomprehensible English texts I've seen believed this. They appeared to have translated their French sentences word-for-word into English (*). The result was gibberish...
David Gay
*: I assumed they had done this because their text did make sense when translated word-for-word into French...
If you want to work behind-the-scenes on SAP, you'd better know German.
I can't tell you how much translation work I've done for folks getting into the deeper parts of their engine, who suddenly can't figure out what any of the comments or variable names mean.
Language is language is language, whether computer or human. Learn to use one well, and the others become clearer while you come to a greater appreciation of a quality statement.
You would be better off recognizing that your team and technology all need to be on the same page than saying that everyone should simply accommodate you.
Having gone travelling recently, many English dialects are mutually incomprehensible. Some within a 20 mile radius.
Um, I call B.S. *Throws BS Flag*
________________________________ ___ _________ __ _______ _ ____ __ _ __ Darknight / _ \___ ____
Guessing what's going on in a foreign-language film and knowing a few stock phrases in another language do not count as "knowing a second language."
If I recall correctly from my own childhood experience, I could not speak English at age 6, despite my father and his family being completely bilingual (they grew up in NYC), watching Sesame Street on TV, having straight A's in English, having children's books in English and reading them with the help of my mother. I knew a bunch of words, sure, but when I was taken on a trip to Disney World at age 6, I know for sure that I could not speak English beyond uttering individual words. Like, when I was in that ride that had these two-seat airplanes attached by a pole to a thing in the middle that made them go around, and the kid in the front seat gets a lever that controls whether the airplane goes up or down, and the dumb American kid who got to sit in that seat just kept the airplane in the highest position all the time, do you think I managed to convey to the kid, in English, my desire that he adopt a more vertically varied course of motion? No, all I could say was "Down!" (after telling him what I really wanted, in Spanish, gotten the kid to look at me funny, and realized that, duh, yeah, I gotta tell him in English, but oops, how do you do that?).
When did I actually manage to speak English decently? When an American kid moved into my street, who couldn't speak Spanish, like two years later, and I started playing with him regularly. I can't remember for the life of me how I managed at first, but by the end I could definitely talk.
So yeah, anecdote is a game that two can play.
Are you adequate?
You are right about English and Finnish, but you're wrong about English and French. Most words in English are still Germanic. (For example, in those two sentences, the only non-Germanic word is "Germanic" itself.)
The language spoken today that is closest to English is Frisian, a dialect of Dutch.
Well... he has a point.
If you are bilingual in your doings and talkings as a human, youve come some way ahead in the ways of language and what differs from one to another.
In this case, it seems obvious that bilingual people that are interested in hacking wwould probably be at an advantage to one that only knows one language.
NO SIG
then how on earth can you possibly say that "the closest language to English is French" if they a) come from different language families [one is romanic, the other is germanic]
Actually, English is more of a hybrid, very nearly a creole language, and one of its major influences is Norman-French, which is presumably why GPP said what he did. However, while it could be considered a "Romano-Germanic" tongue, its core is still very Germanic, so I think you're probably more right than he is.
Only a small fraction of the developers in the US understand English, let alone the world.
You make a lot of good points, and indeed I may have been a bit loose on the use of the "close" word. What I was pointing at was the amount of study necessary to attain a good level of English, and I am positive French is the language (among the larger ones at least) from which this amount is minimal.
Grammar is relatively fast: most irregular English verbs are laughable, with all their irregular forms neatly aligned on a line, and a complete list filling a few pages; there are entire manuals for Romance languages. I don't mean it demeaningly, simplicity is great!
I distinctly remember making only once the mistake of adding a number concord on an adjective, when I was 13: it was "the yellows cars", third or fourth English lesson. I needed that explained once, and off I went. Remembering to put the adjectives always first took some time, since I had to rearrange some thinking patterns, or so I think. But what really took decades has been building up a large vocabulary. That's the advantage French (and, to a minor degree, other Romance-language) speakers have.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
(trying to sweep in before the trolls show up)
I think you're on to something here. I've a French (Quebec) native, but my life is 99% English. The only time I ever speak french is when I'm having a few (dozen) beers with the good old boys, or when a random French client turns up.
I'll be honest, I hate French for computing. It is too verbose, and those accents are a pain in the ass, not just to type but to code for. English is much much simpler. It's also a shit language, in that it fails to properly communicate subtle nuances, and most of its words are borrowed/bastardized from foreign languages anyway. It's a mess, and people keep adding more garbage to it every day.
I have to agree with you that knowing more than just English is a great way to expand the mind. It probably does not matter which other language you learn/know, it is the effort of comparing and translating the two languages that leads to new mental processes.
Different languages, be they human or computer, follow different patterns. Most of the time, those patterns can be cross-pollinated. I've deciphered English words I had never seen, by drawing parallels with my knowledge of French etymology (Latin, Greek, German roots). In a similar way, I've applied my C++ experience to PHP code, employing solutions the average PHP drone would not likely consider (insults aside).
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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...
Recently, I've seen some C# code written by Japanese which not only has Japanese comments, but also strings and even constants that use Japanese multibyte characters. It's really ridiculous because it compounds the problem, it's not just a language problem anymore, it's also an encoding problem. I think the latter is actually harder to deal with.
I feel I was taught/programmed to not be able to acquire any other language but English. My nieces and nephews have a much better time with second languages as their parents are more open to it and they started at a young age.
I will agree that English is the predominant technical language for a couple of reasons. We're the driving force behind most technologies and are the biggest consumer and English is very good at coding complex concepts in a smaller space.
Though some of the jargon may as well be considered another language like the language of medicine.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
English is a high context language that is incredibly difficult to speak WELL and there is always a difficulty with the fact that so many english sounds are similar. Enunciate. Because of the reliance on context, even broken or misspoken english can be meaningful, but not when the accent is too heavy to discern the root object(s) of a statement.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Either my german fails or that makes no sense.
My car never gave me anything :(
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You took a fairy from Northern Ireland? I suppose Orangemen are not the only fruits.
No, not really. If you think French and English are "incredibly different", you make me thing you do not know that many languages; there are even weirder ways to abuse the Latin alphabet. Their systems are not that far apart, being ludicrously close for the words that are in common, which are quite a lot.
I have diacritics in my language without resorting to French, thanks. So do most languages, including yours to a reduced extent, so don't be "naïve".
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
I'm Spanish and I teach Linux and PHP at an IT formation center. In each course we deliver to the students one book, which they can choose if they prefer it in English or Spanish (two different books, not the same book translated from English to Spanish). Like 70% choose the Spanish book because they are unable to understand English (even technical English).
And when they realize that LPI or Zend exams are in English they are like... "oh shit, are you trying to fool us?" It is a fucking 'choose the right answer' exam! No more than 50 words per question!
I wouldn't hire someone that is so null at English.
When I was in St. Petersburg I had better luck finding older people who spoke French or German as those languages had had more emphasis on them 40 years ago when English really wasn't taught at all.
If it's US shows you haven't learnt English, you've learnt American. Vastly different dialects...
American branched at Middle-English rather than Modern-English, which causes some major issues with people attempting to learn English but being taught by an American.
Here in Northern California, the English-language TV shows usually have optional subtitles in English, and the Spanish-language TV shows usually don't have them, or if they do they're in Spanish. (It's frustrating that most of them aren't subtitled - that'd make it much easier to follow.) The one Chinese-language channel I get has Chinese subtitles; I think most of the audio is Mandarin as opposed to Cantonese or occasionally other dialects, but I'm not sure.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What makes you an ugly American is to suggest that it should be required. Most of us non anglo resent that kind of crap.
I always comment in english, not because it is required but because I can only read English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Esperanto and Spanish and I do realize that most people only understand one or two languages and those languages may not be languages that I can undertand. I can reach a greater audience by using a language known by more people.
If there was a written requirement I would comment in anything but English. The English language is the de facto international language due to the fact that America runs the world economy and the language of money is English.
I hate the Brits and would rather not have to use English but the facts of life are that English is the international language and the language of most Americans.
One thing I would agree with is that British only words should be forbidden and if you use English that you should stick to US English.
I am a French speaking American by the way.
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.
they're both quite clearly mere claims
re. the statement,
being bilingual or a polyglot is beneficial to thinking and memory skills
In fact, studies have been shown which do tend to suggest this; the Wikipedia article cites a few of them. I once took a psychology course from a professor who'd done some other research on the subject, with French Canadians IIRC.
As for these studies: You do need to take them with the "correlation-is-not-causation" grain of salt, but, really, you never have a guarantee that you've isolated all the relevant variables in any experiment, so it's more a question of degree than anything.
Finno-ugric languages are thought to have been spoken during the last ice age in the Ukrainian LGM (Last Glacial Maximum) Refuge. At that time there were only two major refugia in Europe - Franco-Cantabrean in Iberia, besides Ukraine. There were probably other settlements around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The kick is that those two mayor refugia probably did not use indo-european languages - these only appeared after the Great Deluge into the Blac Sea some 7500 years ago. Indo-european dialects spread first by diffusion and later on simply by a language switch. A vast majority of genes among native europeans have survived the last ice age in Europe and thus are not of "indo-european" origin.
Finnish and Hungarian and Estonian (and other finno-ugric and Saami and Basque languages) are the remaining dialects of ice-age europeans. So in essence, a large majority of native europeans should have no trouble learning those languages since their ancestors spoke similar dialects. And also the opposite is true - since many indo-european languages in Europe came to being through language-switch (as a pidgin), those still speaking the old ice-age dialects should have little trouble learning those newer pidgin languages since their relatives have switched over alright. And indeed, we have no trouble learning foreign languages, but we won't abandon our ice-age dialect and vocabulary (ice being one such word from finno-ugric / ice-age european into indo-european languages) :P
As to programming, one can always choose a language that is less dependant on english - such as APL, J, perhaps Python, etc.
I use J and when I comment for myself I use my native language, when I comment for others I use english.
Linus's mother tongue is Swedish. He speaks some Finnish too but not as much as English.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
When I was in the States, somebody from the appalachian mountains(tennesse maybe?) vs someone that sounded like "Fargo".
I could just tell they were both screaming "Why can't you foreigners speak English" while gesturing at the parking spot they both tried to fill after I backed out.
Or Newfies and anywhere else.
When in doubt, check Wikipedia: Cognitive Advantages to Bilingualism. I also wrote a little more here.
Really? You learned how to read English by watching TV and from that were able to read computer manuals, and learn even more English? I'm afraid I have to call reverse-bullshit.
English is one of the easiest? Since when? Almost all verbs in English are irregular, and the vagaries of grammar as well as the sheer magnitude of vocabulary required to read anything written by someone with more than an 8th grade education... I'll have to disagree with your disagreement. Finnish is harder to learn than English, but the "easiest" languages to learn are more like French and Spanish, with very regular rules and limited vocabulary.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
What the hell are you talking about? Standard American is completely comprehended by native speakers of English. Actually, I would say it's understood more often than some of the dialects from the UK.
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 =)
Since Linus is a "finlandssvensk" (a minority with swedish as it's first language) he should at least know 3 languages from young: finish, swedish and english.
It is. Or at least as proven as such things ever are.
IIRC, children brought up in a bilingual household (such as a migrant family) initially develop slower, but end up on average performing better across the board, grades wise.
I don't have the source for that though (it was some years back I studied language), so don't quote me on it.
I remember all throughout Europe that it was always helpful to try speaking a few words of the peoples' native language first...even if it's only enough to demonstrate that you don't know what you're doing. At that point, most people that speak English will switch to that language, and even people that don't will try to help you anyhow.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
There's understanding English and understanding English.
I was asked to try out an Indian outsourcing firm at one point. They gave me HTML along the lines of:
<ul>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
</ul>
I tried explaining, "We really prefer classes to be descriptive of purpose rather than descriptive of the style. That way, we can change the styling for a given class of data later and still have the class names make sense. So please use descriptive of purpose classes not descriptive of style ones."
I got back:
<ul>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
</ul>
Once I stopped laughing, I cried for a bit.
Aw jeez, I wish I had mod points!
English is actually quite a difficult language to learn. English grammar is quite complex, and the lexicon is a hodge-podge of anything and everything. It may certainly be simple for someone whose native language is something like Spanish or German, but for someone who is Chinese? The differences between those two languages are staggering. And frankly, if I knew neither and had to learn the easier of the two, I'd gamble on Chinese. With 3000-5000 words in 99.9% of written works, and most of them combinations of simpler words, it makes English look strange and bloated. Not to mention that it's grammar is basically subject-verb-object, almost non-existent.
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.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
Very interesting reading - English is more of a "blunt" language (less differentiation between titles/power distance between the speakers) so it's easier to communicate "Hey idiot, we're going to run out of fuel" to your commanding officer.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I would argue that someone who is bilingual/trilingual in the languages you've mentioned would not even be working as a programmer. After all women have better language skills than men (many brain injury studies seem to have proven that), but I would assert that many of them do not ever go into programming because they have other interests and other things they were very good at while growing up.
...correctly.
If you don't get the vowel sounds right a phrase can take on a different meaning. This what I'm lead to believe anyway.
From a programing point of view, I'd hate to code on a laptop with a French keyboard (having to use shift to get numbers, commas, full stop etc), I guess you'd get used to it though...
And American is the better form of the two, as it's much closer to Shakespearean Middle English. It's the Brits who had to mangle the language further. When the Americans moved to the New World, they left their language alone for the most part.
American also has simpler and better spellings for many words, such as "draft" ("draught" in UK English; WTF is with all those extra letters?).
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.
Sure - never would an American store set up one of these signs.
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.
Every time I see some label or message printed in both English and Spanish, the Spanish version is usually at least 50% longer than the English version. English certainly isn't the most efficient or economical language (Latin is probably a lot better, out of the indo-european languages), but it's much better than Spanish.
Also, the number of words isn't that important, it's how long the entire sentence/paragraph is, especially how many syllables there are. It seems like anything in Spanish requires 3 times as many syllables as the equivalent thought in English.
note: the Romanian language might have some Slavonic influences, but it's still a Latin language.
$god = null;
if($god) echo 'I believe!';
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".
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.
...people just keep translating it.
God.
My case is almost the same, only I switched from manuals to science fiction novels at some point. English lessons at school consisted mostly of handheld console games for me.
In addition to that, I learned German (to the greatest part; of course I had some interaction as well) from TV at age 5, when I moved to Germany. When school started (a year later) I could read, write and speak better German than most of my native classmates.
