I do not like that. One world, one language. Preferably English. How cool would that be? No more language barriers. English is not my first language.
Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
61–70 of 96 posts
Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
#62I think it will be a niche. People forget that most people working in software are in corporate jobs(or `website jobs` e.g.: PHP+Jquery), and there lies most people that don't care that much about perfecting the skills etc, i.e.: People that take it as a job and not a craft(and I'm fine with this, honestly) So this may capture lower grade q and a's but it doesn't matter.. for example, I do speak english and it's very…
When I was interviewing with Stack Exchange, one of the employees there made this off-hand comment (not direct quote, but probably close): "Brazil is seeing a lot of out sourcing work with high quality output but for whatever reason they just don't seem that interested in learning English, so we are localizing the site"
Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
#63I think it will be a niche. People forget that most people working in software are in corporate jobs(or `website jobs` e.g.: PHP+Jquery), and there lies most people that don't care that much about perfecting the skills etc, i.e.: People that take it as a job and not a craft(and I'm fine with this, honestly) So this may capture lower grade q and a's but it doesn't matter.. for example, I do speak english and it's very…
Still it's nice that Portuguese got the first one ;) Not to mention the moderation capabilities SO may up the level of things a bit... I'm in some brasilian Android, Ruby and Java lists/groups and it's just noise on my inboxes to me.. Too much of beginner level discussions / Googleable stuff(to me)
Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
#64If you're a programmer and you're not comfortable with english, you better become. Fast. There's just no way around it and I think it's a good thing, it means less fragmentation of knowledge. Remember when Nginx documentation was almost entirely in russian? Yeah, it sucked. ps: English is not my first language
While it's true that learning English is very important and helpful for non-English-speaking programmers, they address this concern (as it applies to pt.SO) directly in the article. Translated for those who can't read:
We didn't think that having the site one language only would be a problem. After all, most programmers speak English, right? Even programming languages themselves are in English, isn't that right? But we forgot something very important:
We weren't writing a technical manual. We were building a community.
It took a while, but we finally understood what most of you already knew. It's very difficult to be part of a community that, literally, doesn't speak your language.
The point they're trying to make here is that it's one thing to read technical documentation in your non-native language, but it's quite another to try and constructively participate in a community, where there's a lot of complex, back-and-forth discussions, and things need to be explained clearly.
It's true that, for an individual developer, learning English well will open up these sorts of communities. But so long as people aren't yet doing that, communities like pt.SO will be a big help.
Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
#65I think it will be a niche. People forget that most people working in software are in corporate jobs(or `website jobs` e.g.: PHP+Jquery), and there lies most people that don't care that much about perfecting the skills etc, i.e.: People that take it as a job and not a craft(and I'm fine with this, honestly) So this may capture lower grade q and a's but it doesn't matter.. for example, I do speak english and it's very…
When I was interviewing with Stack Exchange, one of the employees there made this off-hand comment (not direct quote, but probably close): "Brazil is seeing a lot of out sourcing work with high quality output but for whatever reason they just don't seem that interested in learning English, so we are localizing the site"
That's probably another point.. It's not on our education system, Most mid-class kids go to paid schools, I went to a good one but didn't learn English there, I did a paid, years long, English course and played a lot of MMOs so it was 'easy', I believe in India and other outsourcing hotspots English is much more tied in basic education...
The cost for this is really high and now I see that most of my friends who didn't learn from an early age are probably not learning it anymore(time and money issues) and, if they do, their English will still not be very good
Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
#66If you're a programmer and you're not comfortable with english, you better become. Fast. There's just no way around it and I think it's a good thing, it means less fragmentation of knowledge. Remember when Nginx documentation was almost entirely in russian? Yeah, it sucked. ps: English is not my first language
While it's true that learning English is very important and helpful for non-English-speaking programmers, they address this concern (as it applies to pt.SO) directly in the article. Translated for those who can't read: We didn't think that having the site one language only would be a problem. After all, most programmers speak English, right? Even programming languages themselves are in English, isn't that right? But…
Did you guys consider doing something like Simple English Wikipedia instead of a different language? From my experience ( I know, I know, anecdotal evidence) with non-native english speakers using english they seem to be most worried about making mistakes, if they are talking to someone who is also not a native speaker they tend to communicate better simply due to worrying less.
Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a mix of market demand and potential. China has all the clones, so Mandarin-speaking people already have their Q/A equivalent. India (mostly) speaks english at a level that allows them to participate in the "original" Stackoverflow. Arabic? As much as there is a big population, I would venture that there is not enough demand. Brazil, OTOH, is a reasonably industrialized country with some industries that are quit…
LOL as a Brazilian, that was my first thought too! The most skilled developers will continue to use the global SO and only the "pesky" will move to the new site. The only real drawback is for the youth who doesn't speak english well yet, and now has one more incentive to never really learn it.
Exactly what I thought as well, [as a Brazilian myself] I predict this PT-SO will be filled with "easy" questions easily answered by a search, and should have a very low level of actual good content. I'm not pulling this out of nowhere, I tried participating in multiple Brazilian programming communities, but it's always the same beginner-level-you-could-have-figured-it-out-yourself type of questions.
As for the youth that doesn't speak English well yet, I suppose they could see the low quality that this PT-SO would be as an incentive to actually start learning it :-)
Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fragmenting knowledge doesn't give much benefit. What about Wikipedia? I think they are benefiting from being multi-language. > English is the standard language for the IT for better or worse. All programmers are certainly not fluent in english. Reading code/documentation is one thing, having a discussion / asking a question is different. Most non native english speakers probably don't feel confident enough to ask…
I prefer the English wikipedia to my native one. Also wikipedia is not SO. A good answer in English helps the whole world. A perfect in Portuguese helps only Brazil and Portugal. There should be harmonizing effort that at least takes the cream of pt.* and moves it to the main site. And I think there is a fundamental problem with SO and the way they manage the content generated - the current model is not working well…
> I prefer the English wikipedia to my native one.
Yes, but obviously, you can read English. Most people can't.
> A good answer in English helps the whole [programming] world.
There is only about 1/10th of the population that speak English as first or second language[1]. I am sure that there are plenty of people that could use a good Q/A website where they can ask questions in their mother tong.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...
Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
#69This is great... I always feel the need of this for Spanish.
The think is that stackoverflow is a great resource and even when it is true that English is the standard language in software, it is also true that a lot of developers living in non-english speaking countries don't domain the language, this is specially true if they are teenagers.
Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) English is the defacto language for IT/Engineering - just as pre ww2 for some fields German was a mandatory language and before that all natural philosophers of course used Latin.
English is not, anything is better than having a knowledge and discussion spread over an hodge-podge of languages. And I say this has a non-native English speaker.
You think English is not the defacto language? Why not?