Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#131

Post by gorrillamcd » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 9:32 PM UTC

oscargrouch wrote: post #58

People barely now this, but theres a social inclusion aspect by creating the portuguese version of StackOverflow. In Brazil, at least, only the kids of wealthy families have access to private english courses.. In regular school its just too weak to make a difference.. and of course there are the self-taughts.. a minority.. So, there are a very good social inclusion aspect in all of this.. make the rookie programmers…

This! People aren't realizing that in a lot of countries, english classes in the normal school system are a joke. And there are many people that don't have the resources to go to college or private classes to learn this. I have some young friends in Mexico that don't even have assurance of their next meal and would like to learn some skills to help land a better job than washing cars, but they're stuck. It's a catch-22 and having programming information and curriculum in their native language would remove one more barrier to them getting out of that situation. It'd also help me teach them since I wouldn't have to translate so much.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#132

Post by smackfu » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 10:04 PM UTC

Odd that they waited two weeks to write this blog post. Should have been out on day 1, because obviously people are going to have questions about it. Instead they just had an explanation blog post in Portuguese:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-announcing-s...

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#133

Post by diogene » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 10:04 PM UTC

Is it going to be Portuguese from Portugal or Brazil?

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#134

Post by ansimionescu » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 10:06 PM UTC

soneca wrote: post #73

"It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them." Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the more stupid…

Agreed, writing posts/comments in English as a non-native speaker (with anxiety issues) is a real endeavour. Thankfully I've put so much time in it already that I can be reasonably certain that what I write is correct, and "flows" well, but I can definitely relate to your struggles.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#135

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 10:11 PM UTC

diogene wrote: post #133

Is it going to be Portuguese from Portugal or Brazil?

I imagine this is a rhetoric question.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#136

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 10:16 PM UTC

As Portuguese I congratulate SO. Now I just hope it means all Portuguese variants (Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe) and not just Brazil.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#137

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 10:19 PM UTC

guelo wrote: post #86

rdtsc wrote: post #45

Programming specific I think is easier in English. I speak 3 languages and understand 4. Talking about programming, computer science and technology in non-Engish is awkward. It either is necessary to just use English terms anyway for every other noun or struggle with awkward translation of them. Things like kernel, doubly linked list, hash table, binary tree, greedy algorithm, they are all invented in English and whe…

I wonder how corporate programmers in non-english speaking countries communicate about programming. I would imagine that they use their local language for docs, commit descriptions, email lists, etc. I think most of the source code people can look at is for open source projects and they always go with english as the default even when there are mostly non-english speaking programmers. But what does it look inside priv…

> But what does it look inside private corporations?

Except for the big international corporations, most of the stuff tends to be written on the country's language.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#138

Post by dcustodio » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 10:19 PM UTC

Walkman wrote: post #125

I have been in Portugal two years ago and everybody, I mean EVERYBODY told me that all Portuguese people speak English, because every movie comes with subtitles only (no sound translation), and most of the films are English. They only translates cartoons for small kids. I mean, is Portuguese the best language to start with?

I think the idea of starting with portuguese is because of the large brazilian community that struggles with english. In portugal most programmers speak english fluently. I, for one, will continue to use english.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#139

Post by notastartup » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 10:38 PM UTC

I am afraid that stackoverflow has become a very hostile environment for the sake of some delusive over optimization as a code bank for every single question out there. The thing about questions is that although there are similarities, they often are not placed in the same context, stackoverflow mods zealously flag even relevant questions like "what libraries should I use for X" because it's not a really answerable question but they are forgetting that this optimization by downvoting (negative user experience) and censuring the question asker leaves a very bad taste in new comers experience.

Even I, as an old timer on stackoverflow get harassed (the usual passive aggressive and cold hearted engineer style) with time to time by people who otherwise do not have any reason to be commenting on the question itself such as "if OP doesn't know this, it's a miracle that he does X" or other ad hominem remarks.

Stackoverflow really has become a hostile place to ask questions provided they don't censure you for variety of subjective rules.

These days I find Ask HN to be far better user experience.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#140

Post by pacofvf » Thu, Feb 13, 2014, 10:41 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #115

moron4hire wrote: post #47

This is great, and I think multilingualism is something we should encourage amongst dedicated developers. I mean, it's not like we don't already have to learn a variety of languages already. I personally get a kick out of communicating with people in other languages. It almost seems like a super power.

> I think multilingualism is something we should encourage amongst dedicated developers. Why in the world would you do that? Languages are the biggest timesuck in the history of humanity. How can you build knowledge together if you can't even communicate with one another beyond drawing a square rectangle in the sand? We finally got around to doing counting in, well, mostly one universal system, but languages are stil…

> Why in the world would you do that? Languages are the biggest timesuck in the history of humanity.

A language not only express the ideas of the speaker, it also carries a lot of historical and cultural data, I love learning new languages even if I don't become proficient in that language. Being said that, I don't think it's a good idea for non-native Portuguese speakers to ask/answer questions in pt.so

> Uhm, no? I know English and my native language (Dutch) and that is more than enough. The only language I had to learn besides my own was the one that most of us on here see as the universal one: English. And for all I care the Dutch language can die a quick and silent death.

I'm a native Spanish speaker, being the second language with most native speakers in the world only behind mandarin, why would I settle just with English?, Spanish is more useful for me in all other activities of my life, I only use English on the Internet, even my Brazilian boss is a fluent Spanish speaker.