Interesting that most of the code comments are in English.
Also some other day she suggested someone else to install Linux at that student's home PC. I followed that advice too and learned a good bunch much of my English by reading man pages.
If I had to work again in a French company, I'd only use English if we were all perfectly fluent, otherwise it's just a mess, you have people, I don't know how they even learned programming, who know little to no English at all whatsoever writing variable names and comments in something so confusing and that no French reverse-translation can ever salvage.
Also the company always avoided any use of external contractors.
I've heard things like "we should grow up and use English".
They wanted to be an "elite" in contrast with russian-speaking "peasants".
The rational decision to use English was often motivated irrationally and was not about switching keyboard layouts. There were numerous discussions on the subject.
That is hard to analyze, I'm not a psychologist.
Russian developers with little or no experience in international environment often suck even at naming things in proper English, especially methods/functions. How many times have I seen grammar errors in APIs? But some of those guys are really great engineers who just aren't that much into spoken languages. Some of them aren't great writers even in Russian.
Yes, sometimes the source they write will certainly insult someone else's sense of beauty. But is there anything we can do about it? We can do something but still some people just aren't good at languages. I think we should just accept that it and stop worrying. And those whose sense of beauty is being insulted should think why they choose to use their knowledge and abilities as a weapon against their teammates or as a decoration to create a false sense of superiority. Pretty sure many of them do this out of their inner insecurity or because of attachment (unhealthy perfectionism, insulted sense of beauty).
Also I think that projectional (structural) editors may change this situation or at least give us some insights on how natural languages affect the way we structure our software.
And if it's going to be half-English either way, might as well just do it all in English. If nothing else, it saves time switching keyboard layouts.
Also he gave me his copy of Stephenson's Snow Crash. When I complained that it was so hard to read he answered that for him reading Lermontov is also a struggle. What a guy!
So if I read at random this in English: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43844/she-walks-in-be... and this in French: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Contemplations/R%C3%A9pon... , I can feel a mysterious beauty in English maybe I can't feel in a French poem, while the French one explodes in meaning, makes me think more than contemplate.
Rhymes are like a little funny exercise in poetry to add some music, but really far from the goal, or so I hope. I feel it's one of the many inputs: you have the rhymes, the rhythmic internal divisions of the stanza, the symmetry between them across the text, and you can add lots of little funny meta-meaning by reversing meaning in two halves of two successive stanzas, stuff like that. A poem is just a text that does more than transfer information at the first level, but does it on many more. English, Russian or French, they can all do it.
However, I'll give one for those who've missed the irony: It's considered gauche to have ubiquitous non-english comments.
Pretty much the only kosher use case is when you have to warn people not to modify otherwise bizarre looking code because of either regulatory, legal, or domain-specific reasons, and listing them in their native language makes more sense, since developers are not legal experts and translating them into English is not in the job description if the app is solely for domestic market.
Who considers it gauche to have software written in non-English? The Russians you mean? I certainly find it perfectly acceptable and even desirable depending on the contributor's English fluency.
2x BigCo's I've worked at, with 1-5K IT staff. Yandex is xbig though, with 5K+.
>That came down to the developers not speaking English at all.
That sounds implausible and not very sane, unless of course you're working for something very static like the government, and the tech stack you're using is set in stone.
Imagine that you're using a popular library and decide to update your dependencies, who's going to read the change logs & the documentation? Sr. Architect?
If you have a security issue and the only writeups are in English, who's going to be trusted to implement a fix correctly if the people can't understand what the problem is in the first place?
Anyway, you'd be surprised at how much documentation and resources are available in Portuguese. You can get by alright with it. I did it when I was younger and eager to learn how to code.
I've worked in big companies in Brazil where docs and comments were mostly in Portuguese. And some teams would even use Portuguese variable names.
Just because they do it differently in Russia, it doesn't mean every country is like that. Remember what you said about bubbles and all.
By the way, interestingly, I've briefly worked for the government there once and it was one of the places where English was most prevalent. People there were very open source oriented, which the Brazilian government incentivizes (at least used to back then). So, nearly all code had English comments and docs. Differently from closed source intiatives in the industry where other people reading it was considered a liability and not a goal.
Also, it seems that the situation with education in general is still better that in Brazil at least in some regards. In 2014 I worked in São Paulo and had a difficult time communicating with a taxi driver. I was trying to ask him to at least write the amount of money we have to pay for the ride on a slip of paper. Later a colleague explained that illiterate drivers are quite common.
In general Brazil felt mostly like home to me. Maybe Brazil is a version of Russia where homeless people don't freeze to death in the winter :)