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Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

blog.stackoverflow.com

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Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#51

Post by jerf »

venomsnake wrote: post #26

That could backfire badly (disclaimer - English is my second language, so I suppose I don't have some superiority complex). Fragmenting knowledge doesn't give much benefit. English is the standard language for the IT for better or worse. Right now a small investment of learning technical English (you need probably 1000 words and rudimentary grammar to be able to search and even contribute) could pay off a lot. If we…

I can accept English as a professional requirement [1], but it's actually pretty easy to get into programming as a non-"professional programmer", and we're often pushing that programming should be extended out to school children or other groups that we can't also count on pouring years into an English-as-second-language education. I'd like such people to be able to find materials in their own language if possible, lest the bar get raised too high for basically no good reason.

[1]: Cards on table, I am effectively monolingual (can read simple French, can arguably read English far enough back in time that's it's not really the same language anymore, but that's not practically useful for programming), but IMHO that's mostly because I just have no options here for being immersed in another language, or I'd pick one up. I've taken a stab a couple of times at learning other languages but with zero (natural) opportunity to speak it to anybody else it's been an uphill battle to convince my brain it's worth doing; it keeps optimizing away the second language and, abstractly, it's correct, and that's hard to argue with....

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#52

Post by icebraining »

reubenmorais wrote: post #42
bnegreve wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fragmenting knowledge doesn't give much benefit. What about Wikipedia? I think they are benefiting from being multi-language. > English is the standard language for the IT for better or worse. All programmers are certainly not fluent in english. Reading code/documentation is one thing, having a discussion / asking a question is different. Most non native english speakers probably don't feel confident enough to ask…

> Most non native english speakers probably don't feel confident enough to ask questions on english speaking forums like SO. On the flip side, people are feeling too confident about asking questions on pt.stackoverflow.com, lowering the SNR quite a bit. But I don't know how English SO was at the beginning, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also took them a while to establish the current quality standards.

The English SO was a special place, since many of the users came from Joel's and Jeff's blogs, instead of Google, so I don't think they can be compared directly.

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#53

Post by stingraycharles »

phowat wrote: post #39

If you're a programmer and you're not comfortable with english, you better become. Fast. There's just no way around it and I think it's a good thing, it means less fragmentation of knowledge. Remember when Nginx documentation was almost entirely in russian? Yeah, it sucked. ps: English is not my first language

Yeah, it's even worse when people use their native language in code comments or, god forbid, variable names. There suddenly is no way of collaboration with people who aren't familiar with your native language.

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#54

Post by reubenmorais »

robteix wrote: post #13

I can't imagine ever searching for a solution to a problem in Portuguese. I never google in Portuguese, ever. Content quality is just abismal.

I have a feeling this is more about Google results getting worse really fast when you don't have a lot of relevant content. For example, I don't remember the last time I clicked or even saw those fake generated pages on English Google, yet every time I search for something in Portuguese those show up.

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#55

Post by Adirael »

stingraycharles wrote: post #53
phowat wrote: post #39

If you're a programmer and you're not comfortable with english, you better become. Fast. There's just no way around it and I think it's a good thing, it means less fragmentation of knowledge. Remember when Nginx documentation was almost entirely in russian? Yeah, it sucked. ps: English is not my first language

Yeah, it's even worse when people use their native language in code comments or, god forbid, variable names. There suddenly is no way of collaboration with people who aren't familiar with your native language.

I once inherited an spaghetti PHP project with everything (code, comments and documentation) written in swedish. It was awful.

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#56

Post by venomsnake »

bnegreve wrote: post #37
venomsnake wrote: post #26

That could backfire badly (disclaimer - English is my second language, so I suppose I don't have some superiority complex). Fragmenting knowledge doesn't give much benefit. English is the standard language for the IT for better or worse. Right now a small investment of learning technical English (you need probably 1000 words and rudimentary grammar to be able to search and even contribute) could pay off a lot. If we…

> Fragmenting knowledge doesn't give much benefit. What about Wikipedia? I think they are benefiting from being multi-language. > English is the standard language for the IT for better or worse. All programmers are certainly not fluent in english. Reading code/documentation is one thing, having a discussion / asking a question is different. Most non native english speakers probably don't feel confident enough to ask…

I prefer the English wikipedia to my native one. Also wikipedia is not SO. A good answer in English helps the whole world. A perfect in Portuguese helps only Brazil and Portugal. There should be harmonizing effort that at least takes the cream of pt.* and moves it to the main site. And I think there is a fundamental problem with SO and the way they manage the content generated - the current model is not working well for me lately.

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#57

Post by kroger »

Wow, I'm surprised by some of the comments here and on SO. Talk about promoting diversity!

For people saying that programmers need to know English. I agree, I speak English as a second language myself. However, learning English is not easy for everybody as isn't learning programming. Some people find easier to learn something in their native language. They can learn English later. Also, you can be a good programmer without speaking English at all, provided you have access to learning material. (Naturally, speaking English will be a huge advantage)

In the 1600s you had to speak Italian fluently if you wanted to be a musician. Today you can learn the meaning of words like "forte" and "stringendo", without having to really speak Italian. Programming is pretty much the same; one can learn the meaning of things like "if" and "function" and learn the big concepts (abstraction, algorithms, etc) in their language.

EDIT: formatting

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#58

Post by specialp »

When I was at Stack Overflow's offices on a tour they said that most developers speak English, but they found that Brazil and Japan had much higher numbers of developers that only spoke their native language. This was about 6 months ago. I think it is a good thing as most of these people that would use the Portuguese version would probably not use the English one anyway so it is not as if information is being lost.

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#60

Post by buzaga41 »

I think it will be a niche.

People forget that most people working in software are in corporate jobs(or `website jobs` e.g.: PHP+Jquery), and there lies most people that don't care that much about perfecting the skills etc, i.e.: People that take it as a job and not a craft(and I'm fine with this, honestly)

So this may capture lower grade q and a's but it doesn't matter.. for example, I do speak english and it's very probable that I won't use much pt.stackoverflow if at all, just like I didn't browse the countless brasilian PHP, Java, JQuery, RoR forums and `Something-BR` discussion lists and groups before, but the people in there may do

So in my opinion it's irrelevant what you say about English being such a must and that it won't be as high-quality, to the people that will use it, it will be useful

To be a 'development is my craft' kind in fact English is essential, but that's just a small slice of the pie, to SO, it's business, or am I wrong?

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