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As an English speaking person I have a vested interest in operating systems that are in English. If Harmony OS takes over then I doubt the finer points of the

As an English speaking person I have a vested interest in operating systems that are in English. If Harmony OS takes over then I doubt the finer points of the documentation will necessarily be in English. I know there are many strong opinions on everything to do with China, but if English is no longer the lingua-franca in tech then I will be blaming the Trump regime and the three letter agencies for messing it up.

pjmlp 7y ago
Even in IT, in certain world regions you would have better luck with some variation of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian as Lingua Franca than English.
- krageon 7y ago
  Most of the IT infrastructure most people would use at any point will have documentation in English. I'm sure you could find isolated examples to the contrary and no doubt those examples are sometimes also great software worth using, but this is currently not the norm.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Then I have to tell you that in quite a few projects, the skill that the clients were looking for was that besides my programming skills, I also master a couple of human languages. No documentation, comments written in native language and even identifiers are not so uncommon across many corporations.
    - krageon 7y ago
      I never claimed otherwise, I said that this could be the case.
- Theodores 7y ago
  I would prefer to do things like getting my web server to work in stock Ubuntu where the instructions are all in English. To further help, everything on Stack Overflow is in English. Harmony OS is a general purpose OS, I doubt that if I was trying to get the server version of it working that the finer points of the settings would be documented in English. On-going development might not be in English. The commands used in programming languages are in English. 'strpos' might not be an English Word but it is still English. There isn't a Spanish/Russian/French or other language version of 'strpos'. Same with HTML. 'body' is always 'body' whatever the language the content of the page is. I don't get your point.
  - lloeki 7y ago
    > The commands used in programming languages are in English Taken as absolute this is untrue: https://doc.pcsoft.fr/fr-FR/?3043007&name=HTTPRequete https://doc.pcsoft.fr/fr-FR/?3043007&name=HTTPRequete The thing is entirely in French (SI ALORS SINON, POUR TOUT, TANT QUE...) with English later tacked on, and a technical crapfest (I'd rather code in INTERCAL), but it does exist and is widely used around here (and by my own admission, produces working - if buggy - software that solves real life problems for people). Combined with OS, software, and resources (http://sdz.tdct.org http://sdz.tdct.org) set to French all around, a lot of the French dev community lives in a secluded language bubble entirely outside the thriving world you and I experience. Even if using non-French keywords, they could just as well be replaced with 'qux', 'frobnicate', or ':roller_coaster:'. To most of them, they're just tokens learned by rote. The overall quality of this community is terrible. At some point some contractor of a customer was hell-bent on explaining me that HTTP redirections were happening server-side (through pixie dust), therefore it was safe to place plaintext auth credentials in the query string. This creates a conundrum: any English content you poke at them is met with great pushback and distrust (mostly from fear of judgement and fear of the unknown), while the typical English-speaking developer will feed from English resources and produce in English resources. This in turn means that practically no French resource is produced (actually untrue, there has been and still is, but they lag behind a lot and usually don't survive long), further widening the gap. PS: I may sound adversarial but that's really not the case, it's more than I'm appalled. I tried to break the bubble by producing some French content and help people but the pushback, inertia, and status-quo is incredibly powerful.
cltsang 7y ago
China has been pushing that propaganda for years. See the movie "Transformers: Age of Extinction", and also the Chinese made "The Wandering Earth", in which Chinese people speak mandarin to white people, and those white people understand just fine. Honestly English being THE international language is certainly a reflection of the power of English speaking nations. It's no wonder China fancy having that.
dragonelite 7y ago
Nothing is forever, just like empires come and fall. So will lingua-franca people will adopt because money can be earned in the new lingua-franca.
ghego1 7y ago
I came here for this. I'm not a native English speaker, but I do not speak Chinese, so between the two I would certainly prefer English. In any case I totally agree that this push for a non American based OS is the fault of the current administration, and it might well be this push for non American based OSs will be regarded as one of the worst outcomes of current policies.

pjmlp 7y ago

Even in IT, in certain world regions you would have better luck with some variation of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian as Lingua Franca than English.

krageon 7y ago
Most of the IT infrastructure most people would use at any point will have documentation in English. I'm sure you could find isolated examples to the contrary and no doubt those examples are sometimes also great software worth using, but this is currently not the norm.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Then I have to tell you that in quite a few projects, the skill that the clients were looking for was that besides my programming skills, I also master a couple of human languages. No documentation, comments written in native language and even identifiers are not so uncommon across many corporations.
  - krageon 7y ago
    I never claimed otherwise, I said that this could be the case.
Theodores 7y ago
I would prefer to do things like getting my web server to work in stock Ubuntu where the instructions are all in English. To further help, everything on Stack Overflow is in English. Harmony OS is a general purpose OS, I doubt that if I was trying to get the server version of it working that the finer points of the settings would be documented in English. On-going development might not be in English. The commands used in programming languages are in English. 'strpos' might not be an English Word but it is still English. There isn't a Spanish/Russian/French or other language version of 'strpos'. Same with HTML. 'body' is always 'body' whatever the language the content of the page is. I don't get your point.
- lloeki 7y ago
  > The commands used in programming languages are in English Taken as absolute this is untrue: https://doc.pcsoft.fr/fr-FR/?3043007&name=HTTPRequete https://doc.pcsoft.fr/fr-FR/?3043007&name=HTTPRequete The thing is entirely in French (SI ALORS SINON, POUR TOUT, TANT QUE...) with English later tacked on, and a technical crapfest (I'd rather code in INTERCAL), but it does exist and is widely used around here (and by my own admission, produces working - if buggy - software that solves real life problems for people). Combined with OS, software, and resources (http://sdz.tdct.org http://sdz.tdct.org) set to French all around, a lot of the French dev community lives in a secluded language bubble entirely outside the thriving world you and I experience. Even if using non-French keywords, they could just as well be replaced with 'qux', 'frobnicate', or ':roller_coaster:'. To most of them, they're just tokens learned by rote. The overall quality of this community is terrible. At some point some contractor of a customer was hell-bent on explaining me that HTTP redirections were happening server-side (through pixie dust), therefore it was safe to place plaintext auth credentials in the query string. This creates a conundrum: any English content you poke at them is met with great pushback and distrust (mostly from fear of judgement and fear of the unknown), while the typical English-speaking developer will feed from English resources and produce in English resources. This in turn means that practically no French resource is produced (actually untrue, there has been and still is, but they lag behind a lot and usually don't survive long), further widening the gap. PS: I may sound adversarial but that's really not the case, it's more than I'm appalled. I tried to break the bubble by producing some French content and help people but the pushback, inertia, and status-quo is incredibly powerful.

cltsang 7y ago

China has been pushing that propaganda for years. See the movie "Transformers: Age of Extinction", and also the Chinese made "The Wandering Earth", in which Chinese people speak mandarin to white people, and those white people understand just fine. Honestly English being THE international language is certainly a reflection of the power of English speaking nations. It's no wonder China fancy having that.

dragonelite 7y ago

Nothing is forever, just like empires come and fall. So will lingua-franca people will adopt because money can be earned in the new lingua-franca.

ghego1 7y ago

I came here for this. I'm not a native English speaker, but I do not speak Chinese, so between the two I would certainly prefer English. In any case I totally agree that this push for a non American based OS is the fault of the current administration, and it might well be this push for non American based OSs will be regarded as one of the worst outcomes of current policies.