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The Ugly American Programmer

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Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#41

Post by josop »

mpk wrote: post #9
mixmax wrote: post #8

Being Danish I can attest that this is very true - I write my code-comments in English, my business plans in Engish and do my financials in English. Even my blog is English. It just makes it easier to communicate, and I've never met a Dane that complained about it.

Same here. English is not my native language but I just do everything in English. Code, documentation, blogs, requirement docs, etc. Really, everything. Is this even remotely controversial these days?

Don't your customers complain that you write the requirement documents in English instead of the local language?

A big advantage you have as a local developer over an Indian developer is that you speak the native language of your customer. It seems kinda silly to throw that kind of an advantage away.

Besides, you can't really apply the principles from Domain Driven Design if you translate everything to English. You would end up with one language in your code and another language to talk to your customers, instead of a single ubiquitous language. This becomes especially difficult when you have a complex domain with tricky business rules that requires frequent collaboration with domain experts.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#42

Post by tokenadult »

wheels wrote: post #38
tokenadult wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it'd be more problematic in for instance Japan, Korea or China. Linguist David Crystal, who has surveyed world use of one or another "interlanguage" for official use by international organizations, has found that actually most frequent and most exclusive use of English as an interlanguage is in east Asia. It is remarkably "natural" for a Korean person to try speaking English to a Japanese person (even thoug…

Is that most frequent per capita or total occurrences? At least with the limited contact I've had with Chinese and Japanese developers the level of English wasn't particularly high, so I guess I'm a bit surprised by that. In the Chinese teams they even went as far as to try to suck in someone from Hong Kong so that he could be the bridge between the Chinese and German (the team I was on, though communicating in Engli…

Replying to your reply to my reply to you, my main point is that if a Korean is with a Japanese person, they MIGHT speak Japanese (I have seen that happen), or they might speak Korean (I have seen that happen more rarely), but most likely they would speak English with each other. Add a Chinese person or a Thai to the conversation, and it is overwhelmingly likely that they will all be speaking English to one another. The standard of spoken English varies from one country to another in east Asia. One problem is that many of the better English speakers eventually emigrate. But English is the general language of intercommunication among people from Asian countries, for lack of any other language in which speakers have stronger proficiency that they all speak.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#43

Post by GeneralMaximus »

I live in India and my native language is Hindi, yet I mostly use English for communicating over the web. If I had to explain even a slightly technical concept (say, a simple data structure) to someone in Hindi, I wouldn't know where to begin.

Given a choice, I'd always pick English over Hindi as my language of choice, not because I dislike Hindi, but because I'm much more comfortable with English. Why? Because I read books written in English, read English newspapers, watch English movies and TV shows and read a whole lot of technical content written in English. Thanks to the American tendency of "exporting" their culture, English is all I've been exposed to (and I consider it a good thing).

In real life, most (educated) Indians speak a mish-mash of English and Hindi. Modern Hindi itself is a mish-mash of words borrowed from Urdu, Farsi, Punjabi etc. It's actually pretty liberating, being able to express yourself without even having to stop to think how to phrase a sentence. Can't complete a sentence in Hindi? End it in English.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#44

Post by bpyne »

likpok wrote: post #27
pmarin wrote: post #16

Eric Raymond: it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job Or probably English is simply the most easy to learn.

Well, English does have a larger technical vocabulary than most other languages. Admittedly, this is more because English accepts other languages technical words into the language, so therefore (to some extent) is the union of the technical language. With this in mind, i would not call English easy to learn. There are far too many special cases and bizarre twists to get to true fluency (it might be east to get to a p…

My opinion is based on a limited sampling but how a language is taught is key. My wife and I each took French classes for 6 years prior to meeting. Her teachers emphasized speaking fluency while mine emphasized writing. She was taught to use idiomatic expressions and to "improvise" while I was made to memorize rules. We decided to take some French classes together for fun. She was much better able to communicate in general. I can read/write French okay in a formal way. When speaking though I tend to stumble trying to think through rules in my head. In contrast, I took 4 German classes in college. The professor had us watch German television shows and speak in "street" German. At the end of 4 classes, I was fluent enough to hold full conversations with German people when I visited. Even factoring in the regularity of German the teaching method seemed more effective.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#45

Post by mixmax »

josop wrote: post #41
mpk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. English is not my native language but I just do everything in English. Code, documentation, blogs, requirement docs, etc. Really, everything. Is this even remotely controversial these days?

