Programming as a Foreign Language
nuts.redsquirrel.com
Programming as a Foreign Language
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Programming as a Foreign Language
#2Makes me think about programming IN a foreign language. One time we had to fix some code a Turkish client had added to our system. The spec and the code were in Turkish (imagine Turkish COBOL if you will). We somehow got it done by trial and error (Is THIS what you want? No? How about THIS?) I have no idea whether this means anything, but we came away saying "Berklat bokari" to each other at random moments on future assignments. Those words or something like them kept appearing in the Turkish code.
Re: Programming as a Foreign Language
#3It's funny, but I've actually used the opposite idea: approaching the grammar of foreign languages like a programming language. Most programming languages are just historic collections of arbitrary rules, most of which make some amount of sense. Most natural languages are the same thing on a much grander scale. Thinking about grammar like this helped me learn it properly.
Re: Programming as a Foreign Language
#4Interesting comparison, but I find it hard to relate to at all simply due to the sheer amount of words you need to learn in a real foreign language to achieve fluency. Seems much more daunting to me...but I guess my glasses are tinted.
Re: Programming as a Foreign Language
#5Interesting comparison, but I find it hard to relate to at all simply due to the sheer amount of words you need to learn in a real foreign language to achieve fluency. Seems much more daunting to me...but I guess my glasses are tinted.
Try http://memrise.com/ for vocab learning - it's really helped expand my French vocabulary quite lot and seems to make it stick well. Doesn't really help with spoken fluency though, for that you just need lots of practice!
Re: Programming as a Foreign Language
#6Interesting comparison, but I find it hard to relate to at all simply due to the sheer amount of words you need to learn in a real foreign language to achieve fluency. Seems much more daunting to me...but I guess my glasses are tinted.
Try http://memrise.com/ for vocab learning - it's really helped expand my French vocabulary quite lot and seems to make it stick well. Doesn't really help with spoken fluency though, for that you just need lots of practice!
Thank you so much for bringing this site to my attention. It seems to have become a nice replacement for smart.fm which I used a few years ago.
Re: Programming as a Foreign Language
#7I had to work on some dutch COBOL once, was actualy realy easy if you take the standard approach and that is to ignore ALL comments as the code is the only documentation you can truely trust.
But the only truely universal language for programming has to be bainfuck :).
Re: Programming as a Foreign Language
#8Interesting comparison, but I find it hard to relate to at all simply due to the sheer amount of words you need to learn in a real foreign language to achieve fluency. Seems much more daunting to me...but I guess my glasses are tinted.
Try http://memrise.com/ for vocab learning - it's really helped expand my French vocabulary quite lot and seems to make it stick well. Doesn't really help with spoken fluency though, for that you just need lots of practice!
Hey, that's a really neat site! I like the way it's implemented.
Re: Programming as a Foreign Language
#9Makes me think about programming IN a foreign language. One time we had to fix some code a Turkish client had added to our system. The spec and the code were in Turkish (imagine Turkish COBOL if you will). We somehow got it done by trial and error (Is THIS what you want? No? How about THIS?) I have no idea whether this means anything, but we came away saying "Berklat bokari" to each other at random moments on future…
For a lot of the world population, english, as common as it may be in programming, is still a foreign language. People less fluent in English are that much less likely to try scripting something. Not only would the language keywords make little to no sense, but the supporting materials and comments as well.
Re: Programming as a Foreign Language
#10I wish more developers treated learning to program like learning a foreign language. When you're learning a foreign language, your #1 goal is to cast off any poor grammar or pronunciation and sound like an intelligent native speaker. It's been my experience that people often don't care very much about doing this with the programming languages they use.
Routines that are too long and ought to be refactored into smaller ones are akin to run-on sentences. Leaving out semicolons in your JavaScript is like speaking French in an Italian accent because you already know Italian and French people seem to more or less understand it. And people who refuse to follow prevailing code style guidelines? Those are your "Everyone there speaks English anyway" folks.
Such poor communication skills would be humiliating when trying to communicate in a foreign language, but for some reason people often wear them like a badge of honour when trying to communicate in a programming language.