Back on topic, I agree with the notion that at least developers should all have a functional English at their disposal, it makes life easier. Also, there isn't nearly as much (useful) content for developers to be found on German or Russian websites, as far as I've discovered so far. Well, in my opinion that also applies to most other topics as well, but that's a different story.
There is no sig.
I believe that most of those languages didn't evolve from Latin anyway, as there were actually two latins in use in Ancient Rome: "real" latin (as spoken by the Catholic Church until recently), used by the patrician class, and what people are referring to when they usually say "latin", and "vulgar latin" which the commoners used. The vulgar one is the one which evolved into Italian et al.
I've never actually seen one of these signs in a store. But to be fair, any American with the sentiments on those signs probably would try to be helpful to anyone in his store who speaks Chinese, Hindi, German, Russian, etc. and is trying to communicate (badly) in English. They're really only annoyed at people who speak Spanish, and seem to think that everyone else should as well.
I'd have to disagree with you on that, because I've learned Italian, English, German and Hungarian from watching TV, shows/cartoons, well before being 10 years..
Nowadays can't have a dialogue in Italian (and German) because I haven't spoken it for years... but I can still understand them.
$god = null;
if($god) echo 'I believe!';
And of course the 'turn left' rule makes a lot more sense when you drive on the left.
As far as I know, HTML & CSS only renders if you use US English.
For example:
<span style="color: blue">works</span>
<span style="colour: blue">this will not</span>
You can also only use HTML tags in US English, such as <title> etc.
If you go to Russia you will hardly find a doctor or a nurse who speaks English. Also I always thought the standard medical language was Latin.
"right" and "write" sounding the same doesn't make the language hard to learn. If you have problems with that, then you probably have a severe learning disability.
It seems to me that English is an easy language to learn the basics of, and become mildly conversant in, but it's difficult to become extremely fluent in it because it borrows from so many other languages and there's so much to remember.
It's sort of like playing guitar. Any idiot can easily learn to play a few chords on a guitar and play simple songs seemingly well, but very few people can become true masters of the instrument like Joe Satriani.
If you look for a language similar to finnish, try hungarian
Estonian is even closer - and the nations are quite close geographically too. A lot of the words are very similar, although I think Estonian sounds much prettier! :-)
Oh, and I concur that Finnish (and the other languages in the Finno-Ugric language group) are very different grammatically from English -- and most other European languages.
In Estonian nouns can take 14 forms (or 28 including plurals). So where in English you might say "on the table", in Estonian you would change the ending of the noun for 'table', "laud", (but the genetive form to which endings are added is "laua") to "laual". "off the table" would be "laualt". Try doing that in real-time as you are speaking!
I think of it as the 'polish notation' for grammar. Disclaimer: I am not a native Estonian (or Finnish) speaker, I am only trying to learn this crazy stuff!
...Shakespearean Middle English.
Unfortunately, both you and the parent don't seem to have much knowledge of history of the English language.
Middle English is the English of Chaucer.
Shakespeare is considered Early Modern English.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
I could code stuff up long before I could even understand the most basic of English sentences. You don't have to have a clue what the various keywords actually mean to be able to use them. After all, some keywords don't even do what you'd expect from their litteral meaning. 'Print' doesn't send anything to the printer, 'interface' isn't used for UI design, 'for' is only correct for mathematicians, 'function's often aren't strictly speaking functions, 'void' has nothing to do with large empty spaces (it's the smallest thing possible - 0 bytes), there usually go two 'char's in a character, a 'word' is actually half of a proper word, which is called a 'dword', 'continue' skips to the next iteration, 'form's are actually windows, while 'hwnd's (window handles) can be buttons and stuff, 'a'nchors are what normal people call links or shortcuts, while 'link' is conceptually closer to inclusion, and so on and so forth. /. except in Cantonese (or possibly Mandarin). And you will happily and sensibly ignore that call, as will I. Possibly because you will not read it and be blissfully unaware of its existence. But you're asking this same thing of others yourself and that makes you a hypocrite and me an honest person. So if you ever get to work with a system commented in Latin, please think of me, even if just for a moment.
In a few years I think the same question will be asked on a Chinese website much like
I think you meant Frisian not Finnish. English is a Germanic language whose most direct influence was Frisian, since then it's absorbed a lot of other influences. Finnish has completely different origins further back in history.
For a good read about the history of English try to find "The Adventure of English" by Melvyn Bragg (ISBN 0-340-82991-5). It's a surprising interesting and informative book. It's also been turned into a television series for those who are reading challenged (the book is more in depth). It also covers the many dialects of English now in use (including American, Australian, Singlish and others).
Really? I am a tri-lingual, started learning three different languages (Urdu, Sindhi and English: reading, writing and speaking) from the age six and now I am 22 and do not find my memory to be performing any better than anybody else I know and guess what it is often worse!
Having been to Paris, I still don't get where that comes from. They're no different from and stateside city. Then again, I do speak French...
By the 13th century approximately 10,000 French words had come into English. About three-quarters of these French loans are still in the language today. These new words duplicated words that existed in Old English from Anglo-Saxon times. Sometimes one word would supplant the other or both would co-exist, but develop slightly different meanings. For example, doom (OE) and judgment (F), hearty (OE) and cordial (F), and house (OE) and mansion (F)
I really don't understand. Only a small subset of English is used in programming languages. If, else, for, while... All of these can be automatically translated into most modern languages and back into English.
Comments... Well, that's another story, as comments are part of documentation. And in case of exporting your product to other countries you'll have to translate the documentation anyway.
So you're saying German is like Perl? Hmm.
It works better if you learn a few basic words of French
That worked outside the tourist season, when indeed I found the Parisians friendly and helpful. Once the tourists hit the only effect was that they mocked my bad French.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
The true problem that I have encountered is people who are not fluent enough in English attempting to name variables and write comments in English.
You work in France, so do your colleagues. Your written English is abysmal. Why on earth do you think that it's a good idea to code and comment in english?!
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?
That's not true. Americans can be just as rude as anyone else.
I was in America 2 years ago. I speak perfect English, it's my primary language but i still have to slow down for Americans to understand me. Even when i was trying my hardest to speak as clearly as possible it was quite common to get comments like "How am i supposed to understand what you are saying? Learn English!" followed by a refusal of service.
Americans don't seem to have any patience for those of use with non-American accents.
Sounds like German to me!
OK well i made a typo which doesn't help my point :P
*us not use
Go to France and tell me if you recognize french in everyday conversation.
It is bastardized with english (on va faire du shopping) and by arab (id say about 1 out of 3 sentences in everyday conversations have arab words).
In cities like Marseille, french is the second most spoken language after arab.
Protection of one's language and culture and heritage is not a crime. There are so few nations who have both their own languages (we can see the swath that the spanish cut in their conquests as well as the english and french empires by how many countries speak their language) that it might be a concept foreign to someone who lives in a country that was british up until 200 years ago.
Unfortunately, the french will fail at this and the sins of their centuries of occupation and effing with people's lives will come back and kiss them right in the ass as their former colonists become a bigger and bigger part of their population. With any justice, England will be right behind.
Ah heck, mexicans will soon be able to do the same in the southern US states as well so better habla espanol too senor.
I am on the French end of a franco-finnish relationship and did my graduate and post graduate studies in the UK so I can relate to a lots of comments here.
Using English for development just makes sense.
1 Learning is done in English because documentation usually exists first, and therefore faster, in it.
2 Naming and commenting is done in English so that more people can understand.
3 Documentation is then made in English and back to 1
Localization is also easier with English as pivot.
French are notoriously famous for being bad at English, and to be honest it is not all cliche, I have been in several job interview where the mere fact of speaking some English could land you the job because nobody else would speak it amongst their programmers. I also had to read, and worst listen, to colleagues "communicating" in English.
My current job involves managing an Indian team, so that can't be done in French
As a side note, having experimented both : it is impossible to live in France without French, it is possible to live in Finland without Finnish and Swedish.
By my experience [I work in a tech capacity within the English dept. of a small university, though I'd note my students are usually exceptional with their language skills] the vast majority of people who speak English as a first language barely have a functional grasp on its use.
Speaking both french and dutch I can tell that you are completely wrong. English grammar is a simpler form of French. Dutch looks like this : "I have a lot of stuff done" And most common words come from French, just look at your own sentence :
En -> Fr
lot -> lot
close -> clos
provides -> providence
vocabulary -> vocabulaire
grammar -> grammaire
none -> non
common -> commun.
The only problem is that the meaning of the words have completely changed so you can't rely on the similarities.
A major differentiator between European countries where English is widely fluently spoken as a second language (Scandanavia, Netherlands...) and countries where English levels are lower (France, Italy, Spain) is whether they dub or subtitle foreign TV content.
The point is that the interaction was crucial. The TV, if it helped at all, could not have done so without the interaction.
Are you adequate?
That's a bit odd. In my time in Paris, about a week also, I'd say it was 50/50. One thing I did notice was that an attempt to speak in French (rudimentary though mine may be - 4 years of high school french 15 years ago) was met with surprised pleasure and a much increased willingness to help, either via French, English, or gesturing and pidgin.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
I'll try to be more precise about this answer. You claim that you learned German from watching TV in Germany, at age 5. You admit that you had interaction in German, but you attribute most of your learning to watching TV.
My answer to this is that it fails to refute the hypothesis that watching TV is sufficient for learning a language at age 5. This is because of the following two possibilities:
I'd stress (1), frankly; I'm inclined to think you're underestimating the amount of German-language face-to-face interaction you were involved in at age 5.
Are you adequate?
Finnish is considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn
You should try Tamil - each alphabet can take 5 different meanings - for example 'm' is either m or n or o or p or q, depending on what follows it or comes before it. This makes it especially difficult for proper nouns, but a native speaker has no problem identifying what words/names should typically be.
But a hell of a language to learn.
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.
Don't believe everything you read.
However, regular TV shows and movies are not dubbed unlike in some other European countries and instead use subtitles, which is a pretty good way to learn English.
Personally I learned English from video games, because they didn't translate those back in the day. The Microprose manuals were particularly useful for developing English skills.
BTW, Linus is tri-lingual (at the very least)...Finnish, Swedish and English.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
In my experiences visiting Paris, I've found that struggling with a few words of French usually gets a smile and the transaction proceeds smoothly in English, while tourists using the "increase the volume" method of making themselves understood in English get treated very coldly - I've seen an American couple sold overpriced train tickets to Versailles on a train that doesn't leave for an hour and a half, while I came up behind them and was sold tickets at a third of the price on a train leaving in 5 minutes - I don't know if they ended up in Versailles or halfway to Lyon, but they definitely didn't get tickets on the next train to Versailles like they asked for. In the rest of France you need fewer words of French, unless you strike someone who genuinely doesn't speak English.
> In other words the French are rude.
Or maybe you shouldn't, you know, conflate Parisians with the rest of them? Paris is a hellhole (no shit, Sherlock) but by gauging the whole country after it alone, you demean the efforts of every Frenchman and woman out there that are genuinely interested in you and curious about what your country is like, and try their best to communicate with you based on their charmingly awkward English. Seriously, don't reward assholes by making them feel like they're the center of their little country. Every one of us who sometimes have to go on business trips to Paris will be grateful, thanks.
A good coder should write clean code that is easy to understand.
But when the variable's names are written with meanings you can't understand, and comments (or worse, none) in another language, you might as well be reading assembly.
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
...except that how many languages a child learns has next to nothing to do with cognitive and memory skills, but everything to do with their social situation. If your kids talk with their immediate family in one language, speak a second one with other neighborhood kids, and take their classes in school a third language that's widely used in your country, they're going to end up speaking three languages. This is absolutely ordinary in African or Indian cities, for example; home language, city lingua franca, and colonial language.
Are you adequate?
Where do you get the notion that English is an easy language to learn?
Anybody that has studied any other of the major languages in the world can make that observation. Native speakers of English often don't speak other languages and if they don't, they (1) are not qualified to compare and (2) believe it's more complex than it is since they have learnt it natively instead of studying it and learning the grammar rules. Arguably, native-speakers of other languages too often make the latter assumption about their native language.
Now, your example of right and write is absolutely ridiculous. If I think of the languages that I speak (Swedish, Finnish, English, German, French) I can easily come up with multiple similar examples in every one of them except Finnish, which is pronounced precisely as it's written (the only easy thing about it) but then too plenty of words with multiple meanings.
If one were to make a sane comparison of how difficult a language is to learn, one would look at grammar and then you'd realize how trivial English is compared to other European languages. First of all, English doesn't have grammatical gender so nouns are much easier to learn - in addition, apart from a few rare exceptions, plural forms are regular (unlike German with its three genders and multiple plurals). And the lack of grammatical gender also makes adjectives trivial to use - English doesn't even differ in plural.
Verbs are also much easier than in German or French. German has a system which is quite logical but much more complicated than English and then there are of course a number of verbs that have exceptions and those are more complicated than exceptions in English since such exceptions aren't even possible in English. And French verbs... well, this post would get too long if I even began to explain the basics so just ask anybody that has studied it how much they've been banging their head against the wall due to verbs. It has so many moods and tenses that don't exist in English.
Then there are the grammatical cases and whilst other European languages cause students a lot of headache, it's enough to learn them for personal pronouns in English and then you're done with it.
The idea that German words are remarkably long is mostly a misconception. In German, noun compounds are written together, with no spaces separating the parts, while in English, the parts of the compound are separated with spaces. This is a superficial, orthographical difference, and not a real grammatical one. English constructions like "senior systems integration engineer" exactly correspond to those long German words.
Are you adequate?
Jim Barrett: Why don't I like you?
Steven Spurrier: Because you think I'm an ass. And I'm not really. It's just that I'm British and you're not.
I should tell you about all the times I've gone to an American restaurant or diner in the south or midwest, and been snubbed by the staff because of speaking Spanish at the table--even when all of us spoke English reasonably well.
Lesson for me? Stick to the coasts and the big cities, and fly over all those other places.
Are you adequate?
It seems to me that English is an easy language to learn the basics of, and become mildly conversant in, but it's difficult to become extremely fluent in it because it borrows from so many other languages and there's so much to remember.
