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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 shoul

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.

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.