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Comment by jiofih | Hacker News Reader

While it’s a good joke, in reality it does not compute.

“Learning a new language” as in programming language, sits in the days-to-months range, while “learning a new language” as in Arabic takes months-to-years, so you’re building a much, much deeper chasm for others to cross and contribute, even though the source code remains English-based.

You can already see this happening with some open source libraries coming from China, where the documentation and all discussion being in ZH already completely blocks foreign contribution.

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If it's completely impossible to work on something that uses a foreign language, then it must be pretty important for people to be able to program with the language they already know.

There is an obvious difference; English is still the lingua franca. If you're dealing with anything international, you use it because everyone has a decent shot of knowing it; assuming most oss isn't confined to a single nation, english is still the best choice. Plus, for this reason, other nations are usually much better than America about teaching a foreign language.

Sure, if you want to start an international project, then English is a pretty good language to use.

However, I have heard people say that all software everywhere should be written in English, including things like personal projects and internal tools for companies in non-anglophone countries. I think that's kind of ridiculous.

I guess it depends how you define, "Written in english." Standard keywords in, say, C++ are derived from english, though they have a symbolic meaning everyone has to learn. I'd understand variable names and docs being in a foreign language.

Best-case is still engligh, though; working in another language is like doing science in American units. It works fine as long as you stay localized, but if you need to hire foreign devs to supplement your team, good luck (see the infamous Mars rover crash.)

No customer ever objected to my code with English variable / method / function names. Some don't care, others explicitly ask for English because maybe "one day we want to sell the company to somebody outside the country".

> English is still the lingua franca

Ironic that in order to say this, you used a latin phrase that translates to "language of the Frankish people".

Ironic? I think one of the main reasons English has become such an international language is how bastardized it is and how easily words & phrases are borrowed from other languages.

Except that it doesn't mean what you imply.

> The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca, the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from late medieval times, especially during the Renaissance era, to the 18th century. At that time, Italian-speakers dominated seaborne commerce in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire and a simplified version of Italian, including many loan words from Greek, Old French, Portuguese, Occitan, and Spanish as well as Arabic and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" (in the generic sense) of the region.

> In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua means a language, as in Portuguese and Italian, and franca is related to phrankoi in Greek and faranji in Arabic as well as the equivalent Italian. In all three cases, the literal sense is "Frankish", leading to the direct translation: "language of the Franks". During the late Byzantine Empire, "Franks" was a term that applied to all Western Europeans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

The fact that the Latin translation doesn't make any sense means that it was an English phrase the whole time, despite its etymology.

Given that one in five person on the planet speaks Chinese as their first language, lack of “foreign” contribution will probably work out okay for them. Global contribution is nice but certainly not necessary. Whoever started the communities have the right to set the rules, using Chinese for (primary) documentation and discussion being one of them. If you don’t like it you can start your own.

Pure numbers mean nothing. Neither a farmer with no internet nor an urban Chinese citizen with a mobile internet but no actual computer is liable to contribute much.

There are 800 million Chinese internet users almost all are mobile only. Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much time for public works after 9 to 9 6 days a week.

> There are 800 million Chinese internet users almost all are mobile only.

What's that supposed to imply? Just Googled "number of software developers in China" and "number of software developers in the world". Got 5.79 mil (2017) and 23 mil (2018) as answers. Not sure how accurate but can't be that far off.

> Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much time for public works after 9 to 9 6 days a week.

I didn't pay too much attention to that story, but having talked to a few software developer friends in China myself, I'm inclined to say it may be a widespread problem but probably not universal. Whether that's true or not, I certainly see a fair share of popular open source projects coming from China these days, not one in five of course, but given their relative isolation and my inherent U.S./Western bias the number that caught my eyes are still quite impressive.

Not to mention there are a lot of corporate open source in China as well. In fact, just like in the U.S., a good chunk of high profile open source projects are corporate-developed or corporate-backed.

Moreover, whether one in five is accurate wasn't even the point of my post.

Parent poster

>You can already see this happening with some open source libraries coming from China, where the documentation and all discussion being in ZH already completely blocks foreign contribution.

You

>Given that one in five person on the planet speaks Chinese as their first language, lack of “foreign” contribution will probably work out okay for them.

The point is you are using number of native speakers as a proxy for the population of developers being sufficient to support development.