Actually, the fact that English borrows from so many other languages makes it much easier. Anybody that speaks an Indo-European language will find something that English has in common with their native language, which makes it easier to learn. And no matter what foreign language you study, it's difficult to become "extremely fluent" but there too I would argue that English is easier than most since the basics are so trivial that you quickly get to focus on the harder aspects and exceptions - it takes more time to reach that stage when you study e.g. German or French (i've studied those and English as foreign languages).
> Almost all verbs in English are irregular
They're really not, though. There are thousands of regular verbs in English, and only around 300 irregular ones--and even some of those are slowly regularizing. For instance, the past tense of "help" was "holp" around 400 years ago.
Is this proven at all?
Yes. I don't have a list of references for you, but there has been tons and tons and tons of research on this in the field of psycholinguistics/cognitive science. That's why I can't give you a single reference. Check out EBSCO or something.
It would seem obvious to me that those with better cognitive and memory skills are more likely as a result to be bilingual
That's like saying "It would seem obvious to me that those with stronger muscles would be weightlifters." Yeah, those with innate abilities might be more drawn to some activities (lifting weights or learning new languages), but there's no denying that some activities--most, in fact--improve your abilities, yes?
Furthermore, learning a second language (as in, actually being able to use it to some degree) is considered normal in most of the world. We in the Anglophone world are just lazy.
Full disclosure: IAAAL (I am an applied linguist--second language acquisition and assessment).
Simplified Chinese is a very expressive written language, and I've known people who are quite proficient at typing it. The assertion is that Chinese is not an efficient language for writing documentation (comments). I don't get the impression that this assertion is made from the point of view of a native Chinese speaker who already routinely uses computers that are setup for the language.
This becomes even more of an issue when your comments aren't just for yourself or a small team of programmers. What if your comments are documentation that is of interest to managers, sales people, and business stakeholders all of whom speak Chinese?
I have an interest in this topic that I'm not at liberty to talk about specifically. It concerns the interface between a US and a Chinese manufacturing company, associated with my day job.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Imagine a program with all single character variables. Now imagine that there are 10,000 variables allowed in a single scope and several differ by only one stroke.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Bwah? The only people I know who think English is an easy language to learn are native English speakers.
Judging from other posters, the only people who think English isn't easy, are native-speakers.
Our structures are complex and arbitrary, many of the words have not just two, but several different meanings dependent upon context.
Do you seriously think that's something unique to English?
The only real advantage English has over some other languages is that we don't have masculine and feminine objects, but sadly that's not enough to save it from being a hideous language.
Another very real and much bigger advantage is how trivial verb conjugation is - not to mention the fact that English has fewer moods and tenses than many other languages. So not only are regular verbs easier, exceptions too.
Finnish does not have articles
And in Soviet Russia, articles don't have YOU. (Seriously, Russian has no articles. Nor does my post.)
has 15 or 16 cases depending on dialect
I seem to remember reading that linguists dispute whether some Finnish cases are cases or postpositions.
and sports oddities
What kind of sports oddities?
such as lacking a verb for "to have".
Nor do Welsh, Hebrew, and Russian, which use circumlocutions: "Y has X" becomes "X is with Y" or "X is to Y" or the like.
My favorite one is Universalschraubenschlüssel.
... and not just *understand*, but speak and write fluently. None of that Ingrish shit, either. And I tend to ignore comments on forums that were obviously by some twit from China or India... "how i write touch for iphone? can you make program that detect shake for me?" And that's after those same shitheads steal the freelance jobs that fluent, knowledgeable programmers are trying to get - they promise the work for $15/hr, but they don't have a clue! If you can't form a coherent sentence in English, but then have the balls to step on my toes like that, I reserve the right to bash your fucking head in with a hammer.
Great, in this discussion about languages, it seems we can't even get any kind of agreement on whether English is difficult to learn or not. You, a non-native English speaker, say it's easy (not just at the beginning, but at advanced stages too), and then other people on here say it's hard. I'm a native speaker, so I can't really say obviously. As an ignorant American, I've only studied German as a foreign language, and that one is pretty easy for an English speaker to learn since English is a Germanic language. As an engineer, I liked it because it was so well-structured and regular (if you can read it, you can pronounce it); the only thing I didn't like was the masculine-feminine-neuter stuff. Whose dumb idea was that, anyway? It seems most indo-european languages have that, except English. I'm sorry, but the idea of inanimate objects having a gender just seems stupid to me.
Russian has no articles. Nor does my post. [...] or the like.
You fail it.
Finnish is considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn, while english is considered one of the easiest.
While Finnish is often (erroneously) considered one of the hardest languages to learn, this is the first time I have ever heard anyone claim that English is one of the easiest.
Clearly, as the inventors of the Interweb, Wikipedia, and Flash based pornography, we Americans have cemented our status as the universally acceptable common language providers... If you want bilingual, try learning Perl/Python in addition to your main language.
But English is still much, much easier than German - let alone French.
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.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
That's not tr--look! shiney!
"Ik houd van het huis" (assuming the missing k in "ik" is a typo) means "I *love* the house", which is similar, but not the same. If you want to stick with the meaning of the English sentence, you'd end up with something like "Ik vind het huis fijn" ("I find the house nice").
Come to think of it, I don't think Dutch has a verb that literally translates to "like" in that meaning. You can like a person like that ("ik mag haar" - "I like her"), but apart from persons you're out of luck. On the other hand, good luck finding a perfect match for the Dutch word "gezellig" in English.
Apart from that, there's also a ton of differences between Dutch and English grammar as well. The word order is different, there's genders, and so on. I'm assuming GP isn't Dutch. I know I am.
I believe there is more overlap between English and Frysian, which isn't Dutch at all. I'm not entirely sure, though. Dutch just loans a lot of words from different languages, mostly English, French and German.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
Just on the spelling thing, I'm noticing that newspapers are starting to refer to jails in this country rather than gaols. That bugs me.
Then *BSD should bug you too because *BSD has never had a gaol. FreeBSD has kernel jails, and NetBSD and OpenBSD used to have systrace-based jails until a month ago.
Het enige wat in het algemeen is het Latijnse alfabet, dat de Finnen gebruiken veel beter dan het Engels luidsprekers sinds hun taal is veel makkelijker te spellen
good dutch?
No, horrible Dutch. It reminds me of what some people (especially rappers that rap in Dutch) sometimes do: take an English sentence and just translate the words literally. Funny as hell. =]
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
I have been meaning to ask this for quite sometime. Is it just me or they are disproportionately a lot of people studying arabic linguistic compared to other language? Is it because the importance of understanding arabic in interpreting Quran? Is it because of the sudden growth of need for Arabic linguist after 9/11? Or else?
Frisian is not a dialect, it's a completely separate language.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
My favourite is himmelfahrt. Sounds like some form of disgusting flatulence, but actually means ascension to heaven.
Loose lips lose spit.
Haven't you ever heard of Bismark's remark that "English is the failed attempt to teach some Germans how to speak French"?
A real slashdotter doesn't need <sarcasm> </sarcasm> tags to recognize sarcasm.
- Hey Luiz, how much do you make a day?
- INTEGER OUT OF RANGE
- I see, wanna have some cofee?
- NEXT WITHOUT FOR
- Oh you are so sweet!
- OK
(...)
- Oh.
- RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB
- I told you to use a condom
- NONSENSE IN BASIC
I would argue that someone who is bilingual/trilingual in the languages you've mentioned would not even be working as a programmer. After all women have better language skills than men...
Note that I am a trilingual programmer but that doesn't mean I have good language skills. It just means I can write, speak and understand more than one language.
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.
Why would someone who speaks Russian and/or Mandarin and English code better than someone who only speaks English or Spanish for that matter? I think that it is more likely that someone who knows c++ and assembler intimately will code better than someone who knows only HTML (with all due respect to all those HTML gurus). Even if these HTML gurus know Russian and Mandarin.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Try German. Just about anything that requires a sentence in English can be said with one 14-syllable German word. :D
So what you're saying is that German is the perl of linguistics? How is this a selling point?
We were talking about comments, not code.
Regardless, even if we were talking about code, it's very strange you would suggest all variables would only be one character. Variables in English could also get confusing if they were limited to single syllables, but no one would do that. The example code given here uses two characters for all its variable names. This isn't surprising since most Chinese words are two or more characters.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Funny, a few weeks ago, my friend who didn't speak a single word of English, was on a trip in N.Y. City to visit our other friend Nikko (not the GTA IV guy). He was baffled when he could order Vodka in Russian in a liquor store in Manhattan. Thankfully, the cab driver was able to get him where he wanted and also helped with the liquor. He couldn't understand why American can't say two words in Russian.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
And by early next century, everyone will think it quaint that all the old programs were written in English, rather than Mandarin.
The languages of commerce and diplomacy follow the empires. And the sun is setting on two centuries of Anglophone dominance. Like Latin (and french and german) it will take a while before scholars stop needing it, but the Hep Cats will move away from it pretty damn quickly.
Watch for when your favorite code editor provides full support for Han Uncode!
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
A programmer who can't communicate in English in the business world is about as useful as a fighter jet pilot who can't land on an aircraft carrier.
It's neat when you're at home, but not very useful anywhere else.
And I was all set to computer translate my JavaDocs into dutch. Guess I'll have to learn the language. Phooey.
FYI - esse /ess-sÃfÂ/ n. a male [gangsta] of Hispanic ethnicity.
That little retarded looking cripple is a fucking racist redneck. He does know a lot about comments though, he's all comment and no code.
I speak no engliz. I super programor.
In-'f*kin'-credible!
I'm sorry, but the idea of inanimate objects having a gender just seems stupid to me.
I must say that I've never thought of grammatical gender as gender in the usual sense and find it interesting that you do since it says something about how you've studied German compared to how I've studied it. The thing is, I don't think of grammatical gender having any relation to gender and have later recognized why I don't - the other of my two native languages is Swedish, which also has grammatical gender but there the two alternatives are neither male nor female but neutral (and they work slightly differently). So I sort of just thought "ok, so in German it's quite similar but you've got three genders" and I never considered the grammatical gender to mean anything. My other native language, Finnish, is completely different and doesn't have any articles at all but I cannot really imagine what my reasoning would be if it was my only native language - I really don't know if I'd then make the connection you do. Interesting stuff, anyway.
Oh, and still to clarify my previous point: Since the basics of English are easy, you get to the advanced stages faster, which makes it easier to become fluent at it faster. The absence of grammatical gender is one good example of it.
Ps. You're not ignorant if you've studied at least one foreign language - IMHO everybody should do it just so that they get a better understanding of what a language really is. Since I'm bilingual I occasionally get the stupid question "so in what language do you think?" and I've never considered thinking to be something you do in a certain language. I formulate thoughts and convey them in whatever language the situation requires (and I speak) - I believe that making that distinction has been an advantage to me when studying foreign languages since then I don't first think of what I want to say and then try to translate it at the same time but instead try to express myself in a foreign language with the limitations that my skills (or lack thereof) impose. I remember quite clearly how I as a kid recognized that I don't think in a particular language. I was telling a Swedish-speaking friend about a trip with my Finnish-speaking cousin and only when I was about to say what funny thing my cousin had said in a certain situation, did I realize that I was telling the whole story in a different language than it had happened because it was impossible to translate what was funny.
Linguists call English a Germanic language and French a Romance language. Presumably for a reason.
The cake is a pie
I wonder how well lolcode works in other languages.
I think this discussion about Finnish started with Linus Torvalds. Just a small note to say that I think I remember that Linus Torvalds belongs to the small minority (5.5%) in Finland that speaks Swedish which is a Germanic language, a lot closer to English than Finnsih. I'm sure Linus also speaks Finnish perfectly, but since his first language is Swedish, it would have been easier for him to learn Engish than it is for other Finns, Chinese, Turkish or Arabs with mother tounges outside of the Indo-European (or even Germanic or Latin) language group.
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, the signature merely needs to match; there's no requirement that you need to be able to read it, and plenty of people whose valid signatures are completely illegible, even though they're "in English".
As for a standardized language for programmers: in the broadest international sense, I think that English should be the standard language simply because it already *is* for most dealings. It's nothing specific to programming. It doesn't mean that somebody can't have a very productive career in a multitude of non-English speaking countries.
Of course, if you're going to be working on an international level, you would benefit from learning a second language, period. That goes for native English speakers, too. It's not just helpful to be able to cross a communications barrier, it can also help you to appear more intelligent and friendly, which in turn make you more valuable.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Most people become bilingual from before they are in a position to choose what to learn.
Yes, the wealthier tier that travels a lot or sends their kids to private boarding schools more will have a higher chance of their child becoming better educated and multi-cultural than a child who is forced to attend the same local public school until college.
But no, better education does not equate to better cognitive and memory skills, but rather implies a broader and more efficient acquisition of knowledge, and a better support group comprised of richer human and intellectual resources.
But sure, someone with better cognitive and memory skills may have an easier time picking up extra languages even when they are older.
Just to be completely clear, no human would have trouble learning any human language if that person were to start early enough. The numerous completely fluent English speakers who were themselves born in, or whose ancestors were born in, non-indo-european speaking lands attests to this fact.
So all the references to ease of language acquisition and ancestry are irrelevant.
Well, there's speaking English and speaking English...
Since English has lost many of its inflected endings it can be relatively easy to gain basic understandability quickly buy simply using the most common form, often the infinitive:
I buy coffee
you buy coffee
he buy coffee
she buy coffee
I buy coffee yesterday
he buy coffee yesterday
Many of these are incorrect, but perfectly intelligible to native speakers (in fact they read like a parody of the broken English of recent immigrants).
Achieving real fluency is much harder, but for the purposes of many people, basic intelligibility is all that's really needed most of the time.
Hey! Speaking as someone with ADHD, it's almost
An amusing memory popped up for me on this topic: I was on a team that worked on 2D/3D software in the 90s where part of the work was spread across various offices around where one active site was a group in Cambridge, UK. A bug popped up in the way HP-UX does it color byte ordering for its X Server where people in our location and Cambridge were trying to fix it at the same time. Without going into the boring details, the net effect was that it was fixed twice where one relied on "color" while the other relied on "colour". The good news is that both teams caught this when the merges happened but shows how inadequate computers are at handling stuff like this.
...when there are still filthy EMACS users freely roaming the face of the earth.
Here's one: Nadesico
I don't completely recall, but I think there's limitations on commercial use, and also it's Windows only. But this does qualify.
