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Python coders from non-English speaking countries: please write your comments in English, unless you are 120% sure that the code will never be read by people who don't speak your language.
And that's for all code written in Python, not just the code that goes into Python. Guido is Dutch.
The overwhelming majority of programming languages use English keywords Can anyone tell me any programming language which doesn't use english keywords!?! English is the common language of communication throughout the world, and consequentially the effect has percolated into the hacker world too I guess !
When I've heard programmers criticised for the "ugly american" behavior it is not about the use of english as a technical lingua franca. The ugly american programmer is one who embeds english chauvinism into the user experience of their software. This includes lack of unicode support, and support for locales and internationalization.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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…
As to the observation of different Chinese dialects using English as an interlanguage within China (...I assume you didn't mean within China)...this is probably very rare. In my 9 years of living in China mingling with all sorts of regional and ethnic groups, I have never once seen this happen.
The overwhelming majority of programming languages use English keywords Can anyone tell me any programming language which doesn't use english keywords!?! English is the common language of communication throughout the world, and consequentially the effect has percolated into the hacker world too I guess !
Well the relevant question is do people do serious coding in any non-english programming languages ?! That's why I was so surprised when I heard of them !
It would be hard for one to understand how anybody uses it, if you don't understand the language, but that does not imply non-existence. You'd also be hard-pressed to find any, because all your searches will come up in English :)
But if you're talking about cutting edge, then, no.
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).
Just as programming languages are expressive in different ways, so are spoken languages, and the designers of programming languages, when exposed to a few ways of structuring ideas, end up writing code the same way.
You can argue that mathematically they are all the same. The computer doesn't care, but the human-readable code is different. If you have ever structured your code so it reads more like English (example: _why's poignant guide), it reflects this thought process.
Another example: somebody once remarked that lisp is a counterintiutive way of structuring code because that's not how language is normally used. If one has learned a few other spoken languages, it is immediately obvious how intuitive the lisp syntax is.
Of course, again, on the metal it makes no difference, so technically we can all "not care"... but when I see elegant code, it's elegant both to the computer and to the human, and that's where it's art, otherwise it's just raw optimization.
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).
Another example of this would be in music composition where Italian is the language used (to describe tempo, dynamics, etc.) regardless of native tongue. I'm not an expert, but I would suspect there many disciplines have a language that is commonly used, and it so happens that Comp Sci happens to be English.
That is, words like "tempo," "crescendo," and "forte" are Italian in origin, but who's going to say, no, they're not English? They're native enough.
Now, let's take a discipline with non-English terms. Take Go for example. There are many terms in Go that are shared between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean schools. They can be written similarly in hanzi/kanji/hanja, with two catches: 1., the same characters are read differently in different places; 2., Westerners, using exclusively the Latin alphabet for their native needs, cannot read the hieroglyphs.
The result? What term should English speakers use? Pick one! Which one? Whichever! For Go, the Western world picked Japanese. You have ko, moku, seki... So which was the common language? There are now two answers. First, there was a common script, which was Chinese characters. Second, there was a commonized pronunciation, which came from Romanized Japanese.
It's not a "so happens to be" thing. It's a speed and scale of adoption thing, and in this way it is a "majority wins" game. And here, the winner is the Latin alphabet. To come around, I would suspect there are few disciplines that do not turn into a Latin-alphabet-standardized-, and in effect, English-, field.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's both, I think. Basic grammar is fairly easy and succinct. But then there are 60K phrasal verbs (stand up, stand down, understand, stand under, stand over, but never "overstand") and special cases, connotations, figures of speech, etc. It's difficult to explain to a learner why it is technically correct but not usual to say "This is my election for lunch", or why a "hot chick" goes to college while a "hot chicken…
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.
Re. Danish - at my first day at Comp Sci at Tech. U of Denmark, I had no clue what this "oversætter" (literally "translator") they were talking about was. Turned out to be term coined in the 1970's for what I knew as a compiler. Esp. among older staff there, they still use the Danish term.