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Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

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Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#241

Post by klzns »

te_platt wrote: post #7

I 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…

I agree with you, but living in a another country makes it so much easier to learn a language rather than just studying by yourself. That's why cultural exchange programs are so common here in Brazil.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#242

Post by zhemao »

goshx wrote: post #240
zhemao wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never went to a real English school/class, as you can probably tell at this point by reading this No, I couldn't. You give yourself too little credit. Except for "way much fun", everything you wrote was perfect idiomatic English. I actually think a lot of us native English speakers are kind of jealous that we have little incentive to become proficient in a foreign language since so much of the worlds information…

Obrigado :)

De nada

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#243

Post by NigelTufnel »

jaimebuelta wrote: post #227
guelo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have a weird jargon of mixed languages... Basically you end up bolting together english words with other grammar to create monsters... I try to limit the amount of this weird jargon, but is extremely easy to fall into that. PD: This is in Spanish

Personal experience: weird jargon is a good thing. I've read a book on Hadoop once and it didn't use weird jargon - everything was in my native language. It was super hard to read - basically I needed to translate the book from my native language into English in my mind.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#244

Post by Someone »

pjmlp wrote: post #206
Someone wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's hugely dependent on the country. For languages with relatively few speakers translating (technical) texts into English is relatively more expensive, so people have to read more English to read e.g. books on programming. That makes them more proficient in reading English, thus decreasing the market for more expensive translations, leading to fewer translations, etc. Learning programming from English tex…

> I think that's hugely dependent on the country Quite common in Spain, France and Germany to have code in local language, based on my experience working in these countries. I already worked as code translator a few times, because of it. Sometimes it helps to be a polyglot of human languages as well. :)

Spanish is not a language with "relatively few speakers". According to http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_..., it is #2, ahead of English.

German and French (#11 and #17, at worst) aren't small, either, and have the benefit of having lots of rich speakers.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#245

Post by lmm »

gbog wrote: post #198
zanny wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a real brutal grammar nazi trend I've been seeing recently on various sites - apparently, someone gets a buzz of self entitled superiority off of correcting someones grammar mistakes. Personally? I think English is insanely stupid, inefficient, and dumb. I speak it because I have to, not because I want to, because everyone else does it. If you think trying to get breakout success in a market with, say, a sof…

> create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs only trace to possible human vocalization There comes Chinese characters, which are exactly the opposite of your definition of "optimal": Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly. In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisati…

I've heard that Mandarin is the only language many people regret having learned.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#246

Post by lmm »

pcrh wrote: post #26
fauria wrote: post #11

> Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia. Yukihiro Matsumoto. Rasmus Lerdorf. Guido van Rossum.

Would Satoshi count? (I'm not even a programmer!)

The most plausible candidate I heard is actually called Mike.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#247

Post by lmm »

moron4hire wrote: post #142
lucb1e wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So I take it you code in PHP and don't understand the necessity to have other programming languages. Learning another language is a foundational step towards becoming a better communicator. And software development is fundamentally about communication. Even if you don't need the other languages you learn, you are still a better developer for having learned it. And yes, I see no point in differentiating on a fundament…

> So I take it you code in PHP and don't understand the necessity to have other programming languages.

New programming languages are an effect, not a cause; they're designed as improvements on existing ones, and even quite disparate programming languages share a lot of common vocabulary. When a particular programming language is experimenting with a new paradigm, or is the best language for particular circumstances, it lives, but old, obsolete languages are allowed to die. Many natural languages offer no advantages over the alternatives, and should be allowed to die in the same way.

> Learning another language is a foundational step towards becoming a better communicator. And software development is fundamentally about communication. Even if you don't need the other languages you learn, you are still a better developer for having learned it.

Learning another language is a horribly inefficient way to improve your communication ability. A lot of it is just rote memorization, or internalizing categorizations that made sense at some point in the last thousand years.

> I also think it is inexcusable for a software developer to not be an extremely competent writer of their native, spoken language. If you can't express yourself with clarity and without ambiguity in your native tongue of English/Russian/Japanese/Dutch/etc., then you have no business writing code in your non-native tongue of Java/Ruby/Python/C/etc.

But many of those programming languages are better for thinking in than the corresponding human languages. A huge amount of the development of mathematics, what lets us solve problems at the undergraduate level where it used to take a genius to even find a few special cases, was simply coming up with the right notation for things.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#248

Post by sebastialonso »

lelandbatey wrote: post #59
chc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of centralization is not inherently incompatible with the idea of categorization. And it's really not that hard in most cases. Is it an objective question about writing code? It goes on Stack Overflow. Is it about programming as a broader topic? It goes on Programmers. Is it about servers or systems administration? It goes on ServerFault. Is it about general computing? It goes on SuperUser. Is it a highly su…

See, but what if I'm writing a little script using Bash to run on my server? Does it go in Unix? Or programming? Or serverfault?

You can always just publish it, and some caring and easygoing soul will very politely inform you the correct place to ask your question.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#249

Post by sebastialonso »

te_platt wrote: post #7

I 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…

Second you on the mixed feelings. I'm from Chile, but since I was a kid I've been learning English mostly thanks to the telly and then, from the Internet. School English is made to understand, not to speak.

In most of Latin America, English lessons are not something important for most people, because the actual chance to go abroad for work and actually speak the language is non existent. And that has to do with the nature of the jobs here. Having said that, I've notice that at least in Chile, and particularly in the startup/software development sector, this is changing at very quick steps, I'd presume it's the same in the rest of Latin America.

So, it's only natural that we have one language for programming, and don't think is a bad thing, quite the opposite. As a social measure, SO is hitting the jackpot, giving spaces for those who didn't have any.

I, personally, would focus more in teaching real life English, i.e. speaking the damn thing in the first place, focus on real life situations, and what not. SO should think this measure is only a patch, in some form. Is not, and it shouldn't be think of as a solution.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#250

Post by diogene »

pjmlp wrote: post #135
diogene wrote: post #133

Is it going to be Portuguese from Portugal or Brazil?

I imagine this is a rhetoric question.

How is it rethoric? Portuguese is a language that mutated a lot between the countries that use it. For more informations check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthographi...
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