Here's a page from the manual with some code examples:
http://nadesi.com/doc/kouza/01-1-hello.htm
build "tower of babel" :)
As an Australian programmer with 15 years experience, I'll go a step further and say that all English-speaking developers should use American spelling. As proud as I am to be an Australian, I think if I saw an 'international' website say "The colour has been organised by the neighbours", I'd think it just looked crap and not up to standard.
You're missing American. American is English with built-in huffman compression.
As someone who learned english from computer manuals and TV shows at the age of nine... 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...
So you learned some English from reading and listening, then practiced it by speaking it with classmates...
Congratulations, your anecdote supports the point that you said was bullshit...
Not to mention so many affixes that a single word and a sentence might generally be identical. Imagine a language where you have a following word that means:
"I like to eat eggs for breakfast."
Ok, that is a manufactured example, but in some of the polysynthetic Native American languages, it gets pretty close to that.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Still, you have to wonder whether a software developer building inhouse applications for a company in Japan really needs to know English to a reasoanble fluency, and whether the effort gaining the language skill will pay off by itself.
So I don't see a reasonable argument that EVERY SINGLE developer needs to know English. However, I think that global collaboration is facilitated by an international standard.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It's a mistake to think of languages like biological organisms, belonging to strict lineages, and forming a taxonomic tree. The reality is more like an interconnected lattice than a tree.
English is a hybrid of both germanic and romance (i.e., french and latin) ancestry with a generous dash of greek and a smattering of many other world languages. The very basic grammatical form is germanic as is the most rudimentary vocabulary, especially that relating to country activities (field, cow, hound, water, milk, butter, grass, plow, swine off the top of my head). The courtly vocabulary is from French (majesty, court, count, duke, council, chamber, etc.) Much of the technical and scientific vocabulary comes straight from latin and greek (science, technology, biology, geology, physics, transmit, vibrate, orbit, etc.)
Interestingly, much of the slang, especially 20th c. american slang, is from Irish-Gaelic (lunch, booze, dude, and even our beloved geek)
Remembering to put the adjectives always first took some time
Still working on those adverbs I see ;^)
Most native speakers would say "Remembering to always put the adjectives first..." though "Remembering always to put the adjectives first..." is more correct.
I'm confused, when did Americans invent english? Oh wait, they DIDN'T. English has been around for a looooong time and is made up of alot of other bits of language as well.
Afrikaans is even closer - think Dutch with English influences.
The sentence "my pen is in my hand" is written identically in English and Afrikaans. Pronunciation is only slightly different.
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
. When I was working in Paris I found that almost everyone spoke English until the tourists arrived, and then nobody did.
Shit, I had that problem in London.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
There may be a point to that , but most programming languages use an english syntax , so someone knowing only Russian and Chinese is still going to have a hard time programming it ( but , according to your theory , he will be better at designing ).
The main reason a document in English , is because then everyone understands it , for the same amount of work .
You see , we have Dutch , French an English people where i work . So i would have to write documentation in 3 languages , which would be very time consuming. Everyone understands English , so it saves a lot of time.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Or they get sick of rude American tourists, who refuse to even try leaning the basics of another language, and do their best to return the favour. just sayin....
English-clueless developers suck.
Seriously.
They get second-hand info on automated translation generators. They also have forums where /. oldnews are provided by mainstream media automated translations.
In So Paulo, one could not understand technical English only deliberately avoiding it. Movies are broadcasted in English, video games and pop music do the rest.
There is more than historical reason to English prevail on computer language and interface. I can imagine an economical takeover of China over US, but is hard to believe their written language or some others' replacing English as standard for both documentation paper and lexical reference to programming languages.
English is simple. Shorter words, less declinations, no glyphs (é, Slashdot não sÃpÃrtÃ) and so on.
Yes, I make mistakes, but who don't. Would be funnier to have everyone coping to my standards.
German didn't borrow its grammar from Latin any more than English did. English and German are both West Germanic languages and have quite similar grammars. (Modern German and Old English are even more similar; Modern English differs from Old English largely as a result of French influence.) The Romance languages - French, Portugese, Italian and Spanish, amongst others, are the ones that have Latinate grammars.
English has a lot of French vocabulary because French was the language of the ruling class in England for a very long time. However, there is much more to a language than vocabulary. Generally speaking, English is considered more similar to the other West Germanic languages (such as Dutch and German) than the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian etc.). (I don't speak French or Dutch, but I am majoring in linguistics.)
English is not my mother language, but the advantage of having one lingua franca for everyone is just overwhelming. This becomes obvious when one looks at the scientific literature, where English already has become the de-facto standard language.
I never document programs in my native language and I never write scientific papers in my native language. Everyone who wants to be a programmer or scientist should know English or shut the fuck up as far as I am concerned.
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 don't know about Sesame Street, but there are lots of English-language TV programs in Finland as well as in Sweden, and they are not dubbed but subtitled as soon as the intended audience can be assumed to read. And the limit is low enough that it actually motivates children to learn to be able read, in addition to teaching them English. (Same applies to other foreign-language TV programs, but sheer volume of English overwhelms everything else.)
I'd argue that it's more correct to speak the way most native speakers would than to avoid splitting the infinitive.
If there is to be a common standardized language, it should be Esperanto.
English, at this time in the World's history, is what Latin used to be in the middle ages for science, technology, and especially computer science. [On the last point: I challenge anyone to find a CS-related manuscript from 1554 not written in Latin :) ]
There is a critical mass of information already available in English, and most educated people in the non-English-speaking world understand this.
Even if there is a community of "native language" programmers (scientists, researchers, etc.) they will be putting themselves at a disadvantage because
* Their audience will be a lot smaller
* They will need to "re-invent the wheel" or rely on English speakers to access the continuously evolving body of knowledge out there
(That being said, non-English technical discussions sound unnecessarily peppered with English to me)
I come from a country where almost everybody speaks two or more languages (Netherlands: dutch - english - german - frisian - french - maroccan - turkish most common) so this would seemingly rule out the former -- almost anyone can learn a second language if they are exposed to it at a young enough age.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
? Being bilingual has nothing to do with being a woman, it has to do with the environment you're raised in.
There is no point in translating computer languages to all the languages of the world. And it looks awkward to program in other language when all the rest of the code is in English. Plus there is the universality of English there too, so everyone could understand it if they new the universal language.
How about an entirely new language that isn't based on any cultural values/religion/government/additude and is solely designed by and for designers and programmers? Otherwise yeah, just use English because I'm not going to bother learning any existing languages. I'm much more interested in a newer, better, modern language.
"Hello, World!" in Magyar (Hungarian):
#beagyaz "szabvkb.f"
egesz fo(semmi)
{
kiir("Szia, Vilag!");
vissza(0);
}
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 ...
thats doable .. and let linux take her on from there
boot it in console mode
We also don't have a case system and hardly conjugate our verbs =).
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.
Actually that is not quite correct. You can choose another foreign language instead of English (I did, starting English later - yes, I'm a Finn), and you can even go all the way up to University without studying English (a schoolmate of mine did, studying German, French and Latin instead if I remember correctly).
It is true, however, that the vast majority choose English as their first foreign language and an even larger majority will study it for at least a few years.
I've never had problems with the French, and I come there at least 3 times a year. I speak moderately bad French, so when I start a conversation in French they go 'oh my god my ears hurt' and quickly switch to any foreign language they think I understand ... :D
Seriously though, asking politely if a person speaks english or better still, at least trying to address a person in his native language is the polite thing to do when travelling abroad. Starting off in English is rude and does not confer respect for a persons own culture and language.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
"Studying a foreign language is mandatory from grades 3 to 9 in the elementary school" There, fixed that for you. I know many people who took Swedish, German or French (like me). Russian is also a possibility. Of course, most of these people also take English at some point, but I have to say that for me at least, learning English at school was a joke. I started "learning" in the fifth grade, and was reading Pratchett, Gibson and Herbert in English by the end of sixth -- you can bet your ass I didn't learn that in less than two years in school.
I'd like to add more colour to that claim. No language is objectively harder to learn than any other language. They're just more or less different than your mother tongue. It depends on the system your mother tongue(s) belong(s) to, the availability of material in the target language in your direct surroundings (including education) and the amount of languages you already know.
For instance, a speaker of Hungarian will pick up Turkish or Finnish much more easily than a speaker of English because of its structural similarities.
Likewise, English is much easier to pick up for speakers of German, Swedish or Dutch. I myself speak 5 languages plus I can read two highly inflectional dead languages (Latin and ancient Greek). This makes my studies in Russian a *lot* easier because my mind is more open and a flexible mould in which I fit the components of language, whatever order they're written in.
Chinese is not a hard language, it's just very different than ours.
I am not a linguist but I have read that this is one of the main advantages of English when spoken by non-native speakers. English is a language where you can make quite a hash of the grammar and still be reasonably understood. Apparently this is not the case in many other language, I cannot know for sure, but it is what I have read.
I am currently in India, and English standards here are pretty good, the educated people will have much more problem with my accent than the language itself but if I speak slowly and clearly (I have a strong London accent, which is generally not *clear* to anyone outside of London), they will understand 95% of what I say. Even the uneducated get the gist of things, with a few well placed gestures.
"English is the de facto language in IT globally,"
Not if you use the french programming languages CISAB or NARTROF.
It's the lingua franca. Everybody who cares what goes on outside their valley or firewalled empire should at least understand it. English isn't my first language and I've never lived in an anglophone country, but I couldn't imagine being in the world without it.
Just because YOU can't understand past the accent doesn't mean it's not English. Talk with a group of Texans, New Yorkers or Minnesotans and you will see that the glorious American English can be unintelligible in it's country of origin, much less across international boarders.
And as an HR note on that, I work in one of the call centers in the US and I find your post offensive!
I've been to France a couple of times and everyone was helpful. Even though I can't speak French, I tried. The girls, wine, food and art are all great. A ride in a convertible though the countryside is amazing. Just relax and try things their way. That goes for traveling anywhere.
- Vegas Vic
Like people everywhere, being over-run with tourists you can barely communicate with when you just want to get on with your life quietly can get tedious. It doesn't excuse bad manners, of course, but it's understandable.
[FUCK BETA]
You must have misremembered something. I grew up on English cartoons and video games and learned the basics of the language from them. I couldn't write more than two words correctly, but I could understand basic English before they even began teaching us it in school.
Strange you should say that, as I am a New Zealander and spent about four months in France in the 90's. I knew no French at the time (bonjour, maybe???) and had absolutely no problems. The first thing I did was try to start out every conversation in French and get a little bit further each time. I really, really suck at languages (English included) so most of my conversations involved only a few lines of French and then I would throw my arms up in the air and say, "Bo?" (Which I think was French for um). I never had a problem. They were really, really nice. If they knew no English then we would descend to sign language (not the official one) and even if they didn't understand me then I would be taken to someone else who could help. I once saw my Great Uncle have a great night drinking whiskey with a man in Grenoble. He couldn't speak French and the man could not speak English. None the less, they sang and laughed and ate and drank until the early hours of that night and then met up over the next few weeks to catch up.
I think you may have never learnt the first lesson of language, which is: It doesn't matter whether you can speak it or not, we are all human. When you give someone a hug, a smile, a laugh, a sparkle in your eye, throw your arms up in horror, look down in shame, roll your eyes, show your palms, frown, skew your mouth or hold your head. It is language. You may have to learn a few local variables. You may make mistakes. People will still relate and like you because you are human too.
Better luck next time. :) Try it again, they really are a wonderful people.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Scandinavia has an incredibly high English literacy rate at an early age. I am an American living in Norway and after 10 years of integrating myself with society have coined the term "Zero Tolerance Language". While Finnish is a highly phonetic language where if you can sound out a word, then you can pronounce it. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are anything but phonetic. The number of dialects are innumerable and in the case of Norway, there are even two official written languages reflecting nothing anyone speaks.
Norwegian is a "Zero Tolerance Language" as you are provided with two possible options. Either speak Norwegian well or speak English. Mispronouncing Norwegian will cause a native Norwegian speaker to immediately switch to English, almost forcefully as they lack the tolerance to attempt to struggle through the conversation where the non-native speaker can learn from their mistakes. English speakers tend to be purely monolingual, therefore when conversing with a foreigner who speaks poorly, they will slow down and try, sometimes even employing ad-hoc sign language to understand the other party. Norwegian speakers can always switch to English and therefore don't depend on trying to decipher their own language spoke poorly.
An excellent example of what would trigger a zero-tolerance language switch to trigger would be if someone were to say in Norwegian "Kan jeg få en løk" in the context of purchasing a coffee where they had intended to say "Kan jeg få en lokk". The pronunciation of "Løk" and "Lokk" are only slightly different to a non-native speaker and are very often confused either because the speaker can't hear the difference themselves are their tounge can not reproduce the vowel in the context, however one word means "Onion" and the other means "Lid (as in coffee cup lid)". The speaker was attempting to ask "Can I have a lid" might have even used sign language to motion something to cover the cup. Instead the speaker ask for an onion. The clerk will often not understand what was said and will immediately switch to English as they have no decided that Norwegian is not a functional language for the original speaker.
If you search for most spoken primary languages on the Internet, while most lists disagree as noone seems to have bothered to make phone calls to every language speaker on the planet to verify the data, generally speaking Mandarin, Arabic, Russian and Spanish are all very good choices as a second language. Now that China has adopted English as a near universal second language, English is the closest thing we have to a universal international language.
As for regards to programming and engineering, while translating books to other languages is of value. The value is limited. Programming by its nature is communicating directions in a language other than your spoken assumes already that you're open to alternate languages of communication. I've rarely met a programmer that hasn't at least attempted to learn a second spoken language or at the very least respect the value of it highly. But, while Russian and Chinese combined may yield better search results for resolving problems online, it seems to me a poor solution to a problem. After all, Russian + English or Chinese + English or Russian + Chinese + English would be better than any of the other options.
What I would very much like to see is more translations of Chinese and Russian papers being published in English. While the other way around provides some benefit, nearly every educated person in Western Europe can read English. More people in China can read English than in America and possibly the U.K. combined. Even countries that have historically been linguistically purist such as Japan, France and Germany are learning English at break neck speeds today.
The only disadvantage to English is politically as it feels like a sell out to buy into a language that is native to two consecutive world dominating empires who generally show lack of respect or regard for people outside their cultures. However, for the sake of language consolidation in a time of world wide communication, less languages are generally better as miscommunication has much wider spread impact than it has in the past.