Don't your customers complain that you write the requirement documents in English instead of the local language? A big advantage you have as a local developer over an Indian developer is that you speak the native language of your customer. It seems kinda silly to throw that kind of an advantage away. Besides, you can't really apply the principles from Domain Driven Design if you translate everything to English. You w…

The thing is that your customers speak English too, and most technical, financial, etc. domains also lean towards English.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#46

Post by chancho »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #43

I live in India and my native language is Hindi, yet I mostly use English for communicating over the web. If I had to explain even a slightly technical concept (say, a simple data structure) to someone in Hindi, I wouldn't know where to begin. Given a choice, I'd always pick English over Hindi as my language of choice, not because I dislike Hindi, but because I'm much more comfortable with English. Why? Because I rea…

"Thanks to the American tendency of "exporting" their culture..." Oh come on, surely the British share some of the responsibility there, if not all of it. Last I checked, we haven't yet liberated* India, so if Indians consume American media (movies, books, music, etc) then they are actively importing it, by their own choice. And its not like you don't have alternatives in India, with its thriving native entertainment industry.

Some countries don't have native content-producing industries, and so you could say that the importing of foreign culture squashes these industries before they can develop. On the other hand, keeping it out is basically censorship.

(* This ironic use of the work "liberate" is a sick joke that I'm not proud of, but it does sum up the cynicism most brain-holding Americans feel about their government's foreign policy.)

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#47

Post by josop »

Tichy wrote: post #10

This really doesn't need discussion. English is simply the language for science and computer stuff, just as latin used to be in the past (not for the computer stuff, but for science).

Well yeah, but you rarely write programs about science and computer stuff. You write programs about some business/domain where English might not be The Language.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#48

Post by hvs »

patio11 wrote: post #30

This post gives me the overpowering urge to write a rebuttal in Japanese just to prove that an American can. Let me hum a few bars: if your customers don't speak English, and your colleagues don't speak English, and your business partners don't speak English, then your refusal to use languages other than English cannot be justified by it being efficient . It is hubris to think otherwise -- an arrogant sort of lazines…

This has nothing to do with what you are talking about. Of course you have to take into account the language of your users. That doesn't mean that the development isn't going to be done predominantly in English. ESPECIALLY if you are working with developers with different native languages is English going to be the fall back. That was his point. And he's not saying that he's proud or arrogant that it is English, just that it is. It's a fact of life.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#49

Post by Tichy »

josop wrote: post #47
Tichy wrote: post #10

This really doesn't need discussion. English is simply the language for science and computer stuff, just as latin used to be in the past (not for the computer stuff, but for science).

Well yeah, but you rarely write programs about science and computer stuff. You write programs about some business/domain where English might not be The Language.

Sure, but if you want to use current libraries and programming languages, chances are documentation is in English.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#50

Post by gommm »

wheels wrote: post #20
mpk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. English is not my native language but I just do everything in English. Code, documentation, blogs, requirement docs, etc. Really, everything. Is this even remotely controversial these days?

I don't think so within the EU (perhaps in France ... chuckle), but I suspect it'd be more problematic in for instance Japan, Korea or China.

I'm a french living oversea and so write and think mostly in english... Most of my friends in France work in french and their english level is often quite weak (especially when it comes to oral communication, one of my teacher at university used to read 'done' as do-one, case as 'cahse' and so on, it was rather funny...)

When working in japan, none of my japanese coworkers could speak or read english (even worth than France...) and they only read translated programming books with a 6-12 month latency to get new information....

Now if I hired programmers, I would never hire someone who doesn't read english fluently because I believe that someone, who is truly interested in programming, will try hard to learn English so he can access to the quantity of knowledge written in English.

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