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As a native Spanish speaker, this doesn’t make sense to me. Even if the argument of lowering the entry bar to non-English speakers was valid (I don’t think it
by _benj 6y ago
As a native Spanish speaker, this doesn’t make sense to me.
Even if the argument of lowering the entry bar to non-English speakers was valid (I don’t think it is) the individual would be severely limited when it comes to collaborating/GitHub/external libraries/learning new programming languages.
A big advantage of learning a programming language is that once you understand what a “loop” or a “if” you can easily transfer that knowledge to another language.
Learning this language as your first language will leave you with very little transferable knowledge without much “translation” needed (pun intended)
- jack_h 6y agoI've commented on this before, but I think the issue is programming languages mix presentation with representation, i.e. text is used for both. Aside from making tooling more difficult it also prevents a programming language from being multilingual. While I agree simple keywords in a programming language aren't that big of a deal to learn as they are essentially symbols; things get a lot more complicated in a real project if a contributor is not a native speaker. Identifiers and comments - which are used for source code documentation - are in a single language and can't be translated easily. If the presentation and representation were split such that the presentation (still text mind you) is just a rendering of the representation then it could go through a translation process in the same way web pages do. Of course there would be an added project overhead of maintaining translations so maybe it wouldn't be worth it. This might be somewhat of a moot point as English is quickly becoming the lingua franca. Things such as issue tracking also require some common language outside of the source code itself.