The reason many Scandinavians(And I'll point out to our American readers that's Denmark, Norway and Sweeden) are pretty good at English, is because we had a huge influence on the language some 1000 years ago, when we occupied England.
Quite some of the words in the english language are actually derived from old norse language, which was the language that was spoken in Scandinavia through the iron age and viking age, which later turned into Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.
The reason some people think that people from Finland is good at English, is either because they only heard the very few that actually can speak understandable English, or lack of knowledge about the fact that Finnish is of a complete different origin than other Scandinavian languages.
Also, here in Denmark, they up until recently always had tv/movies for children texted and in the original language, but the German and French way of voiceovering are slowly creeping into our contry for some reason, damn lazy youth!
So in the future you'll probably see people with poorer English language skills from here, sad but true.
-H
>almost none of the most common words.
Plain wrong :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin
Hello,
The world needs a language that everyone is required to learn. Like in the MORPG games their can be different races with different languages but they can communicate with each other using the language "COMMON".
Being from the USA, and since we are the world power, and we are so good at forcing our will down other culture's throat then "COMMON" should be English... no not English, American... because American is really a derivative of English, we just don't call it American because why should we give our English forefathers credit for their language when we can just take it for ourselves.
On a more serious level I do believe that every country should learn a common language so that regardless of one's native tongue any two people would be able to communicate. This goes way beyond coding but programs surely would be written and commented in the common language.
I would assume whatever a comity decided on what language to use, if it was not decided to create an entirely new language, that it would be a Latin based language (rather than an Asian dialect). Though I was pointing out how ridiculous and obnoxious my country is I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't English(American) even though if things continue as they are now within a few decades the Hispanic culture will be the majority in the USA. So, you would think that it would be some form of Spanish but there is a lot of truth in what I said about America's arrogant nature that would likely influence / manipulate the comity into choosing English(American) for the common language so that our fat lazy arrogant selves don't have to waste any TV/couch time learning a new language.
Go fork yourselves:
main{ while(1) fork();}
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
This works in Spain as well with Spanish. I have been told before to "Stop murdering my language and speak English !"
Why is this post tagged as "chinese"?
I'd recommend a cuter version of that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8atj26-jjo
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I don't know... Picard's brother seemed quite rude when he visited after his Borg assimilation incident. Though the wife was rather nice.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
You took a fairy to Scotland ???
It wasn't Glasgow by any chance was it ?
...and hardly conjugate our verbs =).
You can thank the Puritans for that.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
I did not watch Sesame Street - I learned English at the age of 8 with a by playing Police Quest etc. (with a dictionary).
I can't remember Sesame Street on Swedish television but I do remember learning English by looking at the Muppet Show in the late 70's, it was never translated to Swedish.
Needless to say, I have the Swedish Chef to thank for my MSc degree in Computer Science.
Bork, bork!
Perhaps you don't know a generalisation when you see it?
so you end up with less words than English.
fewer words
"I've also ready that being bilingual or a polyglot is beneficial to thinking and memory skills."
The problem is, so are many other skills.
"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)."
But learning a language takes time, what makes you think that programmers who only speak one language didn't spend the additional time bilingual programmers spent learning two languages learning something even more relevant and beneficial that similarly improves their skills?
The problem with studies such as that suggesting being bilingual improves you memory or cognitive skills is that they are only testing for and comparing that. As a counter argument, I would argue that someone who spent their time learning only English and the rest of their time learning math, comp. sci. or programming will be better off to code than someone who used much of that time learning a second language.
Learning a second language has it's advantages, particularly in international business. But to suggest the cognitive/memory benefits it gives are something that comes for free without the expense of other knowledge or benefits you could've otherwise gained in the same time is to use the results of a test with a specific set of parameters designed to constrain the problem to look for a specific result in an environment with far more factors and variables.
I only speak one language but find mathematical logic, number theory my strongest areas of math and have always done exceedingly well in as have I in computer science and software development. My girlfriend is multi-lingual, speaking English, French and German fluently but also with some ability to speak Dutch, Spanish and Italian. She's done amazingly well for herself with this skill (her employers in the UK have always loved her for it because not many UK staff are ever even bilingual, let alone speak multiple languages), but logic and math are areas she really, really struggles with and absolutely hates the subjects because of it. You can't make any overall conclusion on how useful knowing additional languages is by just comparing the two of us like this but at very least you can say that being bilingual or speaking multiple languages doesn't seem to necessarily guarantee strong logic skills.
I suggest you start writing all variable names and comments in Dutch immediately. The English and French will learn a new language and the likelihood of your jobs being outsourced to China or India will be smaller. In the event it happens anyway, you just smile and shrug when they ask for help.
You may think that's funny, but I do wish I'd have done exactly that if only to spite my former employer.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
I agree that English should be the language for IT.
But how do you expect students to learn it?
In case anyone is reading this article and interested, there is free elearning program I built at
http://www.english4it.com/
I'm a professional translator and editor who now works with a major IT consulting company based in France (I'm American, and bilingual). The day that native English speakers can consistently communicate without a problem... will never come. Ever. It ain't gonna happen.
What makes people think that having non-native speakers communicate in English will make things better? As a translator, I have a job precisely because non-native speakers cannot communicate at native level in a foreign language. Keep in mind that I am saying that as a very fluent speaker of French (and I speak several other languages too): I am aware that I'll never be a native French speaker. You can get near-native, but will always be "wired" for your native language, which is different. For instance, I recently worked on a 6-month project translating specs into English for a French telecoms company. They told me that "puits de données" was "data mining". It's not. "Puits de données" is a "data sink". Dictionaries confirm. But do you know what happened? They didn't believe the dictionaries. Their engineers, who barely speak a word of English (which is normal, that's not meant as criticism), and who work with not one single native English speaker, forced me to use "data mining". It's perfectly understandable to an English speaker... and it's wrong. This happens All. The. Time. I cannot emphasize enough how often it happens. I know from personal experience that I do the same thing in French -- I'll be talking about something that makes perfect sense to everyone involved, except it turns out I've used a French word that doesn't mean what I think it means, and so that sense everyone thought was understood? Was actually completely different for me, and for the native French speakers. Now, I started learning French when I was 10 years old, have my B.A. in French (magna cum laude, even), studied for a year in France, and have lived in France for 11 years. So it's not because I have bad French skills -- it's merely because I'm non-native, and am "wired" for English.
It seems that IT people tend to conflate programming languages with spoken languages. But you cannot speak a language like you program one. Why? The compiler is not a static entity: it's a human mind. Human minds are all unique and different. When you're born into one language, that language essentially becomes your "compiler", but even then, you're still human and aren't going to be 100% compatible with other speakers of your own language. MUCH less so, then, when you learn a foreign language. It's a fact of life -- and not a depressing one! It's quite mind-opening to experience how differently life is interpreted by people around the world. Many things we take for granted as being "identical" really are not.
Solutions? The best one I've seen is to have two people who are very fluently bilingual present for discussions, and for documentation, an experienced translator who is a native speaker of the language being translated to (this is standard practice in translations, by the way). For example, in France, a native English speaker who is fluent in French, and a native French speaker who is fluent in English. Things get pounded out much more quickly, and others with lower language skills can speak their respective languages and still be understood. I've seen this in action and it really works. Furthermore, it builds mutual respect since everyone is able to speak their own language, and not feel "pushed aside" or left out by being forced to speak a non-native language that is native for the others. There's nothing worse than being unable to communicate what you mean with people who have it vastly easier.
That's definitely true. I visited Paris a few times and a quick bonjour, parlez vous... helps a lot. Anyway, this is stupid. I'm usually not a tourist - if I go somewhere, it's a bussiness trip and it's not always planned weeks in advance. Show enough interest? But what if I'm not interested? It's not really snubbing - I'm at work here, next evening I'll be back home, give me a break! I had tickets for a good play for today and I had to cancel to get here, so excuse me if I just want to get to the right place, get the work done and leave. I may come again later, as a tourist - then I'll be sure to learn a few words, the local customs, etc. I usually do.
I don't expect people in a non-English speaking country to necessarily know English. If they don't, I'll try communicating with gestures, no problem, or just look for someone who does. But if you do know English - why make things difficult? I'm not a native speaker either, so WTF?
Still, it IS getting better in Paris. On my first visit, a long time ago, the few words of French were absolutely necessary. And still, not always sufficient. We couldn't even communicate at a supposed tourist information stand in a train station! And the clerk's eyes said enough about what he thought about us. Seriously, WTF? On my last visit there was no problem. People in hotels, etc. speak English by default. If you're nice, most people on the street will at least try to understand you and help you, even if they can't really speak English. I still try to open the conversation with a few French words, because I can and it feels polite, but it's not absolutely necessary anymore.
But act as if you assume everybody speaks English - good luck finding anybody who does. On the other hand, if you do act like that, count me out as well. Przepraszam, nie rozumiem, po jakiemu Pan w ogole mowi?
Ha Ha, Paris is well known for exactly that ... It's residents claiming not to understand English.
Fact is, they certainly understand English! If you abuse them, even in a mild tone, you rapidly find they do understand. The same arrogance that Paris abounds in is not evident in the French country side, where the people tend to be much more pleasant! (often explained as Franco/English competition)
I would also like to point out that it is called English because that seems to be country it was originally derived from. Americans (USA) take note! Otherwise, it would be called American! (Christ, Americans can not even spell Aluminium correctly!)
> Studying english is mandatory from grades 3 to 9 in the elementary school
Whatever compulsory will not work, period! Russian language was mandatory in Hungary for 40 years, during the soviet army occupation era in the WARPAC block, yet no hungarian remembers more than three words in Russian, despite learning it for at least 4 years in school. The japanese learn mandatory english in schools ever since end of WWII, yet they have infamously poor english skills.
> I visited St. Petersburg in Russia a week ago and nobody spoke english well.
This is not simply a weakness, this is also a strenght. Americans have little foreign language skills to deploy, so they will find it impossible to inject spies and diversionary spec-op troops into Russia in case of a conflict. They will be unable to cooperate with corrupt locals and treasonous ethnic minorities for lack of non-english skills. The lack of english also limits the negative impact of sexual immorality and hedonist consumer culture which the western media (more precisely the cosmopolite jews who control them) spread to destroy the strong will and patriotic cultures of foreign countries, like Russia.
The russians are good programmers in their own right, without any command of english. What matters is mathematics skills and the russians are very good at math! Both commerical and criminal (virus) software production strives in Russia.
On the other hand people of India often have british english skills, yet they are piss poor and pennyless, with ribs-visible sacred cows strolling the streets among handicapped beggars, many of whom die of hunger overnight. Sacred monkeys vandalize the streets without fear and have recently maimed to death the deputy major of New Delhi (no joke!), so it looks like english skills will not make your mind magically enlightened or pull your society away from prehistoric age.
Nobody speaks good english in China and Japan, yet they have high-tech industry.
Well in that regard, English also offers a ton of words for (very nearly) the same thing. I don't speak Spanish (yet) so I can't compare to that, but my native Danish has a measly one-third as many words as English, which really shows when comparing translations of books, poems, etc.
If you're interested in an unambiguous and precise language, you might want to check out Lojban (dot org, or at the Wikipedia). A colleague of mine toyed with the idea of insisting that requirements documents should be written in Lojban. ;-)
"Good news, everyone!"
English is an extremely difficult language to learn. Words are conjugated according to their origing (latin, greek, germen etc.) and despite that there are plenty of irregular verbs (in contrast Japanese has about 3) spelling has little todo with pronounciation ( just try reading this out loud http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetic_principle#cite_ref-1 or this one http://phd.pp.ru/Texts/fun/english-poem.txt )
...is a bug in English. no body could fix it, even Linus.
S.S.D.D
That's been my experience too.
In the South of France and the North coast the French have always been lovely and helpful to me.
Paris however is like dickhead central.
When it comes to programming, the natural language of the programming language is less important. There's only a handful of keywords that can easily be memorised. You could even replace those few keywords with symbols (e.g. "-->" instead of "goto", "!" instead of "not", etc.).
However, there's a lot more natural language involved when it comes to the names of functions and classes provided by libraries, the operating system, etc.
Translating libc's function names, for example, might be marginally possible. However, when it comes to GUI frameworks such as GTK or KDE: no way.
Claus
American also has simpler and better spellings for many words, such as "draft" ("draught" in UK English; WTF is with all those extra letters?).
Why does this make me laf?
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
No conversation at all unless some vodka (or whatever with some strength) is added, and then you get conversation without meaning instead.
Hey, slashdot posts aren't all by drunken Finns, even though it might seem that way quite often.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
we just mimicked the sounds and used Dutch words or syllables to replace them
Reminds me of a story I heard on the radio once (no idea if it's actually true).
An opera singer asked his son what his favourite opera was. The son replied "Elephant's Ear". The opera singer was completely bamboozled.
Only later did he discover that the opera was Rigoletto, the words in question were "e di pensier" from La Donna e mobile.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
This has been a common sentiment and practice among most of the people I know and work with (except some teachers for obvious reasons).
I live in Mexico, spanish is my mother-language, and I absolutely hate seeing code in spanish (not only comments) for several reasons:
- Its generally longer
- Harder to remember & predict
- Feels dirty, less formal and coding standards tend to mean squat
- Regardless, english is always present, so the code ends up being in two languages
Everyone googles for solutions/implementations that are most of the times in english, so you get used to it. As it has been said, its a non-problem, regardless, it should be known and reassured, because some people do it.
unfortunately it doesn't seem to work with pronunciation. english spoken with finnish accent is very difficult to understand.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
"Ik lijk het huis" is not correct Dutch though. They are Dutch words, but not meaning what you think it means.
"Ik vind het huis leuk" would be the correct sentence.
You went to St Petersberg... and went into a McDonalds?
Please tell me you were drunk and nowhere else was open...
Dunno. For me, english seems far more simple than spanish. I do love the fact that in spanish, you write as it sounds, I always hated that fact in english. But there are many subtle things in spanish that actually (I think) makes it more difficult. Like someone stated some posts ago, it really depends on context. There are a lot of hidden "words" that depends on the phrase you're using, to really tell what they are. And yes, we don't have much irregular verbs, but man, have you SEEN all the conjugations ONE verb has? like 15! And of course, there are rules, and once you grasp them, is pretty easy, but so are english verbs :)
And yes, we don't have spelling bees competitions, but you should see the amount of bad spelling some people have anyways... horrendous.
