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I will never be interested in any projects whose primary language is Chinese, or any languages other than English. I wouldn't care if the project is targeted t

I will never be interested in any projects whose primary language is Chinese, or any languages other than English. I wouldn't care if the project is targeted to China. But it is donated to The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation should have not accepted such projects at the beginning. I'm Korean and there is nothing to do with China itself. But the more we accept projects like this, the more they like to write in their language. What's worst is that their Github issue page will be full of Chinese that other people will not understand. I don't want to see the programming culture get fragmented just because of the language.

kilroy_jones 7y ago
The project itself is not in Mandarin, are they? Thought it was just the docs, which shouldn't be a big deal as they will get translated.
- kbumsik 7y ago
  The docs is the most important. If the docs is Mandarin then the project itself is Mandarin. > shouldn't be a big deal as they will get translated. The problem is nobody guarantees they will get translated or the translation will have the same quality.
  - powerapple 7y ago
    So what? If there is a problem, it will be solved. Forcing non-English speaker to write in crappy English will not solve the problem. Unless, we make the rule that only native English speaker can start an OSS project, or just change Linux Foundation to English Linux Foundation :)
madsbuch 7y ago
It is already fragmented, the non English fragments are just not at liberated. I think it would be great with some more language diversity. It would reduce the barrier for a lot of people to enter the programming world. (and remember, it is commonplace many places to speak 2, 3, 4 languages).
- a-saleh 7y ago
  I am not sure the language diversity helps. I.e I remember working with localized Excel. Some of the names made no sense. What was worse, depending on localization, '0.5' could be displayed as '0,5', and that kept tripping me up. And I do speak three languages (and if push comes to shove, I can somewhat understand another two) ... and with <15 million understanding my mother tongue, yeah, I will do my programming in English. If you choose other language, it might make sense for you, and I don't feel entitled to understand you, but I probably won't learn your language just to participate, even if your project is really cool ... (unless it is one of those two that I have been neglecting ...)
  - madsbuch 7y ago
    I think we are in perfect understanding. I, myself, also do all of my work in English even though my mother tongue is a small language of 6 million people.
saagarjha 7y ago
You’re awfully exclusionary of a large group of people. It’s 2020; we have access to decent translation services: surely it can’t be all that much work to translate the issues? Why deny interested people the ability to interact with English-speaking members of the community?
- kbumsik 7y ago
  > we have access to decent translation services: surely it can’t be all that much work to translate the issues? If the translation services are great it wouldn't matter but I personally have never seen an useful service that translates technical talks well.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I help maintain a project with a very large segment of users who I suspect do not speak English. I have some help from Chinese-speaking members, but overall I can get by with an online translator. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s good enough for support in most cases. Usually the bigger issue is technical incompetence rather than a language barrier.
greendude29 7y ago
That's the stupidest barrier I have seen being proposed to potentially good software.
- haecceity 7y ago
  Agreed. If it provides value then they're going to work on it whether we like it or not. Telling people they have to write a certain way to play with us doesn't help at all.
- dzypa 7y ago
  How can software with no documentation be good?
dmix 7y ago
I use element-ui professional almost every day whose default language and some of the Github issues are Chinese but never had a problem with it. The bulk of the communication is still in english and the translation stuff was built in. https://element.eleme.io/#/en-US/component/installation https://element.eleme.io/#/en-US/component/installation The initial error/validation messages in the dialog box being in Chinese first caught me off guard, plus the website used to default to cn before that added geo filters later on, but a simple config change when you import element and set language to 'en' wasn't a big deal. And I never ran into problems otherwise communication wise. English is still very much the default communication language. My first reaction was that it was awesome to have so much OSS coming out of China and it was top-tier UX/design level stuff using modern JS like react/Vue. If it helps their communities to be able to communicate in their own language while they contribute to the wider world of software with top-notch software than we all ultimately win in the end. Localization is largely a solved problem.
nexuist 7y ago
Have you considered how Chinese developers feel when they must not only browse English documentation, but learn English keywords present in every major programming language? How accessible do you think StackOverflow is to Mandarin speakers? The solution is incredibly simple. Hire professionals or invite volunteers to provide an English version of the documentation. There is no need to force developers to learn an entire new language to be useful to the community as a whole. At the end of the day, it is the code that matters. "I'm not a nice person, and I don't care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that's what's important to me." - Linus Torvalds
- marvin 7y ago
  As a non-native English speaker: I strongly disagree with this. English is the lingua franca of computer technology, and as long as this remains the case, new entrants must adapt to the standard that is established. This is not a matter of cultural imperialism, it's a pragmatic decision around how to easiest communicate with the existing community. "It's the code that matters" is a nice soundbite, but in software engineering it's absolutely critical to be able to communicate and understand others' code, as well as reason and communicate about what the code should do. Having a working binary that's decoupled from any human language is only the end result you get after this process. Maybe Mandarin will be the lingua franca of computer technology in 30 years, if China becomes the dominant player in technology development. But that's not the world we have today, and this is really a decision between trying to include Chinese developers in the international community of technologists, or being stuck with two separate communities for the forseeable future. [Edit: Of course, since Tencent has 75 open-source projects and there's presumably a thriving community of Chinese technologists, we will most likely end up with the latter result anyway. So you may actually end up in the position where you'll have to learn Chinese to contribute instead, because the Chinese developers will be similarly disinclined to use English as long as they are able to get things done in their native language].
