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

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Not much different than learning French a century or three ago if you wanted to go into nternational diplomacy and handle high government legal affairs.

Musical vocabulary is Italian....

[Rozzin]

I read an anecdote somewhere that went something like this:

I asked a programmer friend, whose native language was something other than English, whether he was bothered by all of the hold of English over programming.

He responded by asking me, "Are you at all musically inclined?"

When I said that I was, he asked, "Does it bother you that all of the musical vocabulary is Italian?"

When I said, "No, of course not.", he said, "Well, it's the same thing--it's just an artifact, that the thing has a vocabulary from wherever it developed."

Selection Bias

[SlashDotDotDot]

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.

Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual

[Anonymous Coward]

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.