Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

blog.stackoverflow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 260 posts

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#251

Post by userulluipeste »

mehmetemre wrote: post #221
gbog wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Chinese is an isolating language, so it doesn't have affixes, conjugation etc. so they can use that kind of writing system. In the other hand, English and lots of other languages (including my native language Turkish) are synthetic languages, so they have affixes, and they do not adapt well to logographic writing systems (class of Chinese characters) in my opinion (I am not an expert on linguistics). My reasoning is…

"My reasoning is not the cognitive overhead that's caused by memorizing tons of characters, but overhead of encoding/decoding the affixes into that type of writing system."

But that need to memorize IS a cognitive overhead that is hard to dismiss. The Japanese have to learn thousands of Kanji from their early years (of elementary school) till well into high-school! And I would say that the encoding/decoding is actually an overhead only until it gets automatized in subconscious mind.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#252

Post by pjmlp »

diogene wrote: post #250
pjmlp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Because if you bothered to read the article you would have seen it is Brazilian Portuguese, assuming you are Portuguese native speaker like myself.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#253

Post by astrodust »

azernik wrote: post #202
astrodust wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recogni…

The connection between programming languages and English is highly exaggerated. Programming language syntax is generally nothing like natural language syntax, and programming language vocabulary (keywords, data structures, standard library names) is usually completely divorced from similar-sounding or similar-spelled words in English.

The biggest problem I've seen is that a lot of the words have subtle meaning and the jargon used to describe the theory is often difficult or impossible to translate.

For example, a "stack" or a "filter" or a "queue" all have specific meanings outside of programming, their nature hints at how they work, even if the technical meaning is obviously different.

Not knowing what any of the things were leaves you with a hazy concept of what they are until you understand their English analog.

I still think it makes sense to try and explain concepts in the language in which one is most proficient, then worry about English later.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#254

Post by jeorgun »

gus_massa wrote: post #68
fauria wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should have added "Or Denmark. Or Netherlands.", but the idea is the same.

In Denmark and Netherlands, they use almost the same letters than in English. In Japan, China and Russia, they use other scripts, so the names are more difficult to Google unless you use some kind of transliteration or nickname. For example, there was a very important Russian mathematician Чебышёв, every book transliterates his name in a different way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pafnuty_Chebyshev

This is absolutely true, and undoubtedly a barrier to communication. It's also a complete non-starter as an argument in favor of a Portuguese SO site, so I really have no idea what it's doing in the article.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#255

Post by K0nserv »

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…

I have worked solely in small development shops and startups in Sweden. I none of them was the usage of swedish in commits, documentation or code acceptable and in most it was outright forbidden. Very rarely have there been developers who did not speak swedish, still english was the de facto language for everything. Where I currently work the policy is that only fleeting conversations may be conducted in another language than english.

In my opinion this is they way it should work everywhere, code in any other language than english is not acceptable.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#256

Post by K0nserv »

hattenn wrote: post #232

(Here's the comment I posted on StackOverflow, I wanted to share it here too.) I haven't read all the comments, so forgive me if I'm just repeating the same stuff (on another note, I hope I am). This is a horrible idea, if you ask me. Language barriers are there because there are languages. If you keep supporting languages, there will always be language barriers. English speakers, especially Americans, feel bad about…

This is the opinion I was looking for in the comments. All though the general sentiment behind pt.stackoverflow.com is good the execution is not. As you say this will only create additional segregation by separating developers based on their proficiency in english. The programming community benefits enormously from having a single common language. Just imagine the problems that would occur if we had libraries that did not use the common language.

However the problem of english proficiency and the barriers it creates for aspiring programmers is still very important. I say: let's not try to localize programming and further the segregation of the community, instead let's try to combine english education with programming education in a meaningful way.

First language is swedish by the way.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#257

Post by jaydles »

blah32497 wrote: post #74

Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not just use Google translate? (or some equivalent) If you don't know any English and you were to auto-translate your question. I think the vast majority of the time you'd get the answer you're looking for. You don't even need the result to be very grammatically correct or to sound natural. Most of the time you just need to get the gist of it and get a code snippet. It'd be help…

We'd love to be able to take all the info we have, and make it available in every language. But here's why it's harder than it looks:

`This is probably a dumb question , but why Google Did not translate simply use ? (Or equivalent ) You do not know English , and if you did, I will automatically convert to your question . I think most of the time , and want to get the answer you are looking for. It grammatically correct is very , or not require a result , you also , to sound natural . Most of the time , you need to and get the gist of it , to get the code snippet you . (Such as , what so that you will translate well to etc. ' space ' Portuguese equivalent of ' space ') because it was translated properly , keyword if there is a conversion method that targets the programming field I think that can help . I feel like the creation of the map of the term would be relatively easy to me. The graduate scheme of things , I hope knowledge is connected in English really . It is a common language in the world , and it also , it 's one of the most expressive language . I spend some time working in Japan , and the knowledge of many , they were crowded world away from the B / C was trouble they will learn English very effectively . ( They are large enough , they're advanced enough that you can afford to maintain the online technical community and trade press in Japan )`

I translated your text above to Japanese and back. (To be fair, that's two "lossy" transfers, not one, but it's pretty clear that you couldn't possibly have a two way discussion that way.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#258

Post by foldr »

lunchbox wrote: post #203
gbog wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe…

>Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.).

The different "dialects" are really different languages altogether (certainly as different as the various Romance languages, for example). It seems unlikely that a country as vast and diverse as China would have become monolingual just if they'd used a different writing system.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#259

Post by dimitar »

zanny wrote: post #155
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…

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…

You may try to use IPA for English.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#260

Post by moron4hire »

lmm wrote: post #247
moron4hire wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I think you're being unduly limiting in your consideration of things that one can think about.
Post reply on HN