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Comment by crescentfresh | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered how non-english speaking developers from other countries who were first adopters of HTTP (or any new tech) reacted to words like "GET" and "Content-Type" and other things that were clearly invented by westerners. What would we think if we had to implement something new and use words we didn't understand?

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The way I learned programming as a kid, while also simultaneously learning English, involved looking at the new weird term, grabbing a dictionary, and trying to figure out why it's named the way it is. Sometimes it was obvious, sometimes it wasn't, but generally it wasn't difficult - after all, this is just vocabulary. Single words. Pretty much the easiest part of learning a language.

I can tell you a similar anectode. My family used to live in a eastern Europe communist-at-the-time country. Computers were hard to come by and the only place you could get good hardware was in Germany.

My dad went to Germany and bought an Atari (I forget which one exactly), and realized it was all in German. Seeing that he didn't know any German, he learned it enough to navigate the UI.

In other words, the time cost of learning German was less than the cost of the computer + the trip to Germany. Basically necessity.

> other things that were clearly invented by westerners

There are plenty of non-English speaking Westerners, you know? :D

I wonder how often it is an advantage to not know English. Then you might have less baggage from outside the computer and you might map the token to what it actually does in the system (rather than what the token was aspiring to be). Assuming you can get to that point, of course.

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