5 ms·

A lot of people don't speak English and I think it's main barrier to become a programmer or QA engineer.

kmlx 7y ago
it's much much easier to learn coding than to learn English. i have coworkers that don't speak English but have no problems coding.
- monoideism 7y ago
  Well, for people like us, obviously. I have many friends who are multilingual, and who can easily learn a 4th or 5th language if they want, but who have/would struggle with the logical and mathematical facilities required to code.
j-pb 7y ago
Good! We need less shitty software, the fewer people that write it the better. I don't get why you have to be a certified engineer to build a bridge, but you can be some bloke with a 2 weekend course in python to program medical computers, avionics, train scheduling systems and other stuff that kills people when it breaks. Non native speaker btw.
- pgcj_poster 7y ago
  Good point. There's just one problem: any moron can still be able to become a programmer if they come from an anglophone country. Therefore, I propose that all companies in English-speaking countries switch to using Linotte[1], which is based on French. I'm also going to submit a patch to GCC that will require the user to solve a differential equation before their code will compile. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte
  - j-pb 7y ago
    On the fact that the atlantic has two sides: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E... > 1. good programming is probably beyond the intellectual abilities of today's "average programmer" 2. to do, hic et nunc, the job well with today's army of practitioners, many of whom have been lured into a profession beyond their intellectual abilities, is an insoluble problem 3. our only hope is that, by revealing the intellectual contents of programming, we will make the subject attracting the type of students it deserves, so that a next generation of better qualified programmers may gradually replace the current one.
  - pgcj_poster 7y ago
    > any moron can still be able to Whoops, proved my own point.
- mparramon 7y ago
  gatekeeper much
- Mirioron 7y ago
  Because man-hours is the limiting factor in software that is made. Additional software simply gives you more options to choose from. Yes, it contributes to noise, but it's nothing like building two bridges.
  - j-pb 7y ago
    And thats why Apple and Microsoft have the best software?/s A monkey with a typewriter will produce garbage no matter how many monkey hours it puts in. The only way to have as little bugs as possible is to have as little software as possible.
EugeneOZ 7y ago
You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).
- tim333 7y ago
  Or at least just a few words I guess - if, for, while etc.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    You don't really need to know what these words mean in English. You just have to know what they do in the code.
  - np_tedious 7y ago
    It's a headstart for sure, but English speakers do have to learn those reserved words and control structures in each language. The difference is we have the benefit of grounding them in their similar, but not identical, ordinary meanings The bigger deal is standard lib classes and functions. An English speaker can guess for the names of things they want whereas a nonspeaker would have to remember them explicitly
- Digit-Al 7y ago
  I'm really curious now. If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn the meanings of the keywords when they were in a language you didn't understand? Did you have to learn to translate "for", "while", etc into Russian equivalents?
  - EugeneOZ 7y ago
    I knew meaning of "if then else", "function", "go", "return", other keywords were just keywords for me - I knew what they do and it was enough.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    Same way you learn to use the ternary operator in c-ish languages? All the binary operators that have no equivalent in daily life?
jcranmer 7y ago
It's also a barrier to becoming a scientific researcher, an airline pilot, or working at an international company. If you're going to communicate with people from other cultures, you need a shared language, and many international contexts have centered on varieties of English for that shared language.
- mkr-hn 7y ago
  Interesting thing: Airline pilots use imperial units instead of metric. They're an odd outlier where the argument used for metric works for imperial. Airlines in all but a few countries use it. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2566/what-is-the-measurement-system-used-in-the-aviation-industry https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2566/what-is-th...

kmlx 7y ago

it's much much easier to learn coding than to learn English. i have coworkers that don't speak English but have no problems coding.

monoideism 7y ago
Well, for people like us, obviously. I have many friends who are multilingual, and who can easily learn a 4th or 5th language if they want, but who have/would struggle with the logical and mathematical facilities required to code.

j-pb 7y ago

Good! We need less shitty software, the fewer people that write it the better. I don't get why you have to be a certified engineer to build a bridge, but you can be some bloke with a 2 weekend course in python to program medical computers, avionics, train scheduling systems and other stuff that kills people when it breaks. Non native speaker btw.

pgcj_poster 7y ago
Good point. There's just one problem: any moron can still be able to become a programmer if they come from an anglophone country. Therefore, I propose that all companies in English-speaking countries switch to using Linotte[1], which is based on French. I'm also going to submit a patch to GCC that will require the user to solve a differential equation before their code will compile. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte
- j-pb 7y ago
  On the fact that the atlantic has two sides: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E... > 1. good programming is probably beyond the intellectual abilities of today's "average programmer" 2. to do, hic et nunc, the job well with today's army of practitioners, many of whom have been lured into a profession beyond their intellectual abilities, is an insoluble problem 3. our only hope is that, by revealing the intellectual contents of programming, we will make the subject attracting the type of students it deserves, so that a next generation of better qualified programmers may gradually replace the current one.
- pgcj_poster 7y ago
  > any moron can still be able to Whoops, proved my own point.
mparramon 7y ago
gatekeeper much
Mirioron 7y ago
Because man-hours is the limiting factor in software that is made. Additional software simply gives you more options to choose from. Yes, it contributes to noise, but it's nothing like building two bridges.
- j-pb 7y ago
  And thats why Apple and Microsoft have the best software?/s A monkey with a typewriter will produce garbage no matter how many monkey hours it puts in. The only way to have as little bugs as possible is to have as little software as possible.

EugeneOZ 7y ago

You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).

tim333 7y ago
Or at least just a few words I guess - if, for, while etc.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  You don't really need to know what these words mean in English. You just have to know what they do in the code.
- np_tedious 7y ago
  It's a headstart for sure, but English speakers do have to learn those reserved words and control structures in each language. The difference is we have the benefit of grounding them in their similar, but not identical, ordinary meanings The bigger deal is standard lib classes and functions. An English speaker can guess for the names of things they want whereas a nonspeaker would have to remember them explicitly
Digit-Al 7y ago
I'm really curious now. If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn the meanings of the keywords when they were in a language you didn't understand? Did you have to learn to translate "for", "while", etc into Russian equivalents?
- EugeneOZ 7y ago
  I knew meaning of "if then else", "function", "go", "return", other keywords were just keywords for me - I knew what they do and it was enough.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Same way you learn to use the ternary operator in c-ish languages? All the binary operators that have no equivalent in daily life?

jcranmer 7y ago

It's also a barrier to becoming a scientific researcher, an airline pilot, or working at an international company. If you're going to communicate with people from other cultures, you need a shared language, and many international contexts have centered on varieties of English for that shared language.

mkr-hn 7y ago
Interesting thing: Airline pilots use imperial units instead of metric. They're an odd outlier where the argument used for metric works for imperial. Airlines in all but a few countries use it. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2566/what-is-the-measurement-system-used-in-the-aviation-industry https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2566/what-is-th...