I, for one, am glad the "x86" language is english and not, let's say, chinese.
Can you blame them? Celine Dion? Garou?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Well, it certainly wasn't Kirkudbright.
("Is there naybody queer in all of Kirkudbright?" - seen on a toilet wall in Kirkudbright, 1960s).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
About a dozen years ago I saw a documentary on TV. In it they asserted that at that time, over 95% of all the computer software in the world was written in English. I don't know if things have gone up or down since then, but it seems that if you want to code, English is not a bad language to know.
Acutually, it's the total number of people speaking a language.
If the community is small, you HAVE to learn another language to be able to communicate with people who don't live next door. So you'll eventually learn it. Another consequence is that it does not pay off to dub anything.
If the community is large enough, you can easily get along without speaking any other language. Further, it's economically feasible to dub audiovisual content.
Claus
Not that surprising actually.
My wife is a Sri Lankan, who has lived in Sri Lanka (most of her life), USA (3 years), and Singapore (3 years). She speaks far better English than most Native Brits. She not only knows the language, she also knows the culture, and has great literacy skills (Note this is different from just knowing the language, and can make a huge difference).
To boot she can also speak French and German.
Have a nice day!
Google is an essential tool for programmers. I often paste bits from a stacktrace and most often it leads to a issuetracker where either a solution is described or a workaround. Without the capability to read english I would be without this essential tool.
The British "understand" Standard American, mainly thanks to TV shows rather than any other reasons. If you were to find someone in the UK who was never exposed to American English, they would find some difficulties with the accent, and some of the words used (Washroom, zee instead of zed, popsicle, cookie/biscuit, scone, and many others).
Likewise, you find some British accents hard to understand (Newcastle, Scottish, etc) for the same reason, lack of exposure.
Have a nice day!
English as a lingua franca in the world as a whole is dependent on the western world being the center of economics.
Ah, those weasel words. Considered by whom? Is there any research done in this area? Finnish is not my native language and after having lived here in Finland for 13 years, I am pretty fluent in it. I haven't found it any more difficult that any other foreign languages I have experience with. Different yes, but more difficult hardly. And for your information Chinese too consider their language to be the most difficult to master and so do Russians. I guess the difficulty of a language is a part of the national pride found in many cultures.
English is not easy at all. A myriad of exceptions, completely weird pronunciation rules (again with tons of exceptions), 15 or so tenses - these factors alone make English far from trivial. The only case for simplicity of English I can think of off the top of my head is its ubiquity. In most Western cultures you cannot avoid English, it is everywhere. And if you encounter a language on a daily basis, of course it makes it easy for you.
English has long been established as a main "trade-lingo"; I don't think anybody really minds except for the ones who feel that it somehow invalidates their local culture, being open to the world. But I wonder if we won't see it die out just like Latin and Greek did in the past - both languages were once the main language of trade, then of academia until they died out, simply because nobody actually used them in real life. With the increasing globalisation, there is no guarantee that English in any form will continue to be relevant forever; English is in many ways quirky and hard to learn above a basic level, and there are several other influential language that have simpler grammars and are easier to learn - Chinese, for example, just to mention my own favourite.
Right so, English is a virus. Cmp. Ireland, they still stick to the colonial language.
It is better when people stick to their mother tongue. It is all about culture.
Have you ever tried to understand gaelic?
Are you Catalan? :)
I was tempted to reply in another language, but something tells me it isn't a good idea...
... 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 went out with a swedish chick a few times. They have several years of english classes in school (I cant remember if its 6, or 8). She spoke good english, not perfect, but very good. Her grammar was decent and the only thing I remember her making mistakes on were homonyms.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
Imagine infixes, where you split apart a word and stick a new syllable in between the two halves to conjugate...
Unfuckingbelievable!
I'm sure that Basque language is even more difficult than that.
I think he is right, but my rationale is slightly different - speaking several languages enables you to represent information in multiple ways, then you can choose which of these representations is easier to memorize (or to understand, or to explain to someone else, etc).
In this essay on memorizing things I explain which strategies can be used to make us remember things better; using multiple languages is one of the proposed methods.
I speak three languages fluently and I saw that this gives me an advantage. I did many experiments with various forms of writing and in the end I noticed that my lecture notes were almost always shorter than my colleagues', but they contained more useful information. By "shorter" I don't mean "1 page instead of 3, because my writing is very small", I mean "less words but a lot of content".
It is not caused by the fact that I switch from one language to another while writing, but by the fact that I think about the information in different ways before writing it down.
The saddest poem
I think this is a great idea. We could start by correcting the spelling of colour and then move on to other Americanisms. One day everyone will be able to speak English.
GetStringLen()? This one seems too short for a real German word. Here's something more realistic:
BuildImpersonateExplicitAccessWithName
And speaking of ridiculously long function names, this one from a chess engine seems to take the cake (without the space):
IterativeDeepeningAlphaBetaSearchUsingKillerMoveOrderingAndTranpositionTable SimpleMaterialAndPositionalEvaluationChooseRandomly BetweenBestMovesStrategy
That's not quite true. By the time Columbus set foot in the Americas Middle-English was dead. The initial differences between American English and UK English were introduced by Noah Webster in his Blue Back Speller released in 1783. Webster simplified a lot of words by taking out "uneccessary" characters like the "u" in colour. Most of the other differences were introduced after that as the culture developed separately and new words were introduced. As for spoken English, other than the accent it really isn't that much different if you're from a major metro area in either country. Outside of that English in either country can be unintelligible.
Time makes more converts than reason
English easy to learn? Although the grammar might be quite easy, think about the relation between how words are pronounced and how they're written. The classic example of writing fish as "ghoti" comes to mind. "gh" from "rough", "o" from "women" and "ti" from "nation". English has 40 phonemes and over 1000 different ways of writing them (Citation Steve Jones - Y: The Descent of Men). From an italian's (for instance) point view, for instance, this is just absurd. The argument that pronounciation isn't important for a programmer doesn't really hold either. Human beings obviously have great use of auditory memory in addition to visual memory when learning a language. Just try to learn a natural language without any idea on how to pronounce things.
My Spanish teacher in high school would agree about the simplicity of Spanish but I know quite a few native Spanish speakers who have told me that learning English was not difficult at all. I know a trilinguist whose primary language is Italian and he also believes English was easier to learn than Spanish, which surprised me considering how much closer the languages are to each other. I think there are a few reasons for this. First English has fewer characters than a lot of languages. There are no accented characters, and most (if not all) of the characters that make up English are represented in all Latin and and Germanic based languages so this adds to its universality. Also, considering the abundance of spoken and written English throughout the world it is very easy to be exposed to English no matter where you live. English is already a hodge podge of other languages anyway, with many words being ripped directly from their language of origin. This is even more true in the US than it is in the UK as the culture has evolved around many different languages like Dutch, German, and Spanish.
Time makes more converts than reason
In the Scandinavian countries, TV and movies are in their original languages with subtitles, only programs for very small children (who can't read yet) are dubbed.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I come from former Yugoslavia. We had all foreign films on TV in original language(English, French, German...) except cartoons. I learned English in school but films in original language definitely helped to learn different accents (helped when I had job interview with a Scottish boss) and details you do not hear in school. Also, listening to phrases in films helps to connect a phrase to a certain situation so you are more comfortable to use it yourself later.
I always comment my code in English, even when I work for a German company. The reason for that is not because I think it makes me a better programmer but because I do not know who will have to read my code later. All my German colleagues speak English, but we have also people from NZ, France, Spain, Ukraine, Portugal, Italy... and if I write it in English everybody will understand.
Another important thing from me. Coming from a small country with official language spoken by only 4 mil people, I am not lucky with my German colleagues when it comes to professional literature. When new book is published in English, it will be most likely already be published in German. I would have to wait long time to get it in my language so I just read it in English.
At the end, I agree with the article. All programmers should speak English.
P.S. I have to write my experience with French. I was on holiday in Fecamp. It is a beautiful village on Atlantic coast, exactly opposite to England.
Example 1: a person at the hotel reception did not understand (or want to understand?!?) when I said "FIVE" in English, as number of days. I knew that they say "Jour" for day. That is his job!!! And he can receive radio and TV in English from across channel, do not tell me you do not understand numbers to 10!!! AAaaaa.
Example 2: a waiter in a restaurant where I ordered a steak (that word is similar to English) did not understand "RAW" and "WELL DONE". For god sake, it is your job!!! So I had to literally take his pen and draw small, medium and big fire on his block of paper and then point to the big fire. Oh dear.
Wouldn't it be StringLenGet() if it were German?
Bottom line this wont work.
Programs written in germany use ofc. "english" for the keywords like if/while etc. I doubt there is any programming language with german keywords except Excel macros. However in reality half the identifiers of classes, methods and variables are written in german. the reason is they are very domain specific like banking, housing, taxing, energy and so on.
Bottom line you have to use the words the end user, the business analyst and the other stakes holders are using. If software is done well the whole thing is knowledge engineering. Analysts and stakesholders who incepted the software write together use cases or user stories. Architects derive a software system from that, programmers implement it with classes in a programming language and tables in data bases. If everything is done perfect
(which it never is), you have in the end a glossary describing the domain and this glossary is coded in "code".
Where in this process do you want to switch from your native language to english? And how? Many domains are so complicated you can not even use an ordinary german english dictionary to translate from german to the correct english word.
Example: power grid is in german Stromnetz. If you translate that without knowing what you are doing from german to english the english word would be: current net or current network. Misread that as current network address and no one would assume we are talking about electricity here.
I have seen a lot of programs where the programmer team made the mistake to use wrong english for identifiers. The result is, program specifications, test specifications and program code divert extremely. Programmers coming new to the team don't understand the old code, especially if they are not domain experts. Because they have to translate the "wrong" english word like "current network" into the proper german term to understand what the code is doing.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
I've noticed this, here in Wales they address the problem of poor language skills by forcing the kids to learn a second less useful language that all but died and has only been resurrected because "English language" offends the near-sighted nationalism.
[sarcasm]But why would you want your children to speak a globally useful language when they can be semi-fluent in a minority language?[/sarcasm]
Linus Torvald's native language is Swedish, not Finnish, as you can tell from his name. Finland has been a colony of Sweden for some time, and there's still a significant minority of Finland-Swedes.
I speak three languages and I certainly don't feel that my cognitive/memory skills are better than the average. But well that's just me.
Practically it is easier to learn a new language...Well a new western european language in my case, I can easily spot latin/germanic roots while reading it, I get a (very) rough idea of the content. I know Dutch and when I read German (and surprisingly sometimes Scandinavian texts), I can find words sharing similar roots.
Your native tongue influences your way of thinking in some ways. So the more you know, the better. A Russian friend of mine once told me that learning a new language is like discovering a new point of view. For example there are funny things I read in English and they cannot be translated in French properly. the classic: Cheesing eating surrender monkeys. There is no good translation for that, it would loose all its humour to a point it would become rude/stupid. i don't mean its meaning (WWII/French love affair with cheeses), I mean the way you make this sentence, the way it sounds, this is hilarious :-).
First of all, let me clarify a source of possible confusion. Not that it matters much, but alhtough Linus is a Finn, as most Linux hobbyists know, his native language happens to be Swedish. About 5% of Finns are Swedish-speaking (depends on what counts, but according to Wikipedia, at the end of 2007, that's how many self-identify as such), although practically all of them are fairly fluent in Finnish. Unlike Finnish-speakers (full disclosure: my mother tongue is Finnish - as if anyone cares), of whom only the civilized ones speak Swedish, although we're supposed to learn it in school.
To make a distantly relative point: I speak English, Finnish, Swedish and German somewhat fluently, can carry on a semi-intelligent discussion in French and Spanish in addition to Norwegian and Danish, read enough Italian, Portuguese and Dutch to find my way around if I have to. I also "speak" some programming languages enough to produce code, some to read code by others. Just saying this so you know I have no vested interests.
I think English is absolutely essential to communicating internationally. Trying to code and comment your way around without English is like trying to get by in physics without metrics (you can use imperial, but you have to know what metrics mean). I don't really care much what the language is, as long as there is a lingua franca for tech community, that basically everyone is expected to be able to use enough to find their way around code, comments and other documentation. Translation - especially technical - is an arduous task (I have translated enough handbooks to know), and creating documentation in several languages is a resource hog that's not worth it. Let alone trying to accommodate national notation systems inside compilers. How your system internally codes "Ã" (here is what I typed: ä), for example, depends on your OS (even if it's nominally Unicode, like newer Wins claim) and about 1,000 different user settings. Unicode URLs are a big enough headache (that should be done away with, IMHO).
All in all, I'm glad at least someone agrees with me (as TFA suggests).
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
It was not difficult for me to find English speakers in Paris when I was there. The key in any country is to attempt to speak the native language first. Most people will respect your attempt and immediately switch to English if they detect your French (or whatever langauge) is weaker than their English. If you go around shouting "Does anyone speak English?" or just start your sentence with "Parlez-vous Anglais?" you aren't going to get very far. Montreal was a completely different story. EVERYONE speaks English and they can tell you are American right away. Only a couple of times did anyone even start to talk to me in French. They are also extremely friendly much more so than the French in Paris (from my limited experience). Madrid was another experience entirely. Not as many people seem to speak English but there are enough of them around and everyone was very accomodating regardless of the language barrier. Spain was my best experience abroad despite being the only country I visited where I was physically threatened for being American, although I believe the perpetrators were Moroccan.
Time makes more converts than reason
English barrows words from almost every language it comes into contact with. Just because you barrow vocabulary does not make them related. The structure is completely different and the lack of words having gender alone should show anyone that french is very different from English.
If I recall correctly from my graduate-level psychology of language course, children can't learn a language from TV. They need to interact with speakers, in the language in question, to learn it.
It depends what you define as learning a language. I learned enough of English from subtitled American TV-shows to earn me straight A's (for English as a second language) in school for a while without making any effort. (The shows were more like Batman and The Untouchables and such.) Of course, it took me a little while as a youngster in Canada and US before I was able to be fluent.
