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.'"

Comments

Yes

[daveewart]

Yes, almost certainly. You need to understand English to develop in programming languages where the syntax and reserved words are in English.

Next question?

Way to extreme, but then there is ATC

[VoxMagis]

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.

Re:Ja

[Em Emalb]

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!"

Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Any choice really?

[Ender_Stonebender]

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.

Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual

[CRCulver]

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.

Why not

[JBMcB]

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.

Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual

[hoover]

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.

Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual

[orzetto]

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but IIRC, Finnish is also very similar in structure and sound to English.

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.

Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual

[ucblockhead]

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.

Re:Quebeqois and French

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

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?

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):

• The biggest difference between Quebec and Parisian French is pronunciation, and within that, the biggest difference is the vowel system. Quebec French vowels are systematically different from Parisian ones. The second biggest difference is vocabulary. Grammar is almost identical.
• What you are referring to as "Jamaican English" may in fact be Jamaican Creole, which linguists consider as a different language. The grammar is very different from English, despite the vocabulary being primarily English.
• The Quebecers understand the Parisians perfectly well, while the Parisians don't understand the Quebecers. The biggest reason for this is that the Parisians they never hear enough Quebec French often enough to learn it, while the Quebecers see plenty of movies in European French. (A similar situation happens for Brazilian and European Portuguese; the Portuguese understand Brazilian perfectly because they watch Brazilian soap operas, while Portuguese soaps are dubbed for the Brazilian market.)
• The Spanish of Madrid and of Barcelona are mutually comprehensible. I believe what you're really thinking of is Catalan, which is a different language than Spanish, official in Catalonia (where Barcelona is located). Catalan is more closely related to the native languages of southern France (e.g., Provençal) than to Spanish. (And some more caution here: the native languages of southern France are not the same thing as the French dialects of southern France...)

  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.