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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.'"
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.
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.
There is only one english language, which originated in a country called England. The other one is just a strange dialect for people that don't know how to spell correcly.
Why do you have to replace s with z in so many words and why are all those u's missing?
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
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."