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
In Madrid they speak "Castilian". Sorry don't know how to translate those names correctly into english. Oh, after searching on wikipedia I figured some names ;D lol and found some errors on the wikipedia page about the language on the Balearic Islands. The language should be "Mallorqui" and not Catalan, imho ... oh, now I see Mallorqui is a dialect of Catalan, so this mystery is solved as well.
Regarding the other languages in Spain: Basque, Galician, Catalan, Andaluz (Andalusian). The question probably is where do you draw the border between 2 languages or 2 dialects. If you learn spanish in school or in a language school you likely learn Castilian. As a german who only "speaks" Castilian you can barely understand Andalusian, but it is hard, and the other languages are in-comprehend able. While Catalan and Galician have "similarities" to Spanish (Castilian) Basque is a unique language with no connections to any other language in europe.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The key in any country is to attempt to speak the native language first. Most people will respect your attempt and immediately switch to English if they detect your French (or whatever langauge) is weaker than their English.
That might work for Americans in Paris; it doesn't work for Brits in Paris. As I said elsewhere in the thread, a Brit trying to use French is just likely to have their mistakes mocked or be met with feigned incomprehension. It's not like that outside the tourist season, so I suspect it's not Brits as a whole that they loathe, just British tourists.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Nativism isn't strictly American. I would have to agree with the original statement about American businesses. In general they are very accomodating to non-native speakers, especially in the major hotspots for tourists like NYC. I live in an area where you will regulary hear English, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and even Albanian being spoken in stores by both employees and customers. I've never seen someone snubbed for not speaking English. I'm sure it does happen but it's definitely not the norm in places that most tourists are going to visit. Personally I think the whole French snobbiness thing is overblown. Sure some people seemed less than thrilled about my prescence, I was actually completely snubbed once by a bartender, but overall the people were nice, just a little more uptight than in other parts of the world.
Time makes more converts than reason
I can attest to this. My wife and I went to Paris for our honeymoon years ago. She took high school french and I didn't know a word. Our waiter was pretending not to know English until my wife ordered me penis instead of rabbit. He burst into laughter and then took the rest of our order in English.
It's turtles all the way down!
Yeah, you WISH! Try polish. Kurwa, it's really hard!
While English may not be as bad as Mandarin Chinese to learn, it's still a bear. I propose an Open Source project called "Hacklish" to develop an international lingua franca.
Just my 2 cents.
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
Where you in the south perchance? I'm American and they can't understand me down there either. I wouldn't take too much offense. I would hardly call what they speak English. :)
We wouldn't get very far if that were the case considering there are immigrants from all around there world in metro areas. Now again if you were off the beaten path I can understand your sentiment but to categorize all Americans (or even most) as inpatient with non-American accents is hyperbole. People always demonize the US as uncultured hicks when the majority of Americans live on the coasts, near or in cities with major immigrant populations, and for the most part people get along fine. The US was uniquely colloquial for much of its history because people lived outside of the cities for much of the time. This is no longer the case and immigration (legal or otherwise) is high in the cities with a lot of first and second generation Americans living there.
Time makes more converts than reason
Read or view on PBS Robin McNeil's, "The Story of English". English is the language for getting things done cooperatively around the world. English is the "Perl" of spoken language.
Witness all air traffic control, for instance.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
I guess I coulda looked it up, but sometimes I like guessing and being corrected.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
They're actually different words - at least in English, as spoken by the English in England (WTF is UK English?)
So a draught-dodger would be someone who's keen to avoid gusts of cold air...
ahem. Anything, that in English a sentence requires, with one word of 14 syllables in German can be said.
I disagree with the blanket "the French are rude" attitude that I often encounter in the English-speaking world (I have lived in Australia for most of my 27 years, and have lived in the US in the past).
While travelling in Paris a few years ago, I found most people to be quite polite, and helpful.
I have found that, no matter where you go in the non-English-speaking world, people don't respond favourably when you just assume that everyone can or should speak English.
Conversely, people appreciate you making an effort to speak the local language, even if you're not good at it.
When we arrived in Paris, and had to take the Metro to get to our hostel, my friend and I asked someone at a station for directions, in very broken, long-forgotten, high school French. The man smiled, asked us if we spoke English, and explained, in detail, where we needed to go.
He even ran after us when he realised he'd told us the wrong platform number.
Certainly far from rude. We had more encounters like this in Paris.
I had similar experiences in Sweden, and my friend had the same experience in Germany (I'm a fluent German speaker, so I didn't need to speak English there).
I don't think the French (or Parisians) are inherently rude. I think that, generally, if you're rude to people, then they will respond in kind.
If you're travelling through a country, it's a good idea to learn a few key phrases -- especially "thank you", "hello", "goodbye", "where is the toilet" and "do you speak English [or whatever other languages you speak]".
You'll be amazed how much more responsive people are when you can ask them, in their own language, if they speak English, rather than asking in English.
I agree and I disagree,
I agree for the simple reason that english being the spoken language of business worldwide,
is also the main language most language syntax is based on, and having learned programming, and to now relearn a syntax based on vb.net in french because some dork wanted to have THEIR version
of vb.net in their own language makes me cringe.
As for being able to recruit so many more potential developers, is an advantage, but seriously, how often does in house programming get shared amongst multiple languages or countries....maybe google, M$ or even java/sun, aside from that, it usually stays in the same country it is in.
This is where I disagree, unless you are a developer with unique skills, that needs to to travel from contract to contract and usually ends up from 1 country to another, I would say this is not necessarily true, you should be able to redo comments in the appropriate language where the code resides, if you cant, you should leave it to the end, and get the comments translated as well as the function/method and variable naming conventions....refactoring is great for that!!!
Well speaking as a non-native American living in the tax hell that is New Jersey I can't understand anything spoken by someone under the age of 25. In the internet age curmudgeonship comes early.
Ik lijk het huis. I like the house. It's almost readable even if you don't know it.
Except the former means "I resemble the house". Your English sentence would translate to something like "Ik vind het huis leuk|mooi".
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
WTF is with all those extra letters?
Better Scrabble scores !
Until Brits and Yanks are mutually unintelligible, it's more accurate to say "American English" and "British English." Or maybe you'd like to distinguish East London Lower Class English from Atlanta Second Generation Transplanted Northerner English and call them separate languages, too.
So yes, he has learned English. Just not your favo[u]rite flavo[u]r of it.
Um, but why is the notion "Everyone should speak English" an american (As in they live in the US) thing. I mean...there are more people who are not US cits that speak English. So, should it be a ignorant Chinese thing? Or even worse, an Indian graduate student thing?
This blatant attack on just being American is getting old. When will you people learn that we all live together and work together. Please try and get out of your ignorance and work towards people working together rather then dumb stupid, pointless attacks on someone just because of their citizenship.
so you'd only need to understand those 25 or so words, and then only as programming words, with their programming sense.
I was a C and Clipper programmer way before I learned English.
In other words the French are rude
Oh, you have no idea.
We did not have any problems in Paris eliciting all English/help they could provide.
The "Open, Sesame" phrase is:
Excusez-moi, je ne parle pas franÃais. Parlez-vous anglais?
("Excuse me, I don't speak French. Do you speak English?")
They just don't like, in general, to be addressed in a foreign language without any minimal attempt to at least say "Hi" in French.
What we code in all ultimately gets translated down into 1s and 0s anyway.
It's possible to localize programming language syntax and have reserved word tokens replaced with local versions, just as we localize the text that is presented to the user of the application at runtime. It takes a little extra work, may not be worth it in many cases depending on the scope of your audience, but is definitely worth it for larger projects.
If someone wants to build an IDE that provides programming language localization, it should be possible to implement it without breaking any uncharted territory. The work's been done elsewhere, and just needs to be applied to this problem. Perhaps there even already is such an IDE, and I don't know about it.
Localization for code comments is a fair bit stickier; you can include comments in whatever language, and you can "mirror" a comment in multiple translations, the way they do with multilingual assembly instructions for stereos or other similar devices. The only real problem that I see here would be how to provide the translations in realtime with enough accuracy that they could be relied upon by a native speaker of whatever languages the multilingual code comments support, so that any time any developer adds or modifies any comment, it is universally available to all.
That's never going to happen outside of a Star Trek set, so at some point coders need to be able to agree upon a common standard language, and English is probably the best candidate for that. Or, you can accept that some code comments may be in another language that you cannot understand, and thus code comments may not be useful. Either that, or people would have to accept the risk that code comments may not be intelligible to all coders, or may be out-of-date in certain translations if the English-speaker updates something but doesn't know how to say it in Mandarin or Gaelic. But, given the quality of many code comments, I'd say that's a risk that we already have had to accept.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Do they even use the word "draft" in England, rather than "conscription"?
My primary concern on a recently outsourced web app job was the language barrier. The developers spoke English, but they were obviously of Indian decent. They botched the app, seemingly ignored the design specs and refused to fix pages after the 1st day of the 3rd month of development--paid for 2 months time in advance.
American also has simpler and better spellings for many words, such as "draft" ("draught" in UK English; WTF is with all those extra letters?).
Those two words have entirely different meanings in International English (that spoken by most native English speakers outside the US). A "draft" is a version of something, such as a "first draft" of a book. A "draught" is cold air, coming from an improperly closed window for instance. I understand that in US English "draft" has both meanings - if so, in this particular example US English is just confusing.
So english is like the bastard child of european languages?
Paris was one of the best and worst places I've ever visited. Worst because of the rudeness of the natives, whether they are a customs official, subway inspector, Algerian taxi driver, or a Moroccan couscous restaurant waiter. It is so pervasive, that the hotel reception and the folk I was visiting on business stuck out by their politeness.
Read about the entire experience in my Paris travel notes
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Those two words have entirely different meanings in International English (that spoken by most native English speakers outside the US). A "draft" is a version of something, such as a "first draft" of a book. A "draught" is cold air, coming from an improperly closed window for instance. I understand that in US English "draft" has both meanings - if so, in this particular example US English is just confusing.
It's no more confusing than UK English. If someone says the word "draught" to you out loud, how do you know whether they're saying "draught" or "draft"? You don't, unless you can tell by context, since they're pronounced the same. US English simply omitted the different spelling, so you have to tell from context whether it's spoken or written.
BTW, a "draught" is also a way of serving alcoholic beverages, IIRC.
Lastly, there's no such thing as "international English", no matter how much some America-haters might like to believe that. There's US English, UK English, Australian English, and various other English dialects, such as that spoken in India. The non-American dialects might bear more resemblance to each other than to the US one, but they're certainly not identical.
My wife and I must have had a very unusual experience in Paris. Over 4 days, nearly everyone we encountered was exceptionally polite (including many random people on the street, not just tourist shops).
The funny thing was that my wife, who can somewhat (but not really) speak french, would always make the attempt to speak french to someone, and they would nod and reply in fluent english. This happened at least a dozen times.
The impression I got was that people get annoyed if you walk up to them and start speaking in another language.
And, honestly, nearly every American I know would feel the same way. If I was in the USA and someone approached and immediately started speaking italian to me, I might be a little irritated. However, if someone approached me and tried to ask for help using the little english they knew, or even asked "Do you speak italian?" (in english), then I'd be perfectly happy to help them out in any language. (ok, I'd be happy either way, but that's just me... most people in southern Ohio (where I'm from) being approached by someone in another language would probably be met with a blatant insult and turning/walking away).
I think the french get a bad rap just for having the gall to act like any english speaker would.
That explains the treatment a college friend got when we went to France on an educational trip. He was French-Canadian by birth, and despite living in the UK for a number of years his passport was still Canadian. At the border control in France he was held up for ages and asked loads of strange questions while the rest of use went through without trouble. Then for the remainder of the trip French people were incredibly rude to him, particularly if he spoke French to them. To the rest of us the French were mostly just surly and uncommunicative - a nice way to make a bunch of sixteen year old believe the stereotype isn't exactly false.
Yes, every software developer who cares about his/her career should understand English. You can stick to your local market but this is a low ceiling for your career. In the outsourcing arena you must be able to speak to foreign customers and partners. Communicating well is part of our skills as developers (does anyone still think it is only about how technical you are?).
Besides, if you want to be respected as a programmer, you must write code that is not only well designed but also understandable by other people. It's not like we get a living from obfuscating code (at least we try not to :). I live in Brazil and if I ever write variable names or comments in Portuguese, it is on personal/practice code only, unless this is a project requirement (it hardly is).
My first contact with a computer was like 14 years ago. Everything has always been in English since then, from games to programming languages to decent Internet sites. Whatever the common idiom is, a standard is necessary, and if the current standard changes, we all will have to get used to it.
So let's do our best to improve our English skills and make ourselves understood. :)
Yes, but back in the late 80's I dealt with some German source code. 14 syllable variable names are ridiculous ;-} (OK, they're ridiculous when people write them in English too)
-- More Smoke! The mirrors aren't working!!!
Actually, Air France pilots speak French when talking to French controllers (so there's a mix of French and English on the frequency), and in Spain Spanish is spoken between Spanish pilots and controllers. Other pilots who don't speak the language don't have a clue what other airplanes around them are doing. This has already led to accidents, for example an airplane being cleared for take-off in French while another aircraft with non-French crew was crossing the runway. They tried to get French pilots to speak English in France (like they do when flying through other countries) but this resulted in a complete mess with certain pilots refusing to speak English, not replying to messages, controllers confused about which language to speak to which plane, etc... So they gave it up after one day and still speak French over France today. (Disclaimer: I am an Air France pilot)
I hail originally from Egypt. English is taught in public schools, but not to a high degree. Most university graduates have some working knowledge of it to get by. French is also taught for a much lesser number of years, but does not have an impact. Both English and French are taught more extensively in private schools.
In some disciplines, English *IS* the language of instruction and study (e.g. Medicine, Pharmacy, ...etc).
For computers, English is used as the natural language. All major computer languages are based on English (remember COBOL? Was very popular for decades).
Even when some company (Sakhr?) came up with Raed in the 80s, which was a computer that booted in Arabic, and had a BASIC like interpreted language in Arabic. The name Raed means "pioneer" as well as "astronaut". The company, Sakhr was based in Kuwait, and was promoting this as a platform for native Arabic speakers.
It did not fly. Most people who were doing computing already knew English, and those who did not know English nor computers did not see this as a viable option.
So, English continues to be the language of computing in Egypt and other places in the center and east of the Arab region. The western region (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) is influenced by French, and hence different.
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It really is terribly obvious, and it's a little chauvinist but English has the benefit of being everywhere already.
