Comment by Nervetattoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nervetattoo | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if there is a higher percentage of programmers than the population in general who are bilinguals. After all programming requires us to learn new languages for talking to the machine, there could be a correlation in ability to learn machine languages.

Could someone make a poll here?

I speak norwegian and english fluently and dont translate in my head when using english, but I'm currently in and around central/south america and learning spanish, and when speaking spanish I at the moment translate from english so probably a long way to go before I could consider me trilingual. Whats interesting about languages is that just like programming languages two different languages are not equally adept for explaining the same situations.

I don't feel the analogy is entirely accurate. Imagine having to learn 5 "if" statements, or 10 ways to say "++". In a spoken conversation, you don't get to look up the API docs if you forgot something. However, most programmers are likely at least bilingual because most programming books are in English and many companies in non-English countries use English as a common language.

However, I do feel there's some similarities between constructing a possibly-correct sentence and seeing if it actually works, and constructing some possibly-correct code and seeing if it compiles.

> most programmers are likely at least bilingual because most programming books are in English and many companies in non-English countries use English as a common language.

Reading English is a smallish subset of fluency in English, i.e. being able to also speak, listen to, and write English. Technical specs often use simple written English, relying on example code. So I'm not sure if what non-English programmers do can be called "bilingualism".

I have started the slow road of learning Norwegian now that I live in Norway. I too have found myself wondering if a link exists between programmers and desire and ease to learn a new language.

My Norwegian, is not good, yet daily as I discover I have remembered the "methods" or the "function names" to piece together sentences it becomes easier and allows me to focus on the code.

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