This is one of the few situations where I side strongly with ESR: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4
Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
31–40 of 260 posts
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#32> We do want as much centralization as possible Yup, totally centralized. Spent half an hour figuring out where my question should go (StackOverflow vs Programming vs ServerFault vs SuperUser vs Ubuntu vs Unix-and-Linux). Ended up not asking the question at all. Shall they open some foreign embassies, I guess users'll spend 10 minutes more deciding in which language should they ask (i.e. whenever they prefer native l…
If you couldn't even define the question well enough it probably wasn't fit for SE anyway.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#33I have strongly mixed feelings on this. When I was a kid my family moved to Brazil for a couple of years and I learned Portuguese. When I was about 20 I moved to Chile and learned Spanish. Speaking the language of the culture you are in is hugely important - and not very easy. So on the one hand if the culture of programming is in English (is it?) then I would strongly encourage anyone wanting to program to learn Eng…
While learning English will help immeasurably when you're learning to program, the languages themselves are often highly English-baed, trying to tackle programming and English at the same time makes for quite a barrier.
Since being able to ask difficult, technical questions in your native language would make it easier to learn, I don't see what's so bad about that. Yes, it fragments the community, but it also recognizes that the world is not English only. Right now there's large Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and French communities that are second-class citizens without a tool like Stack Overflow.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#34> Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia. Many Ruby developers won't have a problem with this.
Yup. Matz immediately came to mind. Also, to the question of english but not native would be Salvatore of Redis fame.
So, not to be mean, but can you name his FQJN (fully-qualified Japanese name) offhand?
The score of people here saying "Matz" somewhat underscores the issue.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#35> We do want as much centralization as possible Yup, totally centralized. Spent half an hour figuring out where my question should go (StackOverflow vs Programming vs ServerFault vs SuperUser vs Ubuntu vs Unix-and-Linux). Ended up not asking the question at all. Shall they open some foreign embassies, I guess users'll spend 10 minutes more deciding in which language should they ask (i.e. whenever they prefer native l…
The only difficult difference here is Stack Overflow vs Programming, the others are pretty descriptive. The difference is not too hard to understand, but still not intuitive for a new user.
There is also some overlap, so if you have a question about Ubuntu you can also ask it on Unix&Linux.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#36instead of starting a brand new stack overflow in another language they should think of some way of letting people translate questions & answers and earn karma for that. this way, like wikipedia, you can always go from one language to another for the translation
That's actually a great idea...
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#37Here's one:
Because any language other than English is brainfucked in string support.
There, I said it.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#38So why start a duplicate place for knowledge? Seems much simpler to integrate a translation system into the canonical English database. Existing entries can be translated into other languages and then improved upon. Hell, you could automate the entire first step and then crowd source the improvements.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#39A really bad idea. Now a really good answer or tip that would otherwise be on the 'regular' stackoverflow (albeit in broken English) will remain, unknown, on a 'pt.overflow.' That is one drawback. Another drawback, an English only stackoverflow helps a Portuguese speaking person to learn another language that is, now, more universal. Yet another, it fractures an otherwise more unified community.
My mother tongue is Spanish, yet I have no issues with an English only stackoverflow, at all.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#40I like it. I wish there was a reference to Orkut worked in there. That social network thrived for a long time purely because a couple Brazilian open source celebs latched on to it.