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This is an anomaly borne out of the discipline's short history. I had fellow students in my Russian classes that were there, in part, because they wished to pu

by fivre 7y ago

This is an anomaly borne out of the discipline's short history. I had fellow students in my Russian classes that were there, in part, because they wished to pursue math PhDs, and it was crucial to have competency in one of the other major languages for math publications. A software engineering community with multiple large active language communities is inevitable, and doubly so for software's ubiquity. Math is at least an ivory tower discipline with a small community that can tolerate limited language diversity. The broader software community using English only would be akin to HVAC professionals exclusively using Italian to discuss their work.

bobthepanda 7y ago
All pilots are required to speak and use English to communicate, and no one is trying to change that. In fact, one of the worst air disasters was caused by inconsistent language use and the resulting miscommunications and misintereptations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
marvin 7y ago
I don't think HVAC professionals is a good analogy, this is a much more narrow discipline than computer software. Construction workers or architects might be a better analogy, but software is really a world of its own. Other crafting disciplines don't have super-complex tooling that goes through massive paradigm shifts every 5 years, with work on the same tools and products happening across continents, and where learning the inner workings of each iteration of these tools can be career in itself. Things move much slower in the physical world, and it's likely that other rules apply to such a domain.
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
Unlike most HVAC professionals, academic researchers, pilots, and programmers all need to frequently cooperate across cultural boundaries. Computers could be in Latin, Esperanto, or Mandarin (which ironically in this case names itself 普通话 “pu tong hua”, the common tongue) for all I care, as long as it’s consistent. Right now it’s English.

by fivre 7y ago

bobthepanda 7y ago

All pilots are required to speak and use English to communicate, and no one is trying to change that. In fact, one of the worst air disasters was caused by inconsistent language use and the resulting miscommunications and misintereptations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

marvin 7y ago

I don't think HVAC professionals is a good analogy, this is a much more narrow discipline than computer software. Construction workers or architects might be a better analogy, but software is really a world of its own. Other crafting disciplines don't have super-complex tooling that goes through massive paradigm shifts every 5 years, with work on the same tools and products happening across continents, and where learning the inner workings of each iteration of these tools can be career in itself. Things move much slower in the physical world, and it's likely that other rules apply to such a domain.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago

Unlike most HVAC professionals, academic researchers, pilots, and programmers all need to frequently cooperate across cultural boundaries. Computers could be in Latin, Esperanto, or Mandarin (which ironically in this case names itself 普通话 “pu tong hua”, the common tongue) for all I care, as long as it’s consistent. Right now it’s English.