They are spreading thin.
It used to be StackOverflow, I'd go search for something and ask if the search would yield nothing. Now they have a thousand sites and I don't know which one to look at, or ask questions on.
Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
81–90 of 260 posts
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#82"It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them." Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the more stupid…
Your written English is great - don't sweat it. Many native English speakers write worse than you.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#83I have strongly mixed feelings on this. When I was a kid my family moved to Brazil for a couple of years and I learned Portuguese. When I was about 20 I moved to Chile and learned Spanish. Speaking the language of the culture you are in is hugely important - and not very easy. So on the one hand if the culture of programming is in English (is it?) then I would strongly encourage anyone wanting to program to learn Eng…
The answer to your '(is it?)' is 'No!', english is just the language of the programming culture that we are part of.
And that is the whole point of this article; there already is a lot of programming culture that we simply don't know about because those people don't hang out on HN. They deserve a StackOverflow, too :)
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Trying to tackle programming and English at the same time makes for quite a barrier. That's how I played all games as a kid :) Civilisation + dictionary FTW
More than one of my non-native English co-workers has said the first English phrase they understood was: GAME OVER
Mine was 'REDO FROM START' :-)
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#85As a non-native English speaker, I have pretty strong feelings about English in engineering in general: everyone should just learn English. I see it as a remarkably good thing that engineering (and to some extent science) has standardised so much on English and I can only hope that all other walks of life will as well. It would be so nice if everyone on earth spoke excellent English.
My dad (that is a excellent programmer, and tried very hard for 20 years already to learn english and failed) disagree with you.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#86Programming specific I think is easier in English. I speak 3 languages and understand 4. Talking about programming, computer science and technology in non-Engish is awkward. It either is necessary to just use English terms anyway for every other noun or struggle with awkward translation of them. Things like kernel, doubly linked list, hash table, binary tree, greedy algorithm, they are all invented in English and whe…
I wonder how corporate programmers in non-english speaking countries communicate about programming. I would imagine that they use their local language for docs, commit descriptions, email lists, etc.
I think most of the source code people can look at is for open source projects and they always go with english as the default even when there are mostly non-english speaking programmers.
But what does it look inside private corporations?
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#87"It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them." Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the more stupid…
Your written English is great - don't sweat it. Many native English speakers write worse than you.
I am a little proud of my writing skills in portuguese (and always a little frustrated that I lose these skills in English). But the point is that it is not all that natural to me. Requires effort, a lot of thought.
I know the final result can be good, but gets in the way of "being part of a community" as the OP put it. Example: i started to play a little with Dogecoin, but I gave up being part of their reddit community because of the language (it gets worse when it is coloquial, informal).
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#88Programming specific I think is easier in English. I speak 3 languages and understand 4. Talking about programming, computer science and technology in non-Engish is awkward. It either is necessary to just use English terms anyway for every other noun or struggle with awkward translation of them. Things like kernel, doubly linked list, hash table, binary tree, greedy algorithm, they are all invented in English and whe…
Exactly. My native language is not English (it's Lithuanian) but when I talk about some rather hard-core topics (such as embedded systems), I just say that I will switch to English and continue talking in English. Because a mix of 70% English and 30% Non-English words is just annoying. When talking about general programming, nothing too deep, I am fine with my native language. You might think I am an arrogant ass hole, but...
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#89I have strongly mixed feelings on this. When I was a kid my family moved to Brazil for a couple of years and I learned Portuguese. When I was about 20 I moved to Chile and learned Spanish. Speaking the language of the culture you are in is hugely important - and not very easy. So on the one hand if the culture of programming is in English (is it?) then I would strongly encourage anyone wanting to program to learn Eng…
While learning English will help immeasurably when you're learning to program, the languages themselves are often highly English-baed, trying to tackle programming and English at the same time makes for quite a barrier. Since being able to ask difficult, technical questions in your native language would make it easier to learn, I don't see what's so bad about that. Yes, it fragments the community, but it also recogni…
I would say that reading documentation is a bigger problem then having to memorize a dozen or so keywords.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#90> 10% of the world’s programmers are in China > 1.4% of our visits come from China > Only 4.8% of our visits come from China, Japan and Korea combined > So, if the data tell us that we’re getting roughly 80% less activity from Asia than we should in the absence of language constraints, why does it feel so obvious that all serious programmers speak English? That data says it's less. It doesn't say the reason why is la…
When I first started, I used to hang out and ask questions in one of the major Chinese programmer forums.
I knew some English back then, but looking at a wall of English text was daunting in itself, now imagine a wall of English text that is not easy to understand even for native English speakers.