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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.'"
... notes that 'Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise).
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.
I've also ready that being bilingual or a polyglot is beneficial to thinking and memory skills. So I would caution thinking that because Linus Torvalds chooses comments in English for any reason other than more people speak it than Finnish. I would also caution you to assume that Linus learned English in order to increase his hacking skills. And I might even be inclined to argue that Linus' bilingualism aided or enabled him to reach such great heights with programming languages.
After toying with tools like ANTLR, it's not too far of a jump to say that understanding another language (even a dead one like Latin) helps you understand that information & logic can be portrayed multiple different ways with different vocabularies & grammar rules. Thus priming you for many software languages.
I cannot attest as to whether or not English buys you anything over Russian or Chinese as far as resources available on the web but I will argue that someone who has Russian as a first language and Chinese as a second will most likely be better off to code than someone with merely English as a first language (Disclaimer: I am the latter).
'advocating the adoption of English as the de-facto standard language of software development is simple pragmatism, the most virtuous of all hacker traits'
I don't think that makes you an 'ugly American programmer' but I sure do think it sets you up for some surprises in life.
My work here is dung.
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
...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.
Here's a response from an American in China with some good considerations on where to draw the line: http://odwks.com/2009/03/mandarin-chinese-programmer-communites/
Unpleasantries.
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!
English has become the de-facto language for air travel and academic research as well. When efficient, accurate communication is required, there needs to be a common language that is used. The choice of the language isn't so important, as long as the community comes to a consensus (whether explicitly or implicitly).
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.
Cool, that sounds interesting. Upon what will you base your argument? Or have you confused "argue" and "assert?" An unfounded, unbased assertion is not an argument. HTH!
everything in moderation
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.
I think it's a more general statement: "All programmers should understand and be reasonably fluent in one common language.". It just makes collaboration easier if there's one language everybody can use when they need to talk to each other. It just so happens that English happens to be the one language with the largest "market share", because of the way computer programming started off. Personally I don't think English should get primacy just because it's English, but at the moment it probably involves the fewest people having to learn a language they don't already know. Plus, as noted, it's such a mongrel. As the joke goes, it doesn't so much borrow from other langauges as chase them down a dark alley, whack them up the back of the head and riffle their pockets for vocabulary. English is probably the best language out there when it comes to having short, direct ways of saying technical things. To me, those things give English the best claim to the position.
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
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.
I read an anecdote somewhere that went something like this:
-rozzin.
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.
The ugly American thinks that Americans only speak English.
Fixed that for you.
Changa hates change.
jeff atwood is proposing a nonsolution to a nonproblem
for historical reasons, english has become the de facto language of business worldwide, and programming as a global profession simply follows this proclivity, no questions asked, no need to underline the point
a non-english speaking programmer knows he or she is limiting their options career-wise simply by ignoring the largest resource available to them: other programmers, who are undoubtedly speaking english, even if they themselves are not native english speakers. and so there is no need to insist programmers speak english, as it is self inclusivity (of those who choose to speak english freely) that is the prime motivator here, not esternally applied exclusivity (insisting someone speak english... that already knows its important)
if a programmer self-excludes by choosing not to speak english, who cares? its there choice. let them program in english language isolation. how does that effect you? its not like you are going to an english language symposium and run into someone who insists you speak hindi to them, or comment on an english language programming tip site, and run into a comment in mandarin, or sit next to a programmer in the office, who only speaks spanish. the hindi speaker would have never gone to the symposium in the first place: its in english, announced up front. the mandarin speaker would not comment in the english language programming site: all the other content is a sea of english, what's the point? and the spanish-only speaker would never have been hired in the most probably english-speaking place of business in the first place, you would never run into such a person
in other words, jeff is pointing out a nonexistent problem, that even if it existed, has a solution proposed which is pointless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm Russian, and computer languages with Russian keywords look very awkward to me.
First, there's a problem with grammatical cases ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case ). A lot of languages with Russian keywords suffer from it (1C, I'm looking at you!).
Second, Russian words are usually longer than their English counterparts.
Third, Russian keyboard layout clashes with some useful characters (keys '', '[', ']', ';', '"' are used for Russian symbols). And I can't remember a language with less letters than English :)
Of course, some of these objections may not apply to other languages.
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.
/...
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?"
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.
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I think that his argument was based on his preceding statements. He said that bilingualism increases cognitive and memory skills (it does), and from that he noted that a bilingual programmer will probably be a bit better off than somebody with only 1 language under their belt. Just because you state your claim after the evidence doesn't make it any less of an argument.
As someone who learned english from computer manuals and TV shows at the age of nine I feel the need to call bullshit. I don't think I learned any english at all in school and as a kid I was constantly confused by those of my classmates who seemed to speak worse english at 15 than I did at nine, later I realized that a possible explanation for this might have been that I was exposed to the english language on a daily basis from an early age while most of my friends never encountered it outside of class until they were in their teens, and even then they preferred to read the subtitles in movies rather than just listen. So yes, I do believe just hearing and reading english can be enough to learn quite a lot.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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.
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
Except, apparently...in customer support call centers.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In my time in Paris (only a week), I didn't meet a single person who spoke English outside of museums or stores close to them.
That's quite likely. I doubt you met anybody who couldn't speak English, but you would meet a lot who didn't. Especially in the holiday season. When I was working in Paris I found that almost everyone spoke English until the tourists arrived, and then nobody did.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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.
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
Try German. Just about anything that requires a sentence in English can be said with one 14-syllable German word. :D
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bilingualism increases cognitive and memory skills (it does)
Is this proven at all? It would seem obvious to me that those with better cognitive and memory skills are more likely as a result to be bilingual... but if there is evidence that bilingualism causes better cognition and memory I'm happy to be proven wrong.
>>>I found that almost everyone spoke English until the tourists arrived, and then nobody did.
In other words the French are rude. When someone from a foreign country walks into an American store, we do our best to help them, like finding a translator. We certainly don't snub them & pretend to not hear them.
"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()"
In other words the French are rude
Oh, you have no idea.
Being Canadian, I was forced to take French in high school, so I can read it fluently and converse somewhat.
However, my "French" has a strong Québecois accent. On the French I-spit-upon-you scale, that makes you more of a target than even Algerians.
By day 3 of my first visit to France I decided I'd get along with the natives much better pretending to not speak a word of French.
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
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.
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If you think Finnish or Hungarian are difficult, you should play around with the languages spoken by some of the native north americans... Imagine infixes, where you split apart a word and stick a new syllable in between the two halves to conjugate... and those conjugations are based on the physical position in space the speaker is to the object, and which direction he's facing!!! And that doesn't even take into account the tones and the respect-level modifiers!
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?
Hey! Speaking as someone with ADHD, it's almost