You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).
I'm really curious now. If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn the meanings of the keywords when they were in a language you didn't understand? Did you have to learn to translate "for", "while", etc into Russian equivalents?
Context. I don't know what lingua franka means, but I also know what it means. I could bother and find literal translation, but why would I? The same applies to obscure English words, weird programming language keywords or math symbols. Integral and differential symbols don't really translate into anything and we use the word "integral" only because we can't type this symbol on an average keyboard.
There is an obvious difference; English is still the lingua franca. If you're dealing with anything international, you use it because everyone has a decent shot of knowing it; assuming most oss isn't confined to a single nation, english is still the best choice. Plus, for this reason, other nations are usually much better than America about teaching a foreign language.
Sure, if you want to start an international project, then English is a pretty good language to use. However, I have heard people say that all software everywhere should be written in English, including things like personal projects and internal tools for companies in non-anglophone countries. I think that's kind of ridiculous.
Back in the 1980s, I thought it would be great to add German, French, and Japanese error messages to the compiler. I hired native speakers to do the translations. But nobody cared. Programmers program in English. I once traveled to Finland to visit a customer. Everyone in the office spoke in English. I asked if they were just being polite because I was there. They said nope, their staff was from all over Europe and t…
As discussed elsewhere in the thread, the few dozen keywords are a different matter (and are just memorized to mean "make the computer do ..."), but having useful error messages from your compiler helps get stuff sorted out more quickly. There are, to this day, people who get in trouble when their computers reply to them in English, including coding folks. I bet they were (and are) thankful for initiatives like yours…
> having useful error messages from your compiler helps get stuff sorted out more quickly.
We're still struggling with this in english. Think about how often the default reaction still is to google a compiler error, unless it's one of a handful of common ones you see often. Compiler errors are often opaque, even to the best programmers that speak english natively. A significant base of software emits error numbers with thin descriptions at best, which then have to be looked up in a manual anyway.
> Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. There are lots of "cultural biases in computer science" -- in UI, neural network training, encodings, terms of service, etc. Of all of them, this is the least helpful, and the least important. It's like doing math in local notation, or translating latin/greek terms doctors…
I am a native English speaker in the US and to me it seems palpably unfair. People much smarter than me have to spend a lot of time struggling with a foreign language, and are still unfairly perceived as less intelligent than native speakers. I could imagine it might be less unfair in a situation, like in much of Europe, where nobody is a native English speaker but many speak it (sort of like Latin at one time). And…
Well the question is why you'd want to allow it to become your problem, too, though. Having to debug libraries written in Elder Futhark or, case in point, Arabic, seems much more impossible than it may already seem sometimes, and that's why I'm not going to write a programming language in Swiss German, and keep my comments in English too, for that matter.
No, not really, I read the whole post. And the FORTRAN reference was weird, but there are weirder things people post (and believe), and when writing, people do make mistakes. Thinking back, it should have been the clue, but it wasn't. And judging by the other answers, I am not the only one who was fooled by the tone. That said, if you feel like `/s` is ruining the sarcasm for you, the solution is pretty simple. Greas…
> No, not really, I read the whole post. And the FORTRAN reference was weird, but there are weirder things people post (and believe) True. I'm sometimes a source for similarly controversial statements. However, the following line should suffice to indicate the facetiousness of the post: > This is the same reason that everyone uses FORTRAN. Everyone does not use FORTRAN, and in fact it is so uncommonly used that it is…
Did you read my comment? I also said:
> ...and when writing, people do make mistakes.
Maybe he meant Python, who knows? If only there was a way to signal you are being sarcastic to avoid misunderstandings. Oh wait... /s
This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does. This is the same reason…
A lot of people don't speak English and I think it's main barrier to become a programmer or QA engineer.
It's also a barrier to becoming a scientific researcher, an airline pilot, or working at an international company. If you're going to communicate with people from other cultures, you need a shared language, and many international contexts have centered on varieties of English for that shared language.
If there is one thing this will achieve then it should be this: it should help to show those born in the world of English what a privileged position they have. For every other person in the world not born into English that is the first hurdle they have to cross in order to get to the next one: programming itself. Anybody that is born in an English speaking region has a huge head start in this respect. Note that it go…
FWIW, most non-English countries teach children English in their version of middle school. And most English speakers aren’t like the stereotypical French; English speakers are quite tolerant of both sentence structure mistakes and extreme dialects. They’re not really at that great of a disadvantage.
Yes, they are. There is a huge difference between having a language as you mother tongue versus having it as a secondary one. My English is reasonably good, I started young (at age 10) and yet, by the time I was 14 or so the programming books I had access to were way over my head. If English had been my first language I would have had a much easier time.
It's not about English speakers tolerance, it is all about the reader's ability to grok a complex written text.
I like the idea of this project. Its main goal is to highlight the bias towards English in programming languages and computer science and I think that's a great goal. I also think another great use would be to provide a stepping stone to those who are native Arabic speakers to get into programming. There will still be the English barrier to move on to other languages (and likely more professional or "serious" work) b…
There is even a coined story about languages: Babylon. People there made great progress building things together while they spoke the same language, but everything fell apart when they started speaking different languages. Countries create their own languages and cultures sometimes artificially, to silo its citizens: when you've been taught since childhood to speak some odd language, it's hard to jump the ship later, so you have to restrict yourself to this little playground or make an immense effort and learn the international language. Luckily, such language still exist, although we take that as given. Software today is that Babylon from the story: everyone speaks the same language, everyone can can join and contribute with minimal efforts. No taxes, fees, licenses and permissions needed to join. As software rapidly gets bigger, people that have power start realising that this kind of freedom is unheard of. They are used to the world of borders where they take a toll for a permission to cross. So they pull the trick as old as humanity: introduce artificial fragmentation of languages and cultures and make people in their country use a language they control. And the more obscure and counterintuitive this language is , the harder it is for people to cross the barrier and the more profits they gain. If I were an evil and powerful dictator of a big chunk of the world, I'd force everyone there to switch to an artificial and very complex language, make it the only allowed language in the country, and do the same with software. From now on all these people would naturally have to live in this little artificial playground.