Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

While learning English will help immeasurably when you're learning to program, the languages themselves are often highly English-baed, trying to tackle programming and English at the same time makes for quite a barrier.

Since being able to ask difficult, technical questions in your native language would make it easier to learn, I don't see what's so bad about that. Yes, it fragments the community, but it also recognizes that the world is not English only. Right now there's large Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and French communities that are second-class citizens without a tool like Stack Overflow.

View on HN

The connection between programming languages and English is highly exaggerated. Programming language syntax is generally nothing like natural language syntax, and programming language vocabulary (keywords, data structures, standard library names) is usually completely divorced from similar-sounding or similar-spelled words in English.

The biggest problem I've seen is that a lot of the words have subtle meaning and the jargon used to describe the theory is often difficult or impossible to translate.

For example, a "stack" or a "filter" or a "queue" all have specific meanings outside of programming, their nature hints at how they work, even if the technical meaning is obviously different.

Not knowing what any of the things were leaves you with a hazy concept of what they are until you understand their English analog.

I still think it makes sense to try and explain concepts in the language in which one is most proficient, then worry about English later.

> Trying to tackle programming and English at the same time makes for quite a barrier.

That's how I played all games as a kid :) Civilisation + dictionary FTW

More than one of my non-native English co-workers has said the first English phrase they understood was: GAME OVER

Mine was 'REDO FROM START' :-)

It depends on the person of course, but trying to learn english while learning programming can create a kind of virtuous circle of learning (learning programming helps getting familiar with english words which helps reading docs which helps programming etc).

It's more difficult to try to learn one ignoring the other IMO. I had collegues that didn't care much for english, but it was surprising how good they were at parsing other people's code and understand how libraries and APIs worked with very few hints.

I would say that reading documentation is a bigger problem then having to memorize a dozen or so keywords.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com