5 ms·
I think this is not the best analogy. You can still understand music and learn from other musicians and play together even though neither of you can sight read.
by olavk 8y ago
I think this is not the best analogy. You can still understand music and learn from other musicians and play together even though neither of you can sight read. But any non-trivial piece of code is textual communication and you will simply not be able to make heads or tails of it if you don't know the language.
- PaulRobinson 8y agoYou're assuming the code is the most important part of producing software. Frequently it's the communication within the team, the documentation and the third-parties you will deal with. You can be a rockstar on your own without English. You can't be a team player and expect to do well without English. That was my point.
- olavk 8y agoI'm not going to argue whether code is the most important or not, but I will claim that if you cannot write working code you are not a developer. And if you cannot use the standard library of your language, then you cannot even get to hello world. It doesn't matter how good you are at communicating then. You can perhaps be a "rockstar" in a very specific niche e.g. scripting or customizing inside some vertical platform which is fully localized. Those do exist. But show me the mainstream language where the standard library API have been translated to a non-English language. Another example might be working completely without third-party libraries. Again this would be possible but a very niche scenario in this day and age.
- PaulRobinson 8y agoYou're arguing over something I did not say.