Does that make English like the Windows of Human Languages?
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.
Of course, in the situation you describe, you're not dealing with American tourists. If had to do that, I might run and hide myself.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
... that is binary, as we all know. Now if we could eliminate the little-endian scumbags who have continuously tried to destroy our language (sigh)
I never heard German and only a little Spanish, but watching 2 movies in these languages helped me know a tiny bit of their phrasing. Be sure the subtitles match (Chinese movies are realy bad for this) the actual foreign language and people speaking with respect rather than as punks offer better guidance.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
In medicine, the terms are Latin.
If you learn music, the terms are Italian.
Fencing terms are French.
Tae Kwan Do terms are Korean.
All air international traffic control is in English.
You learn the language of the field you're working in. Programming is American English, so that's what you use in that case. I wrote a coding standards guide, and despite being in Canada, though I'm as nationalistic as the next toque-wearing chesterfield owner, I specified that symbolic names must use American spelling (color, not colour), because that is the standard, like it or not, and doing otherwise would just lead to subtle bugs (e.g. set "colour" and nothing happens, because the text control is using "color").
I didn't speak english with my classmates, I had to spend 2x40 minutes every week listening to their attempts to read simple sentences aloud.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
20+ yrs ago i read a book (can't remember the title right now) about the rise of english...while it is a difficult 2nd language to learn, due to the chaotic spelling, that is the result of english's greatest strength: it has the largest vocabulary of any language (> 0.5e6 words) because it absorbs words from everywhere (usually retaining their original spellings, adding to the exceptions;-)
english is also a the defacto language of air traffic control...aren't you glad they say "jet" instead of "l'avion de le reaction";-)
and as an adherent to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir%E2%80%93Whorf_hypothesis i'm glad english is not monophonic: having more than 1 way to spell a sound (or pronounce a spelling;-) leads to more diverse thinking, and an acceptance of diversity...note that it was the _spanish_inquisition;-)
...and correspondingly, have a gazillion different prepositions and periphrastic constructions, which, since they're not cases or conjugations, the grammar books tend to skimp on. I'm serious, after 25 years of English, I still can't get 'in' vs. 'on' right.
Are you adequate?
Be careful what you insinuate there. Immigrant households produce high-ranking offspring because many of these parents are driven themselves. It's only the parents with no drive that tend to produce worthless offspring.
You can get the same amount of drive in a non-immigrant household. I experienced this growing up as poor white trash - my mother was a single parent with a high school diploma. She went back part-time to get her degree over several years, and insisted on her children doing the same.
Today, she has her Master's and a teaching certificate, my sister has her JD, and I just got my Masters's in ECE (the whole family is highly-educated). My entire family only speaks english.
Drive is the most important thing you can give a child.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
In French:
int monTampon[FOQUE_MAX];
In English:
int myBuffer[MAX_SEALS];
I still think the parent poster above is exaggerating the difference. Are people really having issues learning English from an American rather than a UK person??
Regardless of the reason why, a person speaking like a cast member of Friends is going to be understood by anyone fluent in English.
(A small query - is 'scone' an American term for you?)
Linus' native language is Swedish.
Just to be clear- just because on average bilingual children achieve measurably better grades, it does not mean that it is a) the only influencing factor, or b) any less possible for monolingual children to grow up to be intelligent, motivated powerhouses.
Your personal successes against the given odds don't invalidate the findings.
Confusing, how? If they sound exactly the same, then in spoken word you have to derive the intended meaning from the context. What's the big deal if you do the same for the written word?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Shakespearean Middle English
Shakespeare is considered the initiator of modern English by most linguists. And the old canard about hillbillies in the mountains of Virginia speaking Elizabethan English is mostly bullshit. True, many sayings that fell out of favor in England (such as "I guess" to mean "I suppose") stayed in vogue in the US, but the similarities are far greater than the differences.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... When I was in university, if you were an engineering major, you had to learn German, because most of the major papers for reference were in that language. Further back from that (18th and 17th century Europe) the language of economics and diplomacy was French. Ergo, when in Rome (or modern times) do as....
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
U r rite! I h8 wen ppl try 2 make me use xtra letrs! My msg stil gets thru... USA! USA!
Claiming there's no International English on the basis that Australian English and UK English are different even if closer to one another than to US English is just arbitrary. There are differences between Arizona English and New York English too, although by and large they are smaller differences than between US English and UK English.
That mistake is one of those I classify "under the radar", i.e. below the background noise of variations of English. Or at least I think, since adverb positioning is a shady subject anyway. I was thinking of something like an "always-first" adjective instead of a "usually-after-sometimes-first" one.
Wah, I blame Slashdot anyway. There are so many bad spellers here that, after a while, I started misspelling its, theirs and your, which had never given me trouble.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
"Ik vind het huis fijn" ("I find the house nice").
Or, if you wanted to show someone how similar it is to English: I find the house fine.
I am bemused though. I've laboured under the idea that lijk = like in Dutch. Perhaps I need to swat up a bit.
Get your own free personal location tracker
You call that cute?
When was the last time you saw a girl?
Ok, girls in Germany are generally pretty cute, so maybe I'm just a lucky lucky bastard. ;)
Still, I think that video of yours is pretty lame.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'll take "penis in the hand" for 400, Trebek.
I lol'd. That was fantastic :)
I shudder at the fact I must admit that, yes it is.
Its rules are proprietary, poorly documented and the legality of it is obscure.
It's inconsistent.
It steals its ideas from all the languages before it.
It's forced unknowingly on many people.
It's largely popular in the US and UK, though some of the rest of the world governments have mandated the use of alternatives inside the government.
It makes you much more interesting and useful to know something else as well.
It comes out with a new version as soon as you get used to the old version.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Imo English is ugly, totally illogical, and barbaric.
I wish I never knew it.
Moreover, English is like cancer consuming other languages.
Or rather, it spreads like locust ousting languages from many lands.
Of course a sysadmin should know it(into order to read mans, how-tos etc) like a doctor should know chemistry,
but after all a language is for communication and definitely unnecessary if there is no one you can speak it to.
I am trilingual and a programmer and I am a guy. Does it help to know more than one language. For sure. Especially if your mother tongue is not english. Most good documentation is in english. All of my programming books are in english. I actually studied all the programming languages from english texts. My third language is useful because I life in a different country.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Well, it always depends if you use english in real life. In Austria you have mandatory english from 6 years on until you graduate. But if you do not study it yourself with reading books and try to have conversations or use it anywhere, you stay monolingual. Most people from my class where "why do I need that stupid english".
Same here in Japan. All english movies on TV can be viewed in english or japanese. all movies in cinemas are subtitled and still the average japanese knows perhaps "Thank you" and "Sorry".
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Donaudampfschiffahrtskapitaenskajuetentuerschluesselloch.
And I think all original Cobol programmers came from german speaking roots ;)
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
It's enough to look at an average Object-C code. Any code word there is like 20 chars long ...
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
but draft and draught can both have different meanings too I think. Don't they?
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
I would say that English is based on a German structure, but English picked up a LOT of French words when the Normans ruled the British Isles.
What would be really cool is a programming language that could be programmed in English and then, with a couple of mouse-clicks, have the intent of the code converted into Mandarin (or some other language.) I've heard there's something out there called Protium that's trying to do just that very thing.
What, Bruce, excited??!
Claiming there is an "international English" on the basis that Australian English and UK English are closer to one another than to US English is also just arbitrary.
Ouch... a thread about multilingualism and an american acts as if there are only 2 languages on the planet. Never before has this been more relevant.
'There are two types of people out there, those that can speak at least two languages and Americans.'
And because you know that's a shamefully US-cock-sucking thing to say, you post anonymously.
I did say cuter. If you find a hottie reciting Rhabarberbarbara, please post!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
That's quite sad indeed.
But i wonder, are you going to switch to the metric system this century or wait a few more?
>No language is objectively harder to learn than any other language.
I disagree: in Japan writing is so difficult that there are still studying at grades where in Europe students don't learn anymore reading/writing (as these skills are supposed to be mastered).
"If that makes me an ugly American programmer, so be it."
It didn't until you suggested it might because you're American. America is neither the origin nor the sole country whose official language is English. But this ugly American made that very association without a nanosecond of hesitation. So you ugly Americans need to really work on thinking outside your borders, OK?
It depends a lot on your source language. My native language is dutch, so it comes quite naturally for me. Especially compared with finnish or something even further removed from me (chinese, for instance).
Note the word "common": http://www.duboislc.org/EducationWatch/First100Words.html
The cake is a pie
Now I have to learn Khoisan, Chinese, Arabic, and Swahili on top of Assembler, PL/1, COBOL, C, C++, Java, PHP, and Texan. When will it end?
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
When the number of Chinese programmers increase and alot of codes with Chinese comments come, what do you who are speaking English do? Can you try to apply yourself to the language?
It's no more confusing than UK English.
I made no claim that International English was less of a mess than US English, but in the specific case cited, US English is more of a mess. As for "draught" being something that's drunk (not necessarily alcoholic), that's an archaic usage that I can't ever recall hearing someone use in conversation.
Lastly, there's no such thing as "international English"
I suggest you look into linguistics and the evolution of modern English. It has nothing to do with paranoid accusations of "American hating". American English, as originally codified by Webster, is very distinct from the English natively spoken elsewhere. This is due to the more recent imperial connections, so dialects such as Australian, New Zealand and South African English are linguistically the same as UK English. American English reflects features of US history, in that it has had longer to diverge than Australian English for example, with less colonial administrators educated in Britain, and a long exposure to large numbers of people with other native tongues.
Because Webster et al clearly didn't understand dipthongs for example.
LOL @ Belgian's
You don't like people with multiple surpluses?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, it would be StringLenGet(). Verb at the end goes!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Informally you might draft someone in to help. We also use that spelling to mean a preliminary drawing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's just that Finns aren't very talkative to start with, and once you get outside Helsinki there's not much to talk about.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hmmm, is that language used in the finance industry much?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Really? So what language was spoken in Britain, France and Spain before they were conquered by the Romans? Perhaps they communicated by miming?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's rather unfair. It's not just the French, believe me.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The correct term for one of the little people is "leprechaun", so it is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll
I love that quote.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
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 live in Texas, north of Dallas but south of Oklahoma. We have a pretty big population of immigrants from central and south America. Many times the first generation speaks very little, if any, English. As a result many businesses and stores will have someone on staff who can speak Spanish and communicate with those customers. Many government forms are translated into Spanish. When my wife taught public school, every time she had to send a note home to her class she sent it in both English and Spanish (the receptionist translated). Most of the kids could speak English but often their parents could not. While I can speak a little bit, when I ran my retail store I made a point to have a fluent Spanish speaker on staff. I know that we got several sales from Spanish-speaking customers that most likely would have fallen through if we had to rely on my minimal Spanish vocabulary. At the moment I'm job-hunting and there are many, many jobs out there specifically looking for someone bi-lingual.
Other parts of the country may well be different, but in this area it's par for the course. Some businesses will, out of principle, refuse to translate anything or have a translator on staff. In most cases it's just good business sense to have at least some capability.
With other languages it's a crapshoot. We had some German customers in the store once who were vacationing. I had no way to translate for them, but I think unless you are in a business that deals with tourists from overseas on a regular basis then there's not much reason (from a strictly business perspective) to cater to that.
Unless one lives in an English speaking country outright, school is never going to be sufficient to learn a workable English—there is simply not enough time for practice. That's valid for English and any other language.
Agree completely.
Many of my friends have had classes in Spanish either in high school or college. During my high school and college years I spent a lot of time waiting tables at various restaurants. The kitchen staff and bussers were almost invariably Hispanic, mostly immigrants from Mexico or South America. Later I spent a year managing a warehouse where many of the employees were immigrants. I learned quite a bit of Spanish language from them - especially words about food, boxes, trucks and profanity. While my friends can conjugate verbs and correct my Spanish grammar, I can actually communicate with Spanish-only individuals.
I dare the ponce who modded this flamebait to fess up.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I live in Quebec where there is a tendency to french-ize everything in order to keep the french language alive.
Unfortunately, some hard-core people here believe programs should be written in french too. That leads to unreadable code.
When such situation occurs, I usually compare it to flying planes: if a chinese pilot wants to land in Toronto or Amsterdam, he'd better speak english if he wants to land his plane. Imagine if anyone would speak their own language...Planes wouldn't be safe.
It is also true for things like unit systems: the metric system is the international language of measurement, yet there are a few that still won't apply it (why? don't ask me), at the cost of say, losing a Mars probes, or generate other such disasters.
Another example is international diplomacy, which for arbitrary/historical reasons used to be conducted in French. Adopting a common language, whatever it is, avoids Babel-like issues.
The same, to a lower scale, applies to writing code: we're no longer in our small corner so we need to find a common way to communicate to make sure we can land the plane, or talk to the neighbours.
Babelfish?
Are 14-syllable function names any better? Was java a plot from "the boys in brazil?" Enquiring minds want to know (no, really, we don't :-).
U = 1! I h8 U mk I uz ++ abc! U = I msg.. CA! CA!
fxd 4 U!
It's tuf to understand your message, tho I rufly get your point. French has some great ones too. My favorite is the simple, single mora produced thru five letters:
"oeufs"
Enuf said.
there's no point in discussing that. english is easy to learn, easy to speak, any culture in the world can learn english. trying to force in acceptance of any other language that is effortlessly adopted by global world wont avail, just like french learned first hand.
before any of the radical idiots accuse me with anglosaxon imperialism, i would like to point out that im a turkish citizen.
Read radical news here
it is no brainer that having english as a 2nd language helped linus torvalds be who he is. i can testify to the effects of bilingualism first hand, since i am one of the generations in turkey who were thought a foreign language from the end of elementary school and educated in university with a foreign language. that being english.
some minority of my generation were taught german, because in those times (early 80s) turkey had great economic ties with germany, and germany was a booming economy. but today the people who are taught german is having a hard time in global world, because global world adopted english. and the positions and professions those of my generation's english taught percentage hold around the world are noteworthy. ranking from top executives in p&g to being one of top 10 people of even greater global megacorporations.
no sir. its not the 'linguistic effect' of 'any' language that helps people. its being able to actually communicate with anyone that helps. and this, is done through english.
Read radical news here
Then again, even though his nationality is Finnish, Linus's first language is *not* Finnish: His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5%) of Finland's population.