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> On 20 Oct 2016, at 07:54, Russ Bishop via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Oct 17, 2016, at 11:45 PM, Rien via swift-evolution 
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> “culturally offensive” is not a logical argument.
>> A programming language should be logically consistent no matter how many 
>> cultures are offended by it.
>> If Swift is driven by SJW’s then very quickly it will cease to be an 
>> effective language.
> 
> 
> I don’t think using “SJW” as a slur is appropriate, certainly not in 
> swift-evolution. We aim to be an open and inclusive community. Cultural 
> sensitivity is one of Swift’s goals; that’s why it supports Unicode 
> identifiers… so people can use their native language if they wish. The world 
> is not the Western Latin-1 character set.

True, but sometimes restricting yourself can bring better results. A big reason 
why technical and scientific progress is advancing so fast in the modern era is 
also attributed to people being able to rely on a common lingua franca (English 
today, something else in 100 years perhaps?) and very fast communication 
amongst people of different cultural backgrounds happening at lighting speed.

People on teams resist to code guidelines for freedom of expression reasons 
too, but the values of standardisation are greater than what we achieve by 
prioritising creative expression in the form of writing all my code in kanji or 
using proper Italian accented characters or following my own code formatting 
convention... pride and fear often put people off when self imposing 
limitations for the greater good. English as programming lingua franca brings 
people together more than it suppresses valuable creative thought. 

English is obviously not my first language, but I enjoy the fact that having 
the documentation, developer forums, this kind of mailing lists, etc... all 
standardising around English as technical lingua franca is both useful, 
facilitate communication, and is totally not unprecedented (Latin used to be 
the defacto lingua franca for medicine, biology, botany, and all sorts of 
scientific and philosophical discussion... it did not kill the local languages 
and brought people together).


> None of these goals are mutually-exclusive with logical arguments; that’s a 
> false dichotomy. 
> 
> I’m not aware of any programming language that is 100% logically consistent. 
> They all make concessions to programmer culture, history, practical concerns, 
> and even opinion/whims. Python doesn’t have multi-line lambdas because Guido 
> doesn’t like them. Even Haskell has unsafePerformIO because the real world is 
> not a pure function. We talk about how beautiful or ugly syntax is all the 
> time, which is absolutely a value judgement.
> 
> 
> 
> Russ
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