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Comment by facorreia | Hacker News Reader

"Ruby came from Japan. Lua came from Brazil. Python came from the Netherlands."

And all of them use English terms for language identifiers.

English is the lingua franca of IT & software development. As a Brazilian I can tell you that programmers that don't learn at least how to read technical English won't become good practicioners.

And GitHub is a social platform for collaborating on projects. In the vast majority of projects, English is the common language spoken by all participants.

Learn English and get over it.

(I didn't read further into the article. I hope the other suggestions make more sense.)

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Totally. I am Italian, and seriously, most of the blog posts, tutorials and such written in my native language are so bad that only bad programmers can grow out of them.

Also, an open source project maintained in, say, Spanish is one I and others can't easily contribute to. That would be a disaster.

Projects would have to pick a language that makes sense, given their goals. Perhaps some would be keener on optimising mainly for the existing set of contributors?

I'm not sure about this, it would restrict the future changes, limiting innovations and putting the project at risk of dying when the developers leave, IMHO.

I wanted to disagree - so I went looking for the source of the original Python (http://www.python.org/download/releases/early/)

And guess what, a couple of grammatical mistakes but otherwise its all in English. Now this may of course be a Dutch thing. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it is one more indication of a trend towards a very few international languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin perhaps) that the "internationally connected elite" can speak and the rest have to learn.

Kind of bothers me but I cannot tell you why.

> Kind of bothers me but I cannot tell you why.

It shouldn't bother you more than utf8 and tcp/ip. If everybody in the world spoke the same language, the world would be a better place.

The discomfort probably stems from the fact that some languages will die out. That's sad but there is always room for bilingualism.

I'm not sure I can agree that the world would be better if everyone spoke the same language, there's plenty of readily googlable research suggesting that multilingualism has cognitive benefits.

But if we're going to have one universal language, it will be java. Still happy?

> But if we're going to have one universal language, it will be java. Still happy?

This is a great retort, the more I think about it. There would be huge efficiences if Java was the only language in the world...and there would be huge holes too, just as if we banned every language and insta-translated all the great foreign works to English.

I think it's safe to say that some of the great works in non-Java languages might never have been possible or thought of if everything was all-Java. Can we say that some of the great non-English works would never have existed if everything was done in English? Probably.

If all people spoke the same language, every person on the planet could express their thoughts to everyone else. In my opinion, that would increase the feeling of community for the human race. The analogy to programming languages doesn't fit very well here.

I have worked out what bothers me

In 1471 (apparently) Chinese navy sent an armada (no seriously, thousands of ships, one dedicated to being a grassed over flat hill growing vegetables - really an armada) to tour the Indian China seas wand show their power / negotiate trade agreements. There is even a suggestion some of the fleet reached the Anericas

Anyway ten years later internal Chinese politics meant the Emperor effectively shut down the Chinese navy and ended external exploration - just as Columbus opened up the New World for Europe.

China was a united political body - spoke one language, etc

Eirope was a crazy, disunited, warring agglomeration - that leaped forward in the New World and brought us kickin and screaming into the modern era

Lets imagine we have a lingua Franca, then closer political union across the globe and ... Humanity misses the next leap forward - or more worryingly all of humanity collapses at the same time

Many other regions on the planet had also been in discord and warring for millennia, without producing an Industrial Revolution.

However the unbelievable progress made in the last centuries and today wouldn't be possible without having a lingua franca. The difficulties you'll have programming without knowing English are an excellent example.

It's unfair to those speaking a different language. There's also the extinction of other languages (and all the work that went into them, and all the works that used them, literature and associated culture). It's like the extinction of species in the rainforest, except for memes (in the original Dawkin sense).

The reason is the network effect, in that the more people who use a communications system, the more valuable it is (given that communication is valuable). Language is a communications system.

This forms a natural monopoly: because of the value of larger networks, it is inevitable that one language will dominate - unless there are other barriers partitioning the network, akin to the lack of a telecommunications physical layer in centuries past.

People in the world speak several different languages. When they want to talk in a way that will be understood in many nations, they utilize a language widely known, at least to the portion of the society that is more literate. At a time it was Greek; later it was Latin, then French. Currently it is English.

Disclaimer: English is not my primary language.

I completely disagree, Github.com should NOT be localized.

I agree that making sure your language doesn't disappear is important, but it has nothing to do with Github. It is your job on a day to day basis.

Having localized versions might lead to messy projects having multiple languages in issues and everywhere. It will not help the open source community as a whole but dilute it. It may be sad, but English is the language of IT and I think it will just lead to a wider and better community to all talk a single language, whatever it is.

Plus, managing multiple locales in an app just sucks, it will lead to problems, they would have less time to work on feature which is the point.

Maybe a localized version of Github Enterprise would make sense, but certainly not Github.com.