  - arkh 7y ago
    > and as long as this remains the case And how do you think this can change but by having projects whose main language is not English?
StreamBright 7y ago
Not sure why you think that English should dominate international matters. I personally think that Chinese has the same amount of legitimacy to be the Lingua franca for generations to come as English.
- LunaSea 7y ago
  The amount of people who know Mandarin as a second language outside of China is tiny. So not a lingua Franca.
edwinyzh 7y ago
I'm sorry, but it's your task to overcome the language barrier if you are interested in the project; if you don't, no one can force you to. But neither you can force other people to do the translation for you, nor force Linux Foundation not to accept an excellent project source project just due to the spoken language of the developer. Everything changes, the world changes. Nowadays you write Korean but your ancestors had been using Chinese as your country's official languages for many hundred years; Now we all learn English to communicate internationally but a few hundred years ago they use France. No one knows how the world will change but there is one thing we can be sure of - no one can force the world to change at his own will - the only thing s/he can do is to adopt it - just as what we human beings have been doing for millions of years.
TheSmoke 7y ago
turk here, if we are going to replace lingua franca, can we please choose german? damn ich würde ein sexy Softwarearchitekt sein. also, chinese software engineering community was a closed up one until a few years ago. now they're actively contributing, rolling up their home brew libraries and applications for the world wide usage. there is simply nothing wrong with them using their own language. we might have a problem when they try pushing that but almost all the popular chinese libs have english documentation.
rqs 7y ago
Here is some basic concept you may need to understand: The language (Both in natural and programming) choice of a project is usually depends on the interests of the main contributors. The main contributors will select the one that is best for them, and make improvement base on that. Since the project is mainly done by Tencent, a Chinese company, it just make since for the project to use Chinese. I see no point for their team members to communicate with one and other by writing documents in a second language everyday. Also, they've provided English document if you want to read, and the document is not bad. If you don't like the document, then send them some PR.
- rad_gruchalski 7y ago
  > Since the project is mainly done by Tencent, a Chinese company, it just make since for the project to use Chinese. I see no point for their team members to communicate with one and other by writing documents in a second language everyday. The point being, if it is accepted by the Linux Foundation, we should be expecting documentation in English. Otherwise it is fine for maintainers to use whatever language they feel is good for them to use.
  - calcifer 7y ago
    > If it is accepted by the Linux Foundation, we should be expecting documentation in English LF has no mandate to dictate any specific language to projects. > Otherwise it is fine for maintainers to use whatever language they feel is good for them to use. Yes.
    - rad_gruchalski 7y ago
      > LF has no mandate to dictate any specific language to projects. Maybe it doesn't, maybe it does. Maybe it should and maybe Tencent is creating precedents. Plenty of questions. All I see is: Linux Foundation is based in San Francisco, key people are all perfectly well speaking English and LF should do anything what is possible to make the projects accessible globally, using a lingua franca of technology.
jsgo 7y ago
If it is too high a bar, the obvious choice is to just not participate or use it. There are tons of projects I don’t leverage for various reasons (usually underlying programming language) and that’s fine, not everything is going to be tailored to me. If entrusting it to the Linux Foundation leads to more internationalization of the project, that can only be a win for the LF and Chinese OSS as a whole. Personally, I’d much rather Chinese developers operate within the global community than outside of it. And things like this are just another bullet point in that.
Proven 7y ago
I agree. There are already too many distracting comments on Github. (Not as important, but those who noticed the appearance of Github issues and comments in ideographic languages may have also noticed that most of them happen to be in simplified Chinese. Not Thai, not Vietnamese, etc. Not that I like to see any language other than English, but worst offenders of Github etiquette are from mainland China)
hhahah 7y ago
I guess in the future Chinese government will use it to threat Linux
ulfw 7y ago
I find it funny how when you put two developers in a room they can't decide on one programming language but million of developers shall somehow agree to use only one human language
- MarkLightning 7y ago
  I am interested in any valuable project, no matter what language it uses.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  It’s similar to air traffic control. All pilots speak English. Of course they speak other langs, but for that official purpose: English.
- ksec 7y ago
  >I find it funny how when you put two developers in a room they can't decide on one programming language May be because most programming language are English alike?
bborud 7y ago
This is a discussion where everyone will lose because it is practical reality colliding with feelings around identity.
sargram01 7y ago
Exactly, one of our teams in China decided to use a popular Chinese web framework, and when the rest of the team out side of China and customers looked at it, the English was grammatically confusing, code had Chinese comments, GitHub was mixed English and Chinese. We ended up replacing the framework for this reason. Here you can see what looking at issues is like: https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/issues https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/issues
Loranubi 7y ago
It's worth supporting Chinese language projects just to see if all the tooling can really handle unicode... There is still too much software around today which breaks when presented with anything else than ASCII.