First thing is the single most popular l1 language in China manderin is more like 1 in 8 humans, next the distribution of talent is nothing like distribution of speakers. It looks a lot more like the distribution of wealth because access to computers during formative years or indeed at all is of substantial importance.

There are of course still many Chinese developers of substance. But because highly educated developers in China are both a smaller portion of the population and likely to speak English starting a manderin only software project would mean choosing between only Chinese developers and Chinese devs and the rest of the planet as well.

> First thing is the single most popular l1 language in China manderin is more like 1 in 8 humans

Wrong in this context.

1. People who speak other dialects like Cantonese overwhelmingly use the same written language, so there's no barrier in written communication;

2. AFAIK Mandarin is the mandatory teaching language in Mainland Chinese schools, so even if you want to be pedantic I'd say 1 in 5 has native or bilingual proficiency in Mandarin.

> starting a manderin only software project would mean choosing between only Chinese developers and Chinese devs and the rest of the planet as well.

First, there's no such thing as a "mandarin-only software project", you use Chinese the written language as explained above.

Secondly, it's still a reasonable choice if the author finds the alternative mentally draining, or the primary audience does. No point in global-proofing your project if the primary audience need to spend extra time and energy to communicate worse. I don't necessarily advocate for it, but I don't pretend that every project on earth has the obligation to make it convenient for me to contribute.

> lack of “foreign” contribution will probably work out okay for them.

That’s not how it works. Programming proficiency isn’t randomly distributed across the population.

As you say it's already happening for project where all the documentation is not in English.

So what's wrong if the language also is not in English? Can you not imagine that some projects don't care whether you specifically can contribute or not?

It's not the first language not in English actually, WLanguage for example from WinDev can be written in English, French or Chinese.

In the early days of nginx non-russian doc was a link to Google translate, and that was good enough, it worked fine for everybody.

How do you think non-english speakers read documentation in english?

For centuries in the sciences, it was essential to know more than one language in order to be able to keep up with developments worldwide. As recently as our parents' generation, it was a graduation requirement for doctorates.

That English has become the lingua franca [1] of the world is a recent development. If we would like people to read our documentation, it is reasonable to expect that we should do our best to learn how to read theirs, too.

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

There are 6000 languages. Even the top 5 would take a decade of your life. It would make more sense to have a miniscule fraction of people make machine translation better.

Latin used to be the language of science & religion in europe too, it's not unprecedented that an industry standardizes on one language in a region.

Universities have only recently (past few decades) started dropping the foreign language requirement for the PhD.

Not only that, you can see people trying to escape the divisions on the programming language landscape, for example on the data-science field Python is miles ahead of any other language (and such homogeneity is widely seen as a good thing).

Think about all the bad variable and function names from your ESL coworkers. This stuff matters to me enough that I know I would hate being on a project knowing I'm That Guy.

It does bring to mind that Mathematics isn't really done in 'english', it's a pidgin of latin and arabic symbols (and like most or all pidgins, has some whole-cloth inventions).

Instead of making most people learn a new language, should everyone have to learn a new language? Like they used to teach college in Latin in Europe?

The problem is that the only programming language I know of that tried to be its own language-language was APL and thoughts of coding in that give me nightmares.

UML tried to remove some of the english and fared better than APL but that's a wide chasm to cross and they too ended up at the bottom of it.

We are very, very slowly replacing some text in programming languages with more symbols, and with more parsers accepting Unicode characters for string literals we also should have access to the entire panoply of mathematical and scientific symbols (I'd really love proper multiply, not, and exponents to start, then maybe we can talk about sigma for some reduce operations) but the tipping point into "let's go ahead and remove the rest of the english" seems so far off that I'll probably never see it.

> The problem is that the only programming language I know of that tried to be its own language-language was APL and thoughts of coding in that give me nightmares.

Have you ever actually tried learning APL, or are you just trolling?

We don't have to globalize everything. Yes, it's wonderful that we have the potential for people around the globe to work on and benefit from a particular project, but it is not necessary for every project to work that way.

You might be surprised how much Arabic you can pick up if you spend a few weeks in a place like Cairo. It helps if you make an effort to completely immerse yourself and not spend too much time in western style shopping malls.

Moving to a different continent is a bigger chasm yet.

How large is the chasm for a new programmer whose native language is Arabic?

It's pretty high. We could make it lower by helping people learn English but tools to program in their existing language so they don't have to learn English first make sense too.

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