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No, I'm Dutch. Our language has been affected deeply by English. People even make a lot of spelling mistakes because of English. For instance, our government bu

No, I'm Dutch. Our language has been affected deeply by English. People even make a lot of spelling mistakes because of English. For instance, our government building has a spelling mistake in the sign of their main building, it reads: 'Hoofd Gebouw' but this is wrong in Dutch, because it must be 'Hoofdgebouw' (without the space, but in English you write it as 2 words instead of one). People don't know a lot of Dutch equivalents for English words either, they use 'body text' instead of 'broodtekst' and 'database' instead of 'databank'. Code bases are a complete nightmare because managers 'want English as the main language' but we lack the English words for lots of (financial) Dutch concepts. A lot Dutch people think they are really good in English, but we really aren't (sometimes native English speakers beg us to not try and speak English but use Dutch instead so they at least understand what is being said given their limited knowledge of the Dutch language). Our limited knowledge of English leads to a lot of confusing code as well (i.e. they use the word 'childs' instead of 'children' in code that deals with tree structures). Also a lot of database names and tables are full of 'poor English' (user_project instead of 'participant') -- maybe due to a limited vocabulary (trying to describe a word with multiple words etc). There are many more examples. These are just my experiences. edit: Due to the fact that English is not my native language my statements may sometimes a bit more rude than I intent. Sorry for that. edit: Tried to clarify text, add some nuance.

lawlorino 8y ago
> A lot Dutch people think they are really good in English, but we really aren't (sometimes native English speakers beg us to not try and speak English but use Dutch instead so they at least understand what is being said given their limited knowledge of the Dutch language). As a native English speaker living in NL I'm really curious about this, could you describe a situation? The few Dutch people I work with have outstanding levels of English, although being at a company where ~90% of people in my department are non-Dutch, so English is widely spoken, my observation is clearly very biased. Plus I live in Amsterdam which I hear is very different from the rest of the country in this respect.
- PoachedSausage 8y ago
  Another native English person here, so usual disclaimers. I have visited and traveled extensively from an early age around the southern Netherlands (Noord-Brabant) due to my parents meeting and befriending a Dutch couple whilst traveling there before I was born. I have found levels of English there to also be excellent, one possible reason could be that English language television and radio broadcasts (BBC etc) have been available to the Dutch for decades, and in a lot of cases actively consumed. That was certainly the case when I was there as a child.
j-pb 8y ago
As a german who worked as a software dev in the netherlands for 2 years, I could't disagree more. The dutch speak a great english, even the homeless. I've never heard a better american style english anywhere else in europe and I found the dutch english often more clean than even received pronounciation. Same goes for the code bases, they had the usual mess that codebases have but variable names weren't an issue. I find your example of childs vs children to be bike shedding, the hard part about coding isn't the variable names. If you read haskell you would probably find "c" for child and "cs" for children, simply to keep the code terse. While I strongly condone the form of backlash you received, I am still happy that there is pushback.(sorry) We as software devs battle complexity on a daily basis, and we achieve many of the things we achieve only because of collaboration. Introducing an additional translation step into the process of coding sounds like a complexity nightmare, a debugging nightmare and a communications nightmare. When working in an international team you still have to talk about the stuff, and as long as something like this doesn't ship with a perfect star trek like universal natlang translator people still have to settle on one language, except that the code they are looking at is now code they've never seen before. Kudos for the effort, go do it as a hobby but don't be suprised that people get mad just by the very thought of being forced by management to work with something that puts even more complexity onto their shoulders. And I'm happy that people want collaboration so bad that they are willing to speak and work in a language that they don't understand well in order to connect with peers from all over the world. And don't take it personal that others don't digg the idea of having to work with something like this. It's a cool idea, it didn't work. Move on and try the next cool idea, one day one of them will stick. You're not the only one to have worked on something and then figured out a year into the project that there is no demand/ its technically unfeasible / there is some obscure paper from the 70s that had the same idea but discovered a fundamental flaw and dropped it. To quote allan key: If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

lawlorino 8y ago

> A lot Dutch people think they are really good in English, but we really aren't (sometimes native English speakers beg us to not try and speak English but use Dutch instead so they at least understand what is being said given their limited knowledge of the Dutch language). As a native English speaker living in NL I'm really curious about this, could you describe a situation? The few Dutch people I work with have outstanding levels of English, although being at a company where ~90% of people in my department are non-Dutch, so English is widely spoken, my observation is clearly very biased. Plus I live in Amsterdam which I hear is very different from the rest of the country in this respect.

PoachedSausage 8y ago
Another native English person here, so usual disclaimers. I have visited and traveled extensively from an early age around the southern Netherlands (Noord-Brabant) due to my parents meeting and befriending a Dutch couple whilst traveling there before I was born. I have found levels of English there to also be excellent, one possible reason could be that English language television and radio broadcasts (BBC etc) have been available to the Dutch for decades, and in a lot of cases actively consumed. That was certainly the case when I was there as a child.

j-pb 8y ago

As a german who worked as a software dev in the netherlands for 2 years, I could't disagree more. The dutch speak a great english, even the homeless. I've never heard a better american style english anywhere else in europe and I found the dutch english often more clean than even received pronounciation. Same goes for the code bases, they had the usual mess that codebases have but variable names weren't an issue. I find your example of childs vs children to be bike shedding, the hard part about coding isn't the variable names. If you read haskell you would probably find "c" for child and "cs" for children, simply to keep the code terse. While I strongly condone the form of backlash you received, I am still happy that there is pushback.(sorry) We as software devs battle complexity on a daily basis, and we achieve many of the things we achieve only because of collaboration. Introducing an additional translation step into the process of coding sounds like a complexity nightmare, a debugging nightmare and a communications nightmare. When working in an international team you still have to talk about the stuff, and as long as something like this doesn't ship with a perfect star trek like universal natlang translator people still have to settle on one language, except that the code they are looking at is now code they've never seen before. Kudos for the effort, go do it as a hobby but don't be suprised that people get mad just by the very thought of being forced by management to work with something that puts even more complexity onto their shoulders. And I'm happy that people want collaboration so bad that they are willing to speak and work in a language that they don't understand well in order to connect with peers from all over the world. And don't take it personal that others don't digg the idea of having to work with something like this. It's a cool idea, it didn't work. Move on and try the next cool idea, one day one of them will stick. You're not the only one to have worked on something and then figured out a year into the project that there is no demand/ its technically unfeasible / there is some obscure paper from the 70s that had the same idea but discovered a fundamental flaw and dropped it. To quote allan key: If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.