kilroy_jones 7y ago

The project itself is not in Mandarin, are they? Thought it was just the docs, which shouldn't be a big deal as they will get translated.

kbumsik 7y ago
The docs is the most important. If the docs is Mandarin then the project itself is Mandarin. > shouldn't be a big deal as they will get translated. The problem is nobody guarantees they will get translated or the translation will have the same quality.
- powerapple 7y ago
  So what? If there is a problem, it will be solved. Forcing non-English speaker to write in crappy English will not solve the problem. Unless, we make the rule that only native English speaker can start an OSS project, or just change Linux Foundation to English Linux Foundation :)

madsbuch 7y ago

It is already fragmented, the non English fragments are just not at liberated. I think it would be great with some more language diversity. It would reduce the barrier for a lot of people to enter the programming world. (and remember, it is commonplace many places to speak 2, 3, 4 languages).

a-saleh 7y ago
I am not sure the language diversity helps. I.e I remember working with localized Excel. Some of the names made no sense. What was worse, depending on localization, '0.5' could be displayed as '0,5', and that kept tripping me up. And I do speak three languages (and if push comes to shove, I can somewhat understand another two) ... and with <15 million understanding my mother tongue, yeah, I will do my programming in English. If you choose other language, it might make sense for you, and I don't feel entitled to understand you, but I probably won't learn your language just to participate, even if your project is really cool ... (unless it is one of those two that I have been neglecting ...)
- madsbuch 7y ago
  I think we are in perfect understanding. I, myself, also do all of my work in English even though my mother tongue is a small language of 6 million people.

saagarjha 7y ago

You’re awfully exclusionary of a large group of people. It’s 2020; we have access to decent translation services: surely it can’t be all that much work to translate the issues? Why deny interested people the ability to interact with English-speaking members of the community?

