Comments on: Should we use English?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:17:50 +0000

That's not true.
I learnt English by Programming. It goes in both ways.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:17:21 +0000

Yes, to be able to read the documentation and learn the language.
A really big problem is that almost all new languages use special characters like {[]} which might be easy on an english keyboard but certainly not easy on my swedish keyboard. Why is those characters even needed at all?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:58:55 +0000

I came across an excellent forum post by the author of lxlabs, a widely-used web hosting control panel:

"As far as we are concerned, English has become the de-facto language of the internet. There is no way you can escape it. So we are not going to take too much effort to support other languages. As the net evolves, we believe a single language is pivotal for surviving in the internet and it is a good thing if everyone learns English."

More at http://forum.lxlabs.com/index.php?t=msg&goto=47646&#msg_47646

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:15:19 +0000

The statement may sound politically incorrect, but it is in fact -partially- true. The fact of the matter is that if you are a programmer and, because you don’t know English, you do not have access to the enormous amount of information (in English) that is out there, you will not be as good (or effective – if you like) a programmer as you could be.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:06:54 +0000

I think it is very rude (although in a sense true) that someone that doesnt understand english is not a programmer because its over-generalizing concepts. I think it would be better to say that it is definitley more difficult for a person to become a good programmer now days if he doesnt read at least some english. But I would even refine the sentence and say that no one can really become a master programmer without reading books and papers, which are of course (now days with amazon) mostly found in english.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:49:09 +0000

I totally agree with that. When I was young and couldn’t read English properly, it was even hard to use a Chinese edition windows, some error messages were not translated. One interesting thing is that there were some programming languages are Chinese based (I’m sure there are some in Japanese).

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:33:38 +0000

"A programmer who doesn't at least understand English is not a programmer."

I am Russian, I live and work in Russia, and I agree 100%. On all software development teams I've worked in the past here, knowing English at least to the level sufficient to read technical documentation and books, and write code comments, was effectively a requirement for the job.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:19:58 +0000

I often come across software developed by French or German authors. It usually employs clever algorithms, but the usability is a mess, or downright obvious features are missing. An extreme example is http://atpic.com.

Note that I’m not biased by my American culture. Although I do reside in California, I was born and have been living in Romania until 23. I can only conclude that those who don’t really understand English, at some level, don’t “get” software development.

See also this excellent post on The unexpected relationship between writing code and writing

By: Cd-MaN

Cd-MaN — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:22:10 +0000

@Brownie: in my opinion none of the software we refer to as "great" has been written by people who didn't read documentation in English.

Also, yes, I would say that if you claim to be a programmer but never touched C-like languages, you're not really a programmer. If you are a good programmer (this in my opinion means enthusiastic) you have used at least one C-like language.

Artist (like level designers and so on) I give you, but programmers have to know English at a level to read documentation.

@Zuhaib: Google Translate (and similar tools - anyone remembers Babelfish which seems to be owned by Yahoo now?) can help, but nothing is more efficient than reading the original text in English (I almost never read programming books which are "localized" - even though they are much easier to come by - I would just get annoyed by the funky language the translators trying to make up).

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:27:07 +0000

Just because you "understand English" doesn't mean you can be expressive in English. Even if you'e fluent in English you can have problems expressing yourself.

Spelling, on the other hand, every real programmer should know how to spell.