Hacker News Reader

>Many of the Japanese coders I've met have put in the effort to learn English.

I put a longer response addressing this point in a different thread, but you're interacting with the cohort that has already chosen to be a computer programmer. It's a biased sample group. I would expect people with no interest in learning English would be disinclined to even enter programming.

(This is still tertiary to actual cultural preferences in web design, mind you.)

View on HN

I'd like to add to this remark that the Japanese as a whole are not as proficient at English as one might expect. I know I had some expectation that the Japanese had some working knowledge of English (maybe because many countries do encourage learning it?), but after visiting Tokyo I realized my assumption was way off the mark.

Negative. One of the best Japanese coders I know runs his own property management business, and learned coding (and English) so he can stay on top of the various stuff he's created in support of his operations.

That's one arbitrary example. It's meaningless if he represents 1 out of a 10000 sample size.

It's anecdotal, but dispels the idea that my "sample group" was limited to career programmers, which was the point in the parent comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com