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The Ugly American Programmer

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Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#61

Post by plesn »

gommm wrote: post #50
wheels wrote: post #20

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'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…

French was an 'imperialistic' language as well, until not so long ago; France had a strong economic and diplomatic influence. You had good conferences in several domains in French. It's tough to loose this kind of influence, and I think the case is similar for countries like Japan or Italy. Young people in e.g. Poland seem to have it easier to adapt...

But your last sentence seems really harsh. Good communication skills are so much more important in real life to have work done.... I know a few good programmers in France for whom reading english is a lot of (sometimes necessary) pain. I'm sure more contacts with foreigners would give them a incredible confidence/motivation boost.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#62

Post by Rexxar »

vinutheraj wrote: post #2

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 !

The template language of spip : http://www.spip.net/@?lang=en

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#63

Post by neonscribe »

vinutheraj wrote: post #2

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 !

Algol 68, one of the grand failures in programming language history, allowed for multiple representations of the same source code, including allowing for each natural language to define its own set of keywords. You can see a code sample with English or German keywords in the Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68

Just to be clear, I consider this to be an argument against the idea.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#65

Post by tokenadult »

jhancock wrote: post #54
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…

Your observations on English as an "interlanguage" is interesting. I can see this happening. 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.

English as an interlanguage among Chinese people has become much rarer since the retrocession of Hong Kong strongly promoted the use of Mandarin there. Most of the examples I had in mind date from the era when an educated Hong Konger would be much more likely to speak English well than to speak Mandarin at all.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#66

Post by shard »

verdant wrote: post #29
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).

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.

The terminology used in music composition are in Italian, but are the research papers and discussions written in Italian?

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#67

Post by Vivtek »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #31
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.

I don't think english is easier to learn, just more fault tolerant. We are used to translating bad english and have no trouble with statements like this: In the early part of the 1950's in the USA, a game called "Violence Fight" was in vogue among mafia, reckless drivers and general businessmen. The "Violence Fight" was the game to struggle for "No. 1 Quarreler" with fighters who were gathered from all parts of the U…

I think the French language tolerates it just fine. French people don't tolerate people who butcher the language, because it's a social thing, but there's not a human language in existence that doesn't degrade gracefully.

You can walk from Paris to Rome, never finding two neighboring villages that can't understand one another. Somewhere along the way, what they're talking isn't exactly French or Italian -- they just polish up their speech when the government men from France come.

That's less true today than it used to be, of course; more people go to the city for education. But it's still true of everybody's grandma.

My point is that all human languages are fault-tolerant.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#68

Post by jmtulloss »

nitrogen wrote: post #53
kurtosis wrote: post #24

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.

To my knowledge, this is a subject that is rarely if ever covered in US schools (I don't recall seeing anything related to software internationalization listed at my university). I'd suggest that those who want to promote translatable software start by encouraging schools to teach their students how to externalize strings, deal with wide characters, etc.

I disagree. How to do localization is usually pretty straightforward, so why teach the APIs? There's barely enough time to communicate a basic understanding of complex systems to students, teaching them localization is a sideshow.

Anybody who wants their program to be used in another country needs to localize it, and that point, a simple Google search is enough.

Re: The Ugly American Programmer

#69

Post by dinkumthinkum »

Wow,Jeff Atwood sure knows how to state a position that the vast majority will roughly agree with yet still position himself as champion of a controversial position. He's not necessarily an "Ugly American;" I think simpleton is more to the point.
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