On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 22:42:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 5/29/2013 3:26 AM, qznc wrote:
Once I heared an argument from developers working for banks.
They coded
business-specific stuff in Java. Business-specific meant
financial concepts with
german names (e.g. Vermögen,Bürgschaft), which sometimes
include äöüß. Some of
those concept had no good translation into english, because
they are not used
outside of Germany and the clients prefer the actual names
anyways.
German is pretty easy to do in ASCII: Vermoegen and Buergschaft
What about Chinese? Russian? Japanese? It is doable, but I can
tell you for a fact that they very much don't like reading it
that way.
You know, having done programming in Japan, I know that a lot of
devs simply don't care for english, and they'd really enjoy just
being able to code in Japanese. I can't speak for the other
countries, but I'm sure that large but not spread out countries
like China would also just *love* to be able to code in 100%
Madarin (I'd say they wouldn't care much for English either).
I think this possibility is actually a brilliant feature that
could help popularize the language oversees, especially in
teaching courses, or the private sector. Why not turn down a
feature that makes us popular?
As for research/university, I think they are already global
enough to stick to English anyways.
No matter how I see it, I can only see benefits to keeping it,
and downsides to turning it down.
