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While this is obviously a (good) joke, the differences between cultures often become unexpectedly important in code. I remember being about 13 and learning abo
by azalemeth 4y ago
While this is obviously a (good) joke, the differences between cultures often become unexpectedly important in code.
I remember being about 13 and learning about OO code and reading Apple's (then excellent) developer documentation. It had an example of a class called "faucet" and lots of text related to American plumbing. At the time I had literally no idea what faucet meant (en_gb: tap) and spent about five times longer trying to understand the metaphor than the actual code. It really left a bitter taste in my mouth: I didn't have a clue what was going on, not because of inheritance or Obj-C, but entirely because I didn't understand what the author probably didn't realise was a culturally sorry metaphor.
- 4ggr0 4y agoI wondered why you didn't just google the meaning of the word like I would've done at that age, but then remembered that this was not a thing back in the days. Also reminds me of when I was stuck in Lego Star Wars and couldn't find the way to solve a level. I then searched for a write-up of said level. At that point I only understood German, but I was still extremely confused by the write-up. The reason was, that the German word for 'hatch' is 'Luke', and Luke Skywalker was a character who was present in that level. I was stuck because I didn't find that hatch and the write-up told me that I 'jump on the platform with Luke and activate a control panel with R2-D2 to make Luke appear so that people can go through the Luke' (very paraphrased, but I think the point comes across)
- bennyp101 4y agoJust pop in the Encarta CD and search
- 4ggr0 4y agoI'm too young to understand that reference :D My first OS was Windows XP and googling things was already pretty well established. Didn't know that Microsoft used to publish an encyclopedia, interesting!
- bennyp101 4y agoOoof, well I’ll go lie down for a bit I guess :) Edit: The best windows OS after 95 ;)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 4ggr0 4y agoI'm tired as well so I understand ;) Windows XP was nice, yeah. Windows 7 as well, and I can tolerate Windows 10 for gaming. For everything else, the penguin does the job.
- tmtvl 4y agoI never used 95, jumped straight from 3.11 to 98. I still think we should've stuck to 3.11, far fewer headaches.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mihaaly 4y agoIt is silly, but even small things like foo and bar could be a barrier or distraction at least. At least I am thinking more about 'Why the heck foo and bar? Why?! Why not A or B or other more neutral and common? What could be the hidden meaning?...' than about the logic of the example.
- emsixteen 4y agoI really dislike when people use foo and bar. Use something with some meaning imo.
- marssaxman 4y agoThat's the point, though; you use 'foo' and 'bar' when you want the reader to focus on an abstraction, instead of potentially distracting them with the details of a concrete situation.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoEvidently the abstraction can also be the distraction.
- jameshart 4y agoOnce the ‘programming bit’ is flipped in someone’s brain, I think metasyntactic variables like foo and bar become very instinctive and easy to reason about. You have activated the part of your brain that visualizes things as abstractions with placeholders. The problem is when foo and bar are used in material aimed at beginning programmers who are still developing that instinct and who haven’t yet got that bit set.
- jkingsbery 4y agoFor example - sometimes people get confused about what is meant by a "faucet," and so using "faucet" as a variable name could lead to confusion.
- civopsec 4y agoI think of a crowbar and martial arts. Ugh, it’s actually much more distracting than the serene A-B-C, X-Y-C, and so on.
- DaveChild 4y agoIt's funny, I wrote it very much tongue-in-cheek of course, but as someone who grew up writing HTML and then CSS and using "color" all the time there's probably a little nugget of genuine pent-up irritation hidden in there somewhere.
- bombcar 4y agoThe footnote for #1 is broken.
- benbristow 4y agohttps://github.com/muan/spiffing https://github.com/muan/spiffing
- kaptainscarlet 4y agoI had a similar problem as a non-native English speaking teenager trying to learn how to code for the first time. The function in one of the challenges named sleepin(day, vacation) had to return true if the day was a Saturday and and vacation was true. I had no idea what that idiom meant and I think that significantly contributed to my struggle to learn coding as a beginner.
- mike_hearn 4y agoOh you think that was bad? When I was that age my teachers were flagging to my parents that I kept switching between American and British spellings at random. Doing lots of programming in US English was causing my schoolwork to be frequently marked wrong (the teachers were fortunately quite forgiving about this type of mistake). It was just hard at that age to remember which of "color" and "colour" were correct in different contexts and ditto for a bunch of other words. Also for a brief period I thought the right way to write a zero was with a strikethrough because of the monospace fonts. Other fun US/UK cultural issues: interview questions like "how many pingpong balls fit in a school bus". To Brits a school bus could be literally anything from a coach to a small vehicle, they aren't standardized like in the US. Even when you remember the big yellow buses from films, how big are they? If you never saw one in real life it's hard to imagine. Also it took a while before I figured out that "ping pong" meant table tennis. Fun times.
- eythian 4y agoMy early programming was on BBC Micro and some Acorn machines in school. There, the programming and documentation was all spelt correctly, from memory. "colour", "dialogue", "catalogue", and so on. It wasn't until I started on a PC that I got the Americanisation of computer stuff. To this day, I still name things internally with the spellings I'm used to despite working in an international company (where it makes sense of course, not in a way that might lead to actual time wasted due to confusion.)
- Tangurena2 4y agoTable tennis is the name of the sport. Ping-pong is a brand of table tennis equipment.
- mike_hearn 4y agoHuh really. This is like with Hoover then, where the term became generic? I only ever heard ping-pong used as the name of the sport. Another thing that confused me and lots of other British children: why do so many American program brand names begin with the apparently meaningless letters EZ? Eee-zed doesn't mean anything!
- hajile 4y agoThe etymology of faucet and tap is interesting (from Oxford online dictionary): > late Middle English (denoting a bