Mwanji Ezana wrote:
> On Apr 17, 4:27 pm, "Todd Costella" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> If I heard correctly, one of the main reasons they fellows are doing the
>> podcast is that they work all day in English and wanted to have some outlet
>> to discuss technical topics in French. I have a ton of respect for folks
>> that speak multiple languages.
>>
>> It's something we (English) North Americans just take for granted that we'll
>> do a Google search and find an answer in English. I do wish the fellows the
>> best of luck with their Podcast. I'll be following along as best I can
>> keeping up with Java news.
>>
>
> That reminds me of Jeff Atwood's recent statements on his blog and the
> Stack Overflow podcast about English as the only language that counts
> for programmers. For someone who's created such a successful piece of
> social software, I'm surprised he didn't see why people would want to
> talk about programming in their own language.
>
My own opinion is probably somewhere in the middle.
I remember that back in school times we had a localized version of
Pascal (80s in Germany), but at home I would use a standard Turbo Pascal
and a US keyboard layout despite the fact that the physical keyboard was
German*. One of the main reasons is the obvious one of the matching
documentation, but you also experience a lot of inconsistencies since
hardly any localization is complete. If you consider the environment we
work in you'd need not only a localized language, a localized JDK and a
localized IDE, you'd also need localized libraries for everything. It
just doesn't seem feasible.
The other aspect is that Germans tend to use a lot of English terms in
IT. Having lived in an English-speaking country for a few years I find
it hard to talk the resulting mix of German and English words -- it
requires pronouncing the English words somehow a bit more German as to
not break the flow, which feels rather awkward to me. For me it is much
easier to talk English and I have had conversations with German
colleagues where we would fall into English because the terms are
somehow more readily available.
Things are even worse in Internet times. My virtual host in Germany
started with a localized configuration, which I found really annoying.
Apart from having English commands producing (partly) German output,
which is inconsistent, it also means that I couldn't just copy and paste
error messages into Google, which is my usual first reaction to anything
I don't understand directly. Yes, you could do that if there would be a
suitable community, but since those errors are sometimes too specific
even for the larger corpus of English forums I wouldn't really want to
fork into language-specific communities.
The only nagging question is "why did it have to be English?". It is
such a bad language for doing anything vaguely resembling specification
and in my experience native English speakers are not trained well in
being accurate (I still hate the fact that everyone here refers to our
daughter's trike as "bike" as if they can't count to three). No wonder
considering the irregular mashup of different languages that makes the
language historically and the lack of any reforms. Mix in all the people
who speak English as second or third language after a broad range of
first languages and you get something that is a Real Mess (tm). But it
has happened and maybe there is something about this mess that is
actually good. Who knows?
But personally I'm not fighting it since it just seems too hard to
change. I'd rather put my energy somewhere else and restrict myself to
the occasional whinge as this one :-)
Peter
* all characters in "{}[]\" are combinations of upper-row right-hand
keys with the right Alt key -- I have no idea who came up with that
idea, but it is a pain too type. Probably literally if done often enough.
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