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I can understand (but don't fully agree to) a claim like that a F/OSS software should be primarily in English to maximize its community, as many programmers alr

I can understand (but don't fully agree to) a claim like that a F/OSS software should be primarily in English to maximize its community, as many programmers already speak English to some extent out of necessity anyway. But forcing English to ordinary people not using English? Plain absurd. For starters, while young people may feel more comfortable with occasional English older people don't, and your proposal will make them much more uneasy. Smartphone penetration rate around the world [1] can easily reach 50% for many countries and that would include many people unable to understand English---I live in Korea and older people are technologically no inferior to younger people in that regard. Impossible when you force them to use English. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphone_penetration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphon...

j-pb 7y ago
Then have local operating systems for them in Hangul (Hangul would also be a nice lingua franca writing system, too bad its very local). I think you'd be surprised how well even older people can learn a new language when required to. I doubt that understanding new technology is easier than learning a new language. And all recent studies show that "adults don't learn languages well" is pretty much a myth. https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn-language-to-fluency-nearly-as-well-as-children-1de888d1d45f https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn... https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-semi-literate-children-in-a-remote-indian-village-taught-themselves-molecular-biology/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-semi-literate-children-in-... http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/paper13.pdf http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/paper13.pdf
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  Adults do learn languages well when required, sure. I question that we should. Making additional [1] billions of people learn a new language is not cost-effective compared to a (comparably) small number of software engineers wrestling with i18n (haha). It is sad that English knowledge is very valued among, for example, several non-English [EDIT] workplaces even when it is not required at all. > Hangul would also be a nice lingua franca writing system, too bad its very local By the way, Hangul was tailor made for Korean with its relatively simple CGVC syllable structure. I doubt it can be generalized much---Hangul is important because it is one of the first featural alphabets, not because it is a universal (or at least adaptable) featural alphabet where it isn't. [1] English has about 2 billion speakers (400M native + 750M L2 + 700M foreign), so you need another billion speakers or two to make your proposal real. [EDIT] was "CJK", but I'm not sure about Chinese and Japanese.
  - j-pb 7y ago
    Instead of the total number of speakers the better metric would be the diversity of the speakers. A language is a better candidate for a lingua franca if its spoken everywhere a little, than somewhere a lot, e.g. Mandarin. And this is not about cost, but about Bugs in critical infrastructure. I'd get rid of smartphones and unicode in a heartbeat if it meant bug free command line applications, no malware, and medical and infrastructure that doesn't crash. I think its great when non english workplaces require english. It gives people an incentive, because humans are a lazy species. And once you learned it you can use it on your next vacation, your next online encounter, and who knows where. Having computers only do english would have given a similar incentive, and I'm sad we didn't use that opportunity.
K0SM0S 7y ago
> I live in Korea and older people are technologically no inferior to younger people in that regard. You guys truly are wonderful unicorns. How do you do it? (serious question in that regard) On topic, I think the ultimate solution is to have whatever language input/output be essentially a placeholder, and then some general "switching" system which puts whatever language a user prefers. It should be able to switch on-the-fly totally independently of application state. (same thing for numbers, outputting decimal or hexadecimal should happen on-the-fly, same model value but different user view) Commercial OS's tend to be pretty invasive these days, but the one thing where we need more of them, and better tooling, is definitely text i/o.

j-pb 7y ago

Then have local operating systems for them in Hangul (Hangul would also be a nice lingua franca writing system, too bad its very local). I think you'd be surprised how well even older people can learn a new language when required to. I doubt that understanding new technology is easier than learning a new language. And all recent studies show that "adults don't learn languages well" is pretty much a myth. https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn-language-to-fluency-nearly-as-well-as-children-1de888d1d45f https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn... https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-semi-literate-children-in-a-remote-indian-village-taught-themselves-molecular-biology/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-semi-literate-children-in-... http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/paper13.pdf http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/paper13.pdf

lifthrasiir 7y ago
Adults do learn languages well when required, sure. I question that we should. Making additional [1] billions of people learn a new language is not cost-effective compared to a (comparably) small number of software engineers wrestling with i18n (haha). It is sad that English knowledge is very valued among, for example, several non-English [EDIT] workplaces even when it is not required at all. > Hangul would also be a nice lingua franca writing system, too bad its very local By the way, Hangul was tailor made for Korean with its relatively simple CGVC syllable structure. I doubt it can be generalized much---Hangul is important because it is one of the first featural alphabets, not because it is a universal (or at least adaptable) featural alphabet where it isn't. [1] English has about 2 billion speakers (400M native + 750M L2 + 700M foreign), so you need another billion speakers or two to make your proposal real. [EDIT] was "CJK", but I'm not sure about Chinese and Japanese.
- j-pb 7y ago
  Instead of the total number of speakers the better metric would be the diversity of the speakers. A language is a better candidate for a lingua franca if its spoken everywhere a little, than somewhere a lot, e.g. Mandarin. And this is not about cost, but about Bugs in critical infrastructure. I'd get rid of smartphones and unicode in a heartbeat if it meant bug free command line applications, no malware, and medical and infrastructure that doesn't crash. I think its great when non english workplaces require english. It gives people an incentive, because humans are a lazy species. And once you learned it you can use it on your next vacation, your next online encounter, and who knows where. Having computers only do english would have given a similar incentive, and I'm sad we didn't use that opportunity.

K0SM0S 7y ago

> I live in Korea and older people are technologically no inferior to younger people in that regard. You guys truly are wonderful unicorns. How do you do it? (serious question in that regard) On topic, I think the ultimate solution is to have whatever language input/output be essentially a placeholder, and then some general "switching" system which puts whatever language a user prefers. It should be able to switch on-the-fly totally independently of application state. (same thing for numbers, outputting decimal or hexadecimal should happen on-the-fly, same model value but different user view) Commercial OS's tend to be pretty invasive these days, but the one thing where we need more of them, and better tooling, is definitely text i/o.