As a bad analogy - It's like asking everyone to ignore other programming languages because C++ is popularly used and the others are not (even if they are more elegant and better structured)

It makes far more sense for 7300 cultures to learn one additional language than for 7301 cultures to learn 7300 languages. The former being difficult, and the latter being impossible.

It is a Dutch thing, they've been learning it from 7 years old or something for decades and a lot of the movies and shows were always subtitled, not overdubbed. The Dutch were far ahead of everyone learning English on the continent, even before English was considered the modern lingua-franca, which personally I think really gathered steam with the adoption of the internet in the mid-90s. I can remember the French desperately trying to cling on to the delusion that French was still relevant.

I'm half-dutch and can only vaguely follow conversations in it, even 20 years ago when I'd go over as a kid everyone spoke it near fluently.

One of my professors at Uni complained that he'd tried to learn Dutch but found it nearly impossible because when he visited there as soon as they found out you were English they'd just speak to you in English.

My friend worked in banking over there for 2 years in Amsterdam, never learnt anything but basic hello/thanks/goodbye.

Dank u wel :)

All I learned. Wait, also how to order a pancake which I remember as something like ick vil crack un pannecooke.

I was very impressed with the Dutch english when I've been over there. They approach it as a practicality and they also get fairly insulted if you ask them if they speak english.

Ah, but much of the original source and documentation for Ruby had Japanese section or was much more comprehensive in Japanese. This was even more true for early Ruby libraries - I can testify to it as of 2001-2003 when I was maintaining several English language libraries and writing a chapter for one of those unfortunate Syngress compilations (I was young and bad at saying no). If you're conflating Ruby and Rails, yes Rails is pretty much English-only - but though it's a common mistake, it's dead wrong if you're discussing actual languages. Even now I occasionally run into libraries with significantly longer Japanese documentation by character count and given relative density that probably means quite a lot longer in terms of actual content.

I disagree. My position is not that English is bad (English has some advantages here and there, but it is hardly the best language I know), it is very practical - and necessary - to learn if you want to work in IT. No doubt about it.

However, confining ourselves to one language makes us all think the same way. Research has proven time and time again, that learning other languages will help us apply different ways to think about problems, because different languages uses different grammar to convey the same meaning.

Effectively, if we continue to strive to eradicate localised IT and software related words from non-English languages and replace them with English words instead, language development will stagnate and all languages will eventually become English. And that is not a positive prospect.

I don't need Github localised, but I would like to localise it for the purpose of creating technical terms in my own language. I fear that most of the localisation into Danish would simply be English words instead, despite the fact that Danish actually has words for 'push' and 'pull' (»puf« and »hal«, respectively).

And English shouldn't be so cocky either, by its current usage, English is slowly becoming less than a language and more of a tool. And with both foreign and native speakers' continue abuse of the language, English will soon be derived of all its beauty, for the purpose of minimising communication.

Are we really that lazy?

Well, actually, it turns out that there is much less evidence for the Linguistic Relativity hypothesis than we initially thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Present_s...

It turns out language does color perception, but not as profoundly as we estimated, and not in all ways.

In any case, even if it did profoundly color perception, who is to say that it does more so than other experiences? Like learning about anthropology or philosophy, or having a life changing event, or taking up art, or doing shrooms? I don't think we know.

A bilingual myself, I've always supported people learning a second language, for some vague impression that it made you a better person. Now I'm not so sure. When most people learn a second language, they don't learn enough to be immersed into a new culture altogether, or to start thinking in that language. Is this really a profound experience? The cost/benefit ratio seems a little skewed. I don't really blame people who know English by birth for not trying to learn another language.

> Are we really that lazy?

It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with being able to communicate. Would you learn all of japanese, chinese, russian, spanish, german, french, italian, polish, swede and english in order to be able to contribute to projects in these various languages? Unlikely.

We need a "babel fish", and currently that babel fish is simply "learn english". At various places and times in history it's been french, chinese, latin or greek. That is not a problem, it's just how things go so that people can talk with one another across countries and cultures, and work together.

I apologise, I did not mean that people who were 'unwilling' to learn other languages are lazy. It is hard to demand that everyone know every language, so a lingua franca (English in this case) is all right.

What I meant to say is that languages are becoming more and more plain. It seems people - and sometimes with language institutions with them - are accepting that the languages should be less complicated, so we can say the same thing with fewer words.

An obvious example is people writing 'u' instead of 'you', but is actually even more obvious in other languages than English. For instance, I am not a fan of people saying 'issues' in Danish, when we have the word »problemstillinger«, simply because the English word 'issues' is shorter. Should English use »arv« instead of 'inheritance' because it is shorter?

Languages' vocabularies shouldn't cherry-pick.

