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>If you don't speak English quite well at an early age (already at 10-13 years old) you are much less likely to get into software development at an early age.
by mlevental 9y ago
>If you don't speak English quite well at an early age (already at 10-13 years old) you are much less likely to get into software development at an early age.
china and russia beg to differ?
- flexie 9y agoThere are many great Russian and Chinese developers but little Russian or Chinese software has spread outside those countries. Except viruses, maybe
- CydeWeys 9y agoI think the point is, though, that there's plenty of resources available in Mandarin and Russian to be able to get really good at programming from a young age, even if you don't learn English until later. Contrast with, say, an African child of well-to-do parents who has access to computers and the Internet but who doesn't (yet?) speak English. Good luck finding lots of coding resources.
- thrownblown 9y agovue.js
- flexie 9y agoYes, that's one. A good one :-)
- nnq 9y agoThe percent of English speaking people is probably like 4x in China or Russia vs. France or Spain. And you don't need "speaking fluency", just "advanced reading comprehension skills" to get most advantages... I could read advanced academic papers written in English (not just technical, also philosophy and economics) well before my speaking fluency was good enough to make "live conversation" well. Of course, there is a horrible side to it: coming from Eastern Europe and living in Western Europe, I need to "dumb down" my English a lot, and to force myself to talk slower in English when speaking with French/Italian/Spanish (French are the worse btw - never met people harder to communicate efficiently with than them... even when their language skills are ok they sprinkle that "context dependency" and "nonobviousness" into everything) people that speak "English" but are actually only fluent in a lifeless subset of "standard international business English"...
- jk2323 9y agoWhy would this matter? There are more than enough books in the local languages about programming. Formerly it may have mattered if you can afford a computer. But prices have come down so far that this is not an issue anymore. Hey, you could use a Raspberry with a keyboard and attach it to a TV to learn how to program.
- cabalamat 9y ago> There are more than enough books in the local languages about programming. Depends what you're looking for. E.g. for many libraries/APIs there is documentation in English and no other language.