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Comment by varelaz | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people don't speak English and I think it's main barrier to become a programmer or QA engineer.

You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).

Or at least just a few words I guess - if, for, while etc.

You don't really need to know what these words mean in English. You just have to know what they do in the code.

It's a headstart for sure, but English speakers do have to learn those reserved words and control structures in each language. The difference is we have the benefit of grounding them in their similar, but not identical, ordinary meanings

The bigger deal is standard lib classes and functions. An English speaker can guess for the names of things they want whereas a nonspeaker would have to remember them explicitly

I'm really curious now. If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn the meanings of the keywords when they were in a language you didn't understand? Did you have to learn to translate "for", "while", etc into Russian equivalents?

I knew meaning of "if then else", "function", "go", "return", other keywords were just keywords for me - I knew what they do and it was enough.

Same way you learn to use the ternary operator in c-ish languages? All the binary operators that have no equivalent in daily life?

How do you learn to read music when all the keywords are in Italian? Do you have to learn to translate “fortissimo” etc into English equivalents?

Context. I don't know what lingua franka means, but I also know what it means. I could bother and find literal translation, but why would I? The same applies to obscure English words, weird programming language keywords or math symbols. Integral and differential symbols don't really translate into anything and we use the word "integral" only because we can't type this symbol on an average keyboard.

Good! We need less shitty software, the fewer people that write it the better.

I don't get why you have to be a certified engineer to build a bridge, but you can be some bloke with a 2 weekend course in python to program medical computers, avionics, train scheduling systems and other stuff that kills people when it breaks.

Non native speaker btw.

gatekeeper much

Good point. There's just one problem: any moron can still be able to become a programmer if they come from an anglophone country. Therefore, I propose that all companies in English-speaking countries switch to using Linotte[1], which is based on French.

I'm also going to submit a patch to GCC that will require the user to solve a differential equation before their code will compile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte

On the fact that the atlantic has two sides: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...

> 1. good programming is probably beyond the intellectual abilities of today's "average programmer"

2. to do, hic et nunc, the job well with today's army of practitioners, many of whom have been lured into a profession beyond their intellectual abilities, is an insoluble problem

3. our only hope is that, by revealing the intellectual contents of programming, we will make the subject attracting the type of students it deserves, so that a next generation of better qualified programmers may gradually replace the current one.

> any moron can still be able to

Whoops, proved my own point.

Because man-hours is the limiting factor in software that is made. Additional software simply gives you more options to choose from. Yes, it contributes to noise, but it's nothing like building two bridges.

And thats why Apple and Microsoft have the best software?/s A monkey with a typewriter will produce garbage no matter how many monkey hours it puts in.

The only way to have as little bugs as possible is to have as little software as possible.

it's much much easier to learn coding than to learn English. i have coworkers that don't speak English but have no problems coding.

Well, for people like us, obviously. I have many friends who are multilingual, and who can easily learn a 4th or 5th language if they want, but who have/would struggle with the logical and mathematical facilities required to code.

It's also a barrier to becoming a scientific researcher, an airline pilot, or working at an international company. If you're going to communicate with people from other cultures, you need a shared language, and many international contexts have centered on varieties of English for that shared language.

Interesting thing: Airline pilots use imperial units instead of metric. They're an odd outlier where the argument used for metric works for imperial. Airlines in all but a few countries use it.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2566/what-is-th...

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