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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.'"
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!
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, for one, welcome our new ulgy American overlords...
All your base are belong to us!
lol, good joke!
hahaha as if people comment code and write documentation ... lolorofl. chortle!
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
Next question?
American English or British English?
Sent from your iPad.
Then it is decided all programming languages will be based on Latin.
perscribo("Salve mundus");
print ("Hello World")....?
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
...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.
That's not English, it's American.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
The ugly American thinks that Americans only speak English.
Fixed that for you.
Changa hates change.
I think you mean "New and Improved English (TM) -- now with 20% fewer extraneous 'u's!"
everything in moderation
It's not as bad when you recite "using System dot Diagnostics dot Trace semicolon" first thing after you wake up every day.
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?"
... Working for a firm that did medical education ... everything was written in English ... We had to be careful not to write above a 6th grade level...
"Hello, Sir. I looked at the see-through pictures of your boo-boo, and it makes me sad. You will have to sleep here for longer, we need to look for more things. We might have to find a new red thingy from a person who doesn't need their red thingy anymore, and it may hurt for a while. We have these little pills you will need to eat. Please lay down for a while, and i will use this pokey tube to make you sleep while I cut."
Oh, wait, that was pre-school english, my bad.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Why? Because the US and England had the first major commercial air industries.
or, alternatively (quoting from: http://www.businessballs.com/airtrafficcontrollersfunnyquotes.htm)
Allegedly, a Pan Am 727 flight waiting for start clearance in Munich overheard the following:
Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."
Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war."
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
It's going to be fun when your bank merges with another (foreign) bank isn't it?
Although I prefer Esperanto.
Except, apparently...in customer support call centers.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What do you care, DoctorMetal? (if that is your real name, and your real occupation)
You're a doctor, no one can read what you write anyway. ;P
Sent from your iPad.
When I pointed out the oddity of that choice, I was told that even if they used their native language (Portuguese, in this case), that the conversation would be peppered with English words anyway, so it was just as easy to use English for the whole discussion.
I can vouch for that. Years ago, I was speaking to a friend from Brazil over aim. He doesn't speak English, so the entire conversation was in Portuguese. However, when we started talking about technical things, I simply didn't have the necessary Portuguese vocabulary. So I started trying literal translations and hoping it would get close enough to the real term that he'd recognize it. Specifically, I was trying to find the word for "firewall" and the conversation went something like this:
Me: "Parede de incendio?" ("wall for fires?")
Him: "nao." ("no")
Me: "Parede a prova de fogo?" ("fireproofed wall?")
Him: "Estamos falando de computadores, certo?" ("We're talking about computers, right?")
me: "Parede de fogo?" ("wall of fire")
Him: "que??" ("what??")
Me: "A coisa que protege computadores de acesso externo!" ("The thing that protects computers from external access"--I didn't want to introduce other terms like "ports" in the discussion, because I also didn't know how to translate that)
Him: "Ah, quer dizer um firewall." ("Ah, you mean a firewall.")
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
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.
Agreed. I had the joy of debugging perl code written in Russian a few years back. Not fun.
I can imagine that it was especially hard for Perl since the ruble doesn't seem to have a standard dedicated symbol. Finding a suitable substitute for all of the "$" characters must have been a real pain.
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
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
And all these years I thought all functions were written in German:
"GetStringLen()"
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'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.
I again recommend Rhabarberbarbara as a funny example of this. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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
And speaking of music in German, putting H on the scale between A and C makes no sense whatsoever; what the hell is wrong with them?
So that you could use B - A - C - H in a piece of music.
You took a fairy from Northern Ireland? I suppose Orangemen are not the only fruits.
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.
In-'f*kin'-credible!
Hey! Speaking as someone with ADHD, it's almost
So they accidentally the whole thing?
... 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)