I do not oppose a lingua franca, I merely advocate keeping each language separate.

I can't really get behind you on this. What do you think of the word "niveau" in Danish? Or "risalamande"? Would you advocate their removal? Languages did not sprout fully-formed from the thigh of Jupiter, they evolved organically.

At the same time, I do understand where you are coming from. Having such a large proportion of your population be fluent in English - and thus more influenced by its culture, is potentially an issue for the Danish culture.

What you are referring to is history. Languages borrowing terms and lending them out back then is nothing something I have a problem with.

Today, the Internet, globalisation, etc. have decreased the number of languages in the world dramatically (last thing I heard is one language dies every two weeks) and there are approximately ~7000 languages alive.

While I know that most of these languages that are dying are spoken by very few (otherwise it wouldn't die). It is now more important than ever to keep each language unique.

What was great before (loanwords and such) may actually be a problem now.

First, as you say, these languages were spoken by very few people. I remember reading not long ago, the obituary of a Scottish dialect spoken in a single village. You can't really expect a language with such a small group of speakers surviving the advent of the automobile and the radio for very long. And these languages did not die by a thousand loanwords: the young folk didn't learn them, and the old folk who could speak eventually died.

There is also another factor at play here. "Proper" languages (that is, not dialects) have hundreds of years of written material behind them, and this is critical to ensure a language's survival.

The idea that languages influence the way you think about things is sometimes called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

> Effectively, if we continue to strive to eradicate localised IT and software related words from non-English languages and replace them with English words instead, language development will stagnate and all languages will eventually become English.

This would only be true if a language only consisted in IT and software related words :)

> I don't need Github localised, but I would like to localise it for the purpose of creating technical terms in my own language. I fear that most of the localisation into Danish would simply be English words instead, despite the fact that Danish actually has words for 'push' and 'pull' (»puf« and »hal«, respectively).

Having had the misfortune of spending this week working on a Javascript codebase partly coded in French, let me tell you it's a very bad idea. The disconnect between variable/function names and language identifier is jarring. Please, just code in English, even if your English is bad.

> However, confining ourselves to one language makes us all think the same way

I have prior knowledge in the area so pardon me if what I'm saying is nonsene, but learning a programming language doesn't have the same benefits of learning any other language in this case?

I mean, if you are used to something like C, learning Haskell or Lisp or Brainfuck is a big mind shift.

I was actually thinking of spoken languages, and attempts to solve the same issues in one particular programming language. Or in the larger scope of designing a system (where choice of programming language is less relevant).

I often find that choice of programming languages confines people to restrict themselves to certain ways in each language. Which obviously makes sense, as each programming languages were created with a need in mind that was sufficiently being fulfilled in other languages.

There are things you'd write in C, but not in Haskell. Like say, a driver.

It's different with spoken languages, they all try to solve the same issue; communicating. But do so differently.

Quite relevant: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/03/the-ugly-american-p...

Great article. Quote:

"I know many developers in Poland who prefer (as Joel mentioned) to get English documentation rather than Polish translation and the reason for that is that translations were not always accurate."

That made me remember how before the Web sometimes I could not get an original book but would be able to buy a translated one. Many times the translations made no sense at all and I had to mentally translate it back to English to understand what the original author meant.

As another Brazilian, I agree 100% with you, I never, ever install anything in portuguese, or read any blog post in portuguese. I always go for english, the ones who do try to avoid it are usually mediocre developers.

You know what I'm talking about. The people that don't bother learning English and depend on auto translators are the same that don't bother studying anything, solve problems by trial and error, and develop by copy-and-paste and cargo-cult. Sigh...

I am a German guy, and I agree! Everybody in IT should know enough english to use GitHub.

Although Ruby uses English terms, a lot of the development happens in Japanese.

Which is a significant barrier of entry for western developers and may actually be part of the reason why MRI is not nearly as good as it could be (less eyes looking at it).

I've experienced this myself twice so far, with Ruby and with TokyoCabinet (earlier HyperEstraier). Upon investigation of lower-level problems I would eventually hit a brick-wall in the disguise of a japanese mailing list.

This seems to be improving for Ruby nowadays, but I did actually stop using HyperEstraier (years ago, before the rise of SOLR) for this reason.

One counter-example could be nginx where lots of discussion still happens in russian, yet the code-quality remains excellent. This is more of an outlier than a role-model, though. Most projects are not blessed with a lead-developer as talented as Igor.

oh come on, it's not such a bad suggestion. There are many programmers with a poor command of English good ones and bad ones. I see no reason to say "suck it up, learn English" to them. And yes, github might be wise to address that market.

It's worth noting that international support is also useful for people wanting to add issues, not just coders. And that revision control systems can be used for more than just code.

Agree, but this is business. They need more customers.

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