Well, what other language should be used? The internet grew up in
english speaking countries, and soon expanded to places where english
was the most commonly known non-native language (not neccessarily
universally second, but, of all languages, the odds that a random Joe
Q. European is at least passable capable of understanding one, is
highest for english).
The only other option I can think of is to officialize the
jargonization process and run with something like interlingua, latin,
or esperanto, and make up words with abandon. That's a little too
geeky in my book.
So, if not english, then what?
NB: In regards to programming symbols: Seriously, now you're just
whining. What else did you want? A localization for compilation so you
can use a ß instead of a open brace? That would look crazy ugly, and
is fantastically inpractical. We have 3 matched bracing symbols that
are somewhat easy to type (on ANY keyboard, not just US 101), and we
generally need all of them when designing programming languages,
unless you're a badass like McCarthy and decide you can make it work
with just 1 pair. You're ostensibly a nerd with some technical prowess
if you're into programming, so fix your keyboard layout, or just do
what everyone else (and yourself do), and just roll with us 101.
Incidentally, I can type german and french very very well on apple's
layout system, which has an extra meta-key which is pretty much 100%
reserved for typing special symbols. ringel-S (ß) is alt+s, umlauts
(ë) is alt+u, vowel, The euro € is alt+shift+2, the pound £ is alt+3
(inconsistent, but, nobody's perfect, unfortunately), the inverse
exclamation mark ¡ is alt+1 (note how sensical that is), and something
like the c-cedille is alt+c (ç). There you have it, an international
(at least, for western languages) keyboard layout that works well for
everybody, in any locale, and even for programmers. Just use that.
An alternative way of looking at it: Programmers need symbols. English
is 'lucky', in that writers only need 26+26+10 symbols to take care of
their needs, which leaves ample space for dedicated keys for symbols,
so one keyboard can suffice for BOTH purposes. Other languages aren't
so lucky, and the default keyboards there ship geared towards writers.
i18n programmers are generally responsible for localizing the software
experience, and note how NONE OF THEM decided to design an alternative
localized keyboard layout that was geared more towards programming
symbols. Instead, they adopted US 101 and where needed designed sane
keyboard shortcuts to type commonly used symbols in their language
that aren't common in english. I can't find any fault whatsoever in
this choice. If you do, I'd be interested to hear how it could have
been done better.
-- Reinier "English is certainly not my native language" Zwitserloot
On Apr 19, 12:11 am, Peter Becker <peter.becker...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mwanji Ezana wrote:
> > On Apr 17, 4:27 pm, "Todd Costella" <todd.coste...@entero.com> 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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