31–40 of 65 posts
Another small example of the network effect increasing the dominance of the already-dominant language.
Yes, but the dominant languages can change over time.
I'd go as far as to say everyone should just move to English for everything, not just Operating Systems.
That's why I write my code (var and function names, comments) in English. First, it meshes nicely with the rest of the language, keywords specially. Second, the most important docs, books, forums, wikis, mailing lists, etc are in English.
Heh, I moved to Poland three months ago from my native England, and the one thing that's really helping me with the language is setting my Windows installation to be in Polish. Note: I guess this step isn't necessary if, unlike me, you don't suck at learning languages ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but the dominant languages can change over time.
And they do, However, in different contexts. Latin has been the language of (European) science long after it stopped being dominant in other respects. English can turn out to remain dominant in technological fields, specifically software, for a long time, even as other languages may overtake it otherwise.
Anyway, one reason for using English versions is that localizations are often rather strange and that GUIs or less well tested. It can easily happen that a text doesn't really fit into the space that was left for the English message.
I'd go as far as to say everyone should just move to English for everything, not just Operating Systems.
I speak two languages: English and Russian. Though it drives me crazy when I have to use software and especially cellphones in Russian - I can't understand anything there. I'd say, everyone needs to know English, but I wouldn't like if majority switched to English as their only language. In my opinion, other languages help us to learn history of their countries.
So I hope this doesn't sound insensitive but I would rather everyone learn English, I think it will just make everything a little easier. It is like having a common API between people ;-)
Shouldn't we instead be contributing to non-English documentation so that even those who are too poor to learn English, can still learn to use a computer? Ubuntu is doing this beautifully.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I speak two languages: English and Russian. Though it drives me crazy when I have to use software and especially cellphones in Russian - I can't understand anything there. I'd say, everyone needs to know English, but I wouldn't like if majority switched to English as their only language. In my opinion, other languages help us to learn history of their countries.
Agreed. English is the second (or third, in my case) language to know, but it would make me very sad if everyone started using English in contexts that don't require it.
Yes. But I would think in the information technology domain, most of the entities don't translate very well. For example words like 'daemon', 'driver', 'segmentation fault' etc. these acquire a certain meaning that just cannot be translated easily to other languages. So you end up with half-half type mix, half of the words in English half in the native language. It ends up sounding silly.
Actually you should switch to software that keeps localization in configuration space instead of code, allowing you to switch languages on a per-user, per-program or per-session. Having user-targeted messages hard coded is a bug.