Hacker News Reader

> For a lot of floss software, there isn't even enough documentation in English and looking at communities that tend to have resources in their own languages ...

I agree; many projects (both FOSS and non-FOSS) lack sufficient documentation. However, this is the case whether or not it is English; it is another issue.

More simplified English might be a good idea. There is what is called Simplified Technical English, but that seems to be for aerospace, and perhaps it could be adapted for computer documentation, too.

I am willing to accept contributions of documentation in any language whether English or otherwise for my projects, although I am only writing in English myself, others can write in other languages if they want to do. (However, I generally have no intention to support commands and status messages etc in languages other than English, nor in character encodings other than ASCII.)

For names of stuff (and comments) in the source code of the program itself, I do not consider it too important to write in other languages, although people can try to do that if they want to do. At least for my own projects though, I intend to limit the source code to ASCII.

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

> More simplified English might be a good idea. There is what is called Simplified Technical English, but that seems to be for aerospace, and perhaps it could be adapted for computer documentation, too.

I'm happy that you think that the idea in the article is good.

I didn't know about the "Simplified Technical English" it seems interesting.

Thanks a lot for you feedback and point of view it's very useful for me.

I reply below to some points but only to share better my point of view I tried to wrote in the article.

> I'm not sure if more linguistic diversity will help FLOSS.

I think linguistic diversity in FLOSS means a more accessible FLOSS world to people that not speak English.

> For countries with more English speakers (e.g. most European countries) I don't think translations provided to developers will prove beneficial.

But here in Europe (I'm from Italy) not all country have the same level English skills. I also wrote the article thinking to the whole World with so meny country with a low level of instruction.

> The language-mastery issue is real, especially for very young people, but I'm not sure if "forcing" people isn't the better call.

I don't think in the article I wrote about forcing people.

> The suggestions for more simplified English in the article seem like good ideas to me.

Thanks, I'm happy you found the idea good.

> I don't think in the article I wrote about forcing people.

Not explicitly, but it's essentially the consequence of not increasing language diversity in FLOSS. If you want to get involved, learn English. That's the "forcing" they were talking about.

it is a pain but force to learn once then done. if we are use the every language then many times a person must deal with this in many language. i learn english enough for to read and some write and no more. language diversity fine for culture but is suck for tech things.

I hate to say this, but: Think of the children!

Seriously. American kids can start to learn to program at age 6. Non-English-speaking kids can do so once they're old enough to know English.

Who do you think will have the edge?

Plus, there's a ton of coding in all fields. Learning english to be a programmer is perhaps fine, but to be able to analyze data in seemingly EVERY field of endeavor? Or automate basic routine tasks?

The language issue is an issue, and one worth solving.

So you are call it better to make some worse, to make the American childern start later also? Either we are having every translation for every thing or here we have the choice.

I think we should solve this problem. It's a big lift, but so was moving ASCII to Unicode, or supporting screenreaders. Making things accessible is the right thing to do, and once the right infrastructure is in place, it's not overly expensive to sustain.

Yes, I do think we should have translations for everything.

We should have infrastructure to view code in multiple languages. Blockly games, Hour-of-Code, and parts of Microsoft MakeCode do this already. You flip a button and "on start" becomes "nar programmet starter" or "all'avvio."

Programming is easy, since code is structured, and it's easy to parse what's a variable and what's a function call. The translation problem, outside of comments and documentation, is a lot easier than natural language.

Furthermore, a lot of this stuff generalizes since the same words are used so often. Once there's a translation for "page_loaded," you can use that across many platforms.

I should be able to select a drop-down, and have the same for any program I can find on github or gitlab, and edit code in my native language.

It's a (huge) one-time investment. But once that investment is made, sustaining is cheap. A lot of translation works well enough automated (through Google or Amazon translate), and what doesn't translate well can be cleaned up by crowdsourcing. Google Translated comments are usually actually good enough.

Thank to add this point of view about children. It's something I haven't though about but make totally sense.

> I hate to say this, but: Think of the children!

> Seriously. American kids can start to learn to program at age 6. Non-English-speaking kids can do so once they're old enough to know English.

I don't think that follows at all. Non-English-speaking kids can also start to learn programming at any arbitrary age. What they need to learn for that is a programming language, not English.

Sure, most programming languages are subsets of English -- but extremely limited subsets. And the meanings of the words in them are (often radically) different from the original meaning of the same word in English; I suspect English-speaking learners have only a tiny initial advantage of the words being similar, but in effect have to learn them as if they were from a foreign language anyway.

> Non-English-speaking kids can also start to learn programming at any arbitrary age. What they need to learn for that is a programming language, not English.

I agree with that, but what I've explained in the article is that if you don't know English is harder to access English-only documentation, resources, etc...

This can be changed by the community to be more inclusive, especially for newcomers, kids, ...

> If you want to get involved, learn English.

Thanks for summarizing this concept. It's sad but it's true.

I think the opposite. More linguistic diversity in FLOSS means less accessibility. having a universal standard here means that if you want to contribute, you learn exactly ONE language, which also happens to be the so-called global language.

Conversely, in the linguistically fragmented scenario, you're SOL, as it's pretty unreasonable to learn N different languages.

Actually in the article I proposed only to think to people that don't know English but want to be part of the community. I think accessibility increase if more people can contribute.

Yeah, and what people are telling you -- which you seem not to quite want to understand? -- is that the best way for these people to become part of the community is for them to learn English.

I'm totally aware that the only way to become part of the community is to learn English, because it's exactly what I've done and I've written in the article, but I wrote also that this is not inclusive and the community can change this status quo.

I'd argue multilingualism is a bad thing in most repects. There are hardly any problem domains where having multiple equivalent yet incompatible communication protocols is helpful. I'd much rather we all simply switch to English wherever possible, even though it's not my native language.

But in this way 4/5 of world population are not able to participate. I don't think this is inclusive and respectful for diversity.

This is such a non-argument I'm tempted to call it disingenuous. People speaking different languages is a historical accident, just because it's the situation right now doesn't mean it is anything to strive for. A single shared language allows everybody to participate in the process and not depend on someone having translated this or that particular bit of information from language X to language Y. There's a reason the scientific and business communities have always gravitated toward having a lingua franca.

Multilingualism is a barrier in human development that should be overcome, not something to celebrate or protect.