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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.'"
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
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.
Let me translate for those that don't speak German:
Chief Inspector Lee:"Do you understand the words that are a-coming out of my mouth?"
Detective James Carter:"Don't nobody understand the words that are comin' out of your mouth!"
Sent from your iPad.
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.
Thanks to google translation German->English:
Yes, the speaking of English almost required, but in being able to think and work in many languages, is better.
I speak two languages. I agree that being able to understand English is required to be an effective hacker. Heck most of the documentation on anything technical is almost always found in English.
I remember slamming my head onto the table over partially localised expressions in the Microsoft Office apps. At least the language for mathematical expressions is localised, and also some scripting language if I remember correctly.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Not only do they exist, Wikipedia has a (probably incomplete) list of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages
I remember running across a reference to one additional language - IIRC, its name began with symbol used for the unit angstrom, and it was developed in one of the Scandinavian countries.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
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.
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.
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?
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/
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
...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.
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
All the main programming languages were invented in the English speaking world, by English speakers for English speakers.
Like Ruby (Japan)? Python (Holland)? OCaml (France)?
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.
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.
When in doubt, check Wikipedia: Cognitive Advantages to Bilingualism. I also wrote a little more here.
I speak French reasonably well, and learned mostly from Quebecers, and I'm a linguist, so here's a few answers that will get you going (most of these are not final or very detailed, though):
I believe nearly all Spanish monolinguals in Barcelona can understand Catalan to a moderate degree, since it's not extremely different from Spanish. They can't speak it, though.
Are you adequate?
The French have L'Academie francaise (yes, accent and cedilla missing), whose major duty is to make up a French word for everything. They're the only people who (officially) dislike the English enough to go to the trouble of doing this. Much of the rest of the world uses English for the same reason the Indians kept doing it after independence: it's widespread enough to be useful, and in many groupings it's nobody's native language - and thus doesn't seem to favor one group over another.
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.
What? The language of Madrid is Castilian. Galician is a separate language, closer to Portuguese than Castilian, spoken in Galicia on the Northwest coast of Spain.
Don't you know that the vast majority of imperative and object-oriented languages descend from Algol?
Designed by: Bauer, Bottenbruch, Rutishauser, Samelson, Backus, Katz, Perlis, Wegstein, Naur, Vauquois, van Wijngaarden, Woodger, Green, McCarthy.
Ok, some anglophones, but nowhere near a majority.
(And where does the insanity of "for English speakers" come from? Like foreign scum aren't allowed to use your precious VB?)
Watch this Heartland Institute video