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Comment by iaml | Hacker News Reader

As a person from another country speaking not-english, I just switch all my devices to english nowadays.

I think this is more common than the HN crowd assumes.

As someone who develops multi-lingual web sites, I can say that the vast majority of the people who visit the sites and then request a language other than English still have their computer/browser configured for English.

Same here. At least when I get an error message, I can google for a solution. Good luck with localized messages.

That's the main reason all my devices are set to english.

And imagine how much programming and debugging effort could be saved worldwide if everyone did as you and I do.

This is completely absurd. English is my only language but I would never hope for something like this. We're not supposed to cater to the needs of our tools; we're supposed to make technology cater to our needs. Following your logic to its natural conclusion, think about how much programming and debugging effort could be saved worldwide if we just stopped using machines and their features altogether.

You learn the language to communicate with everyone else on the planet. Computers are tools for manipulating and transferring information so spend time learning their language. Instead of wasting colossal effort catering to needs of everyone let everyone spend some time learning the language of everyone else.

As a counterexample, when I open some lib's repo and see comments in code are non-english, I just close it and don't use the lib. Not because I'm a racist, mind you, but because it complicates trying to understand/modify it by unreasonable amount of time. When I'm working I have to deal with spec requirements in other languages too, which is also troublesome. I kinda agree with gp on this, things would be much, much simpler.

Reminds me of the time when StarOffice became OpenOffice. As StarOffice was developed in germany all the comments where in german. This hindered development for several years when the project became more international before alls comments where translated by volunteers.

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