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How many other free software projects are significantly hindered by the language used by the main developers? I found that the most fascinating aspect of this

by Vivtek 16y ago

How many other free software projects are significantly hindered by the language used by the main developers? I found that the most fascinating aspect of this post. Software tends to be so very English-centric that the fact that Ruby is Japanese really stands out.

kscaldef 16y ago
I believe that early on most of the OCaml community was French-speaking. Personally, I found that aspect of the article borderline offensive. Oh, people shouldn't speak their native language because... speak English dammit! Oh, and don't release software on Dec 25th. (News flash: the majority of the world population does not celebrate Christmas.)
- moe 16y ago
  Oh, people shouldn't speak their native language because... speak English dammit! Nothing offensive about that, as long as it's expressed in a polite manner. To me it sounds like a constructive proposal from someone who has witnessed the problems first-hand, he's not just "ranting from the sidelines". This is not about imperialism. It's about improving the communications in a project that has long turned international. English is the lowest common denominator. Refusing to acknowledge that simple fact does not help anything.
  - jamtur01 16y ago
    Also given Lucas' native language isn't English either it's hard to claim imperialism.
- zppx 16y ago
  I think it's a problem when your project goes international. You have to choose a language to communicate with the larger community. Some countries do not have this problem, the Anglo-Saxon world can communicate with a common language, they are inflated by the Indian community that generally uses English in their communication as well. India, with its many official languages, is a living example of how this can be a problem in Science and Technical communities, restricting our problem to programming you'll hardly see an Indian developer starting a project and documenting it in Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil or Malayalam (or others with more than 10 million speakers). This can be a problem, so you have to decide very early how you'll approach this problem, Linus Torvalds for example chose English in the beginning instead of his native Swedish. The Lua developers chose a similar route, since they native language is Portuguese, I do not know much about Python, but I expect that Guido also chose English to communicate with developers instead of Dutch. Ruby apparently took another way, some people sees this as a problem, others don't, personally I would not like to work in a project in which I cannot ask some guys directly because we do not know a common language to communicate. For me English is a easy choice since the majority of people learn some English in school or college, or even playing games.
- cmelbye 16y ago
  A majority does not celebrate Christmas, but a large chunk of it does. Even if you don't celebrate Christmas, you may have time off of work anyways. It's just not a good time to do the yearly release in my opinion (and the author's too)
  - kscaldef 16y ago
    A large chunk also celebrate Ramadan, Diwali, and others. No one seems to suggest that you shouldn't release software on those days. Also, saying "you may have have time off work anyway" suggests a restricted view of the world.
    - Vivtek 16y ago
      Well, a restricted view that includes Europe as well as North and South America isn't all that restricted.
masklinn 16y ago
> Software tends to be so very English-centric I'm not sure software is "english-centric" so much as english being the linga franca of computing, much like diplomacy used to be mostly (if not solely) in french. You need a common language to share, and english was as good as any (better, in fact, since most early research [Church, Turing, Von Neumann, McCarthy] in CS was in english as were pretty much all the early implementations (Colossus, ENIAC, FORTRAN, ALGOL, BASIC, …)
- Vivtek 16y ago
  That's pretty much my point: the "A" in "ASCII" stands for "American", and software as a culture has remained plagued and characterized by that ever since. What I found remarkable about this post is that Ruby's development culture is distinctly not run in English, and it's creating the predictable amount of friction. The Japanese are no less insular than Americans when it comes to actual belief in the independent existence of anything off their shores - I find it fascinating to see that reflected in the Ruby project.
- gwern 16y ago
  > I'm not sure software is "english-centric" so much as english being the linga franca of computing, much like diplomacy used to be mostly (if not solely) in french. What exactly would be the difference there?
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    At the very least: Diplomatic phrasing. But diplomacy is important. If I'm going to be audacious enough to ask the majority of the human race to conduct their business in my native language I can damn well try to be excessively polite about it. But it does go beyond that. "English-centric software" could be interpreted as "software designed primarily by and for English speakers". And we wouldn't want to advocate that, because that has historically been a problem. Before Unicode, software supported English character sets much better than foreign-language character sets (and Western Europe better than Eastern Europe, and Europe better than Asia...). Even now, a lot of software doesn't support right-to-left languages. This kind of English-centrism is not good. We don't want to perpetuate it. What the OP is advocating is "English as a lingua franca of software engineering", which is in fact a different thing.
pgroves 16y ago
This reflects a larger issue about project management: Do you want more people working a little on the project or a few top performers working at their absolute maximum productivity? If I was them I'd keep running the project in the way that makes the top 10 contributors as productive as possible, and it sounds like keeping the discussions in Japanese is the way to go. Think about if we were discussing Apple. Would you really suggest it would be worth making the top performers (including Steve Jobs) do their day to day work in Japanese if it meant more people could participate in the discussions? Or do you want to do everything you can to have the people who really know what they're doing working at their optimum?
- davidw 16y ago
  It could well be a 'local optimum' - switching to English would slow things down for a bit, until the much larger pool of people who speak some English started to get involved, and a few to stand out, and take things to a level the smaller group could never have reached.

by Vivtek 16y ago

kscaldef 16y ago

I believe that early on most of the OCaml community was French-speaking. Personally, I found that aspect of the article borderline offensive. Oh, people shouldn't speak their native language because... speak English dammit! Oh, and don't release software on Dec 25th. (News flash: the majority of the world population does not celebrate Christmas.)

moe 16y ago
Oh, people shouldn't speak their native language because... speak English dammit! Nothing offensive about that, as long as it's expressed in a polite manner. To me it sounds like a constructive proposal from someone who has witnessed the problems first-hand, he's not just "ranting from the sidelines". This is not about imperialism. It's about improving the communications in a project that has long turned international. English is the lowest common denominator. Refusing to acknowledge that simple fact does not help anything.
- jamtur01 16y ago
  Also given Lucas' native language isn't English either it's hard to claim imperialism.
zppx 16y ago
I think it's a problem when your project goes international. You have to choose a language to communicate with the larger community. Some countries do not have this problem, the Anglo-Saxon world can communicate with a common language, they are inflated by the Indian community that generally uses English in their communication as well. India, with its many official languages, is a living example of how this can be a problem in Science and Technical communities, restricting our problem to programming you'll hardly see an Indian developer starting a project and documenting it in Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil or Malayalam (or others with more than 10 million speakers). This can be a problem, so you have to decide very early how you'll approach this problem, Linus Torvalds for example chose English in the beginning instead of his native Swedish. The Lua developers chose a similar route, since they native language is Portuguese, I do not know much about Python, but I expect that Guido also chose English to communicate with developers instead of Dutch. Ruby apparently took another way, some people sees this as a problem, others don't, personally I would not like to work in a project in which I cannot ask some guys directly because we do not know a common language to communicate. For me English is a easy choice since the majority of people learn some English in school or college, or even playing games.
cmelbye 16y ago
A majority does not celebrate Christmas, but a large chunk of it does. Even if you don't celebrate Christmas, you may have time off of work anyways. It's just not a good time to do the yearly release in my opinion (and the author's too)
- kscaldef 16y ago
  A large chunk also celebrate Ramadan, Diwali, and others. No one seems to suggest that you shouldn't release software on those days. Also, saying "you may have have time off work anyway" suggests a restricted view of the world.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Well, a restricted view that includes Europe as well as North and South America isn't all that restricted.

masklinn 16y ago

> Software tends to be so very English-centric I'm not sure software is "english-centric" so much as english being the linga franca of computing, much like diplomacy used to be mostly (if not solely) in french. You need a common language to share, and english was as good as any (better, in fact, since most early research [Church, Turing, Von Neumann, McCarthy] in CS was in english as were pretty much all the early implementations (Colossus, ENIAC, FORTRAN, ALGOL, BASIC, …)

Vivtek 16y ago
That's pretty much my point: the "A" in "ASCII" stands for "American", and software as a culture has remained plagued and characterized by that ever since. What I found remarkable about this post is that Ruby's development culture is distinctly not run in English, and it's creating the predictable amount of friction. The Japanese are no less insular than Americans when it comes to actual belief in the independent existence of anything off their shores - I find it fascinating to see that reflected in the Ruby project.
gwern 16y ago
> I'm not sure software is "english-centric" so much as english being the linga franca of computing, much like diplomacy used to be mostly (if not solely) in french. What exactly would be the difference there?
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  At the very least: Diplomatic phrasing. But diplomacy is important. If I'm going to be audacious enough to ask the majority of the human race to conduct their business in my native language I can damn well try to be excessively polite about it. But it does go beyond that. "English-centric software" could be interpreted as "software designed primarily by and for English speakers". And we wouldn't want to advocate that, because that has historically been a problem. Before Unicode, software supported English character sets much better than foreign-language character sets (and Western Europe better than Eastern Europe, and Europe better than Asia...). Even now, a lot of software doesn't support right-to-left languages. This kind of English-centrism is not good. We don't want to perpetuate it. What the OP is advocating is "English as a lingua franca of software engineering", which is in fact a different thing.

pgroves 16y ago

This reflects a larger issue about project management: Do you want more people working a little on the project or a few top performers working at their absolute maximum productivity? If I was them I'd keep running the project in the way that makes the top 10 contributors as productive as possible, and it sounds like keeping the discussions in Japanese is the way to go. Think about if we were discussing Apple. Would you really suggest it would be worth making the top performers (including Steve Jobs) do their day to day work in Japanese if it meant more people could participate in the discussions? Or do you want to do everything you can to have the people who really know what they're doing working at their optimum?

davidw 16y ago
It could well be a 'local optimum' - switching to English would slow things down for a bit, until the much larger pool of people who speak some English started to get involved, and a few to stand out, and take things to a level the smaller group could never have reached.