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Comment by zarkov99 | Hacker News Reader

Great. Now programming languages are also political tools. We should do the same in science. Every scientist should learn every language of every other scientist so everybody can write their papers in the language of the culture they identify with. That will surely advance science and benefit all of us immensely.

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Oh come on. Given that

* there's already an immense body of scientific work written in languages like Chinese and French that the English-speaking world lacks access to,

* the main goal of this language is clearly not for international collaboration or anything like that,

* not everything non-English is "political", and

* sometimes people just want to teach kids programming without having to teach them words in an unfamilar language, too,

your comment comes across as thoroughly nonsensical.

The lingua-franca of EU is EuroEnglish, for obvious reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English

How does this rebut any of the points you are replying to?

You're right. Imagine if other countries had science journals in their own languages.

Science would collapse and politics would reign supreme.

You do know that pre ww2 if you worked in chemistry (and physics to an extent) you basically had to learn German, so you could read the papers.

It happened to be the lingua franca for the field at the time. So?

And the lingua franca for programming is English so what

That it is. Your point is?

I'm confused what this has to do with politics.

Apparently there are two languages: English and political.

Latino isn't a language, it's an identity. That makes it political.

Really it's a geographic location of origin.

There's nothing particularly political about being from South america

As someone who is latin american, I never understood what is the obsession with identity in the US. American hispanics I've talked to use it as something of a catch-all concept, but I've observed that many only have a meagre proficiency in Spanish and know nothing about the other Latin American countries that they pack with the bunch (apart from their own/their parents).

This is a touchy subject in the US so I don't want to get too into it, its a bit off topic. The shortest and most neutral answer I can give is that minority political groups in the US use identity as a tool to push for political change.

Historically, a large part of it goes back to the Treaty of Hildalgo.

It obligated the US to enfranchise Mexican citizens living in the seceded lands of Alta California.

This immediately threw a wrench in antebellum politics which only allowed "white people" the vote. Eventually the US invented a racial category based on speaking Spanish...well actually two, one black, one non-black.

Fundamentally the identity of people with cultural affiliation to Spanish speaking cultures is complicated by the sanctioned narratives of US history which do not allow for the US to consider its Latin American heritage.

You could sleep in a hotel in Santa Fe and eat in a restaurant when the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth Rock. And when "fulfilled manifest destiny" reached the California coast, there were churches there where people went on Sunday...and chattel slavery had been banned for two hundred years.

To me the most non-sensical part in this kind of arguments is that most of the people identifying themselves as “Latino” are people from the US. Most people actually born in latin america will self-identify with their country of origin (Argentinian, Colombian,..)

The advantage native English speakers have in terms of leading CS projects, making start ups, and getting the high paying tech jobs lessens if speaking English isn't a major requirement for reading and writing code.

If instead you need to know Spanish, or don't need to know any one specific langauge, it challenges or changes the power structure and is thus political.

People getting defensive in this thread over the idea of a language not made for them is great evidence of this. Instead of ignoring it like the millions of new projects that don’t apply to you, we must go out of our way to explain why this is bad and wrong.

We could do the same with units, so Americans could talk in freedom inches while the French talk in metres

This isn't the first language to do this. This isn't even the first post about this.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=non%2Denglish%20programming%20lang...

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