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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
...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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
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.
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
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.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
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