kbumsik 7y ago
> we have access to decent translation services: surely it can’t be all that much work to translate the issues? If the translation services are great it wouldn't matter but I personally have never seen an useful service that translates technical talks well.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I help maintain a project with a very large segment of users who I suspect do not speak English. I have some help from Chinese-speaking members, but overall I can get by with an online translator. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s good enough for support in most cases. Usually the bigger issue is technical incompetence rather than a language barrier.

greendude29 7y ago

That's the stupidest barrier I have seen being proposed to potentially good software.

haecceity 7y ago
Agreed. If it provides value then they're going to work on it whether we like it or not. Telling people they have to write a certain way to play with us doesn't help at all.
dzypa 7y ago
How can software with no documentation be good?

dmix 7y ago

I use element-ui professional almost every day whose default language and some of the Github issues are Chinese but never had a problem with it. The bulk of the communication is still in english and the translation stuff was built in. https://element.eleme.io/#/en-US/component/installation https://element.eleme.io/#/en-US/component/installation The initial error/validation messages in the dialog box being in Chinese first caught me off guard, plus the website used to default to cn before that added geo filters later on, but a simple config change when you import element and set language to 'en' wasn't a big deal. And I never ran into problems otherwise communication wise. English is still very much the default communication language. My first reaction was that it was awesome to have so much OSS coming out of China and it was top-tier UX/design level stuff using modern JS like react/Vue. If it helps their communities to be able to communicate in their own language while they contribute to the wider world of software with top-notch software than we all ultimately win in the end. Localization is largely a solved problem.

nexuist 7y ago

Have you considered how Chinese developers feel when they must not only browse English documentation, but learn English keywords present in every major programming language? How accessible do you think StackOverflow is to Mandarin speakers? The solution is incredibly simple. Hire professionals or invite volunteers to provide an English version of the documentation. There is no need to force developers to learn an entire new language to be useful to the community as a whole. At the end of the day, it is the code that matters. "I'm not a nice person, and I don't care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that's what's important to me." - Linus Torvalds

marvin 7y ago
As a non-native English speaker: I strongly disagree with this. English is the lingua franca of computer technology, and as long as this remains the case, new entrants must adapt to the standard that is established. This is not a matter of cultural imperialism, it's a pragmatic decision around how to easiest communicate with the existing community. "It's the code that matters" is a nice soundbite, but in software engineering it's absolutely critical to be able to communicate and understand others' code, as well as reason and communicate about what the code should do. Having a working binary that's decoupled from any human language is only the end result you get after this process. Maybe Mandarin will be the lingua franca of computer technology in 30 years, if China becomes the dominant player in technology development. But that's not the world we have today, and this is really a decision between trying to include Chinese developers in the international community of technologists, or being stuck with two separate communities for the forseeable future. [Edit: Of course, since Tencent has 75 open-source projects and there's presumably a thriving community of Chinese technologists, we will most likely end up with the latter result anyway. So you may actually end up in the position where you'll have to learn Chinese to contribute instead, because the Chinese developers will be similarly disinclined to use English as long as they are able to get things done in their native language].
- arkh 7y ago
  > and as long as this remains the case And how do you think this can change but by having projects whose main language is not English?

StreamBright 7y ago

Not sure why you think that English should dominate international matters. I personally think that Chinese has the same amount of legitimacy to be the Lingua franca for generations to come as English.

LunaSea 7y ago
The amount of people who know Mandarin as a second language outside of China is tiny. So not a lingua Franca.

edwinyzh 7y ago

I'm sorry, but it's your task to overcome the language barrier if you are interested in the project; if you don't, no one can force you to. But neither you can force other people to do the translation for you, nor force Linux Foundation not to accept an excellent project source project just due to the spoken language of the developer. Everything changes, the world changes. Nowadays you write Korean but your ancestors had been using Chinese as your country's official languages for many hundred years; Now we all learn English to communicate internationally but a few hundred years ago they use France. No one knows how the world will change but there is one thing we can be sure of - no one can force the world to change at his own will - the only thing s/he can do is to adopt it - just as what we human beings have been doing for millions of years.

TheSmoke 7y ago

turk here, if we are going to replace lingua franca, can we please choose german? damn ich würde ein sexy Softwarearchitekt sein. also, chinese software engineering community was a closed up one until a few years ago. now they're actively contributing, rolling up their home brew libraries and applications for the world wide usage. there is simply nothing wrong with them using their own language. we might have a problem when they try pushing that but almost all the popular chinese libs have english documentation.

rqs 7y ago

Here is some basic concept you may need to understand: The language (Both in natural and programming) choice of a project is usually depends on the interests of the main contributors. The main contributors will select the one that is best for them, and make improvement base on that. Since the project is mainly done by Tencent, a Chinese company, it just make since for the project to use Chinese. I see no point for their team members to communicate with one and other by writing documents in a second language everyday. Also, they've provided English document if you want to read, and the document is not bad. If you don't like the document, then send them some PR.

rad_gruchalski 7y ago
> Since the project is mainly done by Tencent, a Chinese company, it just make since for the project to use Chinese. I see no point for their team members to communicate with one and other by writing documents in a second language everyday. The point being, if it is accepted by the Linux Foundation, we should be expecting documentation in English. Otherwise it is fine for maintainers to use whatever language they feel is good for them to use.
- calcifer 7y ago
  > If it is accepted by the Linux Foundation, we should be expecting documentation in English LF has no mandate to dictate any specific language to projects. > Otherwise it is fine for maintainers to use whatever language they feel is good for them to use. Yes.
  - rad_gruchalski 7y ago
    > LF has no mandate to dictate any specific language to projects. Maybe it doesn't, maybe it does. Maybe it should and maybe Tencent is creating precedents. Plenty of questions. All I see is: Linux Foundation is based in San Francisco, key people are all perfectly well speaking English and LF should do anything what is possible to make the projects accessible globally, using a lingua franca of technology.

jsgo 7y ago

If it is too high a bar, the obvious choice is to just not participate or use it. There are tons of projects I don’t leverage for various reasons (usually underlying programming language) and that’s fine, not everything is going to be tailored to me. If entrusting it to the Linux Foundation leads to more internationalization of the project, that can only be a win for the LF and Chinese OSS as a whole. Personally, I’d much rather Chinese developers operate within the global community than outside of it. And things like this are just another bullet point in that.

Proven 7y ago

I agree. There are already too many distracting comments on Github. (Not as important, but those who noticed the appearance of Github issues and comments in ideographic languages may have also noticed that most of them happen to be in simplified Chinese. Not Thai, not Vietnamese, etc. Not that I like to see any language other than English, but worst offenders of Github etiquette are from mainland China)

hhahah 7y ago

I guess in the future Chinese government will use it to threat Linux

ulfw 7y ago

I find it funny how when you put two developers in a room they can't decide on one programming language but million of developers shall somehow agree to use only one human language

MarkLightning 7y ago
I am interested in any valuable project, no matter what language it uses.
GhettoMaestro 7y ago
It’s similar to air traffic control. All pilots speak English. Of course they speak other langs, but for that official purpose: English.
ksec 7y ago
>I find it funny how when you put two developers in a room they can't decide on one programming language May be because most programming language are English alike?

bborud 7y ago

This is a discussion where everyone will lose because it is practical reality colliding with feelings around identity.

sargram01 7y ago

Exactly, one of our teams in China decided to use a popular Chinese web framework, and when the rest of the team out side of China and customers looked at it, the English was grammatically confusing, code had Chinese comments, GitHub was mixed English and Chinese. We ended up replacing the framework for this reason. Here you can see what looking at issues is like: https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/issues https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/issues

Loranubi 7y ago

It's worth supporting Chinese language projects just to see if all the tooling can really handle unicode... There is still too much software around today which breaks when presented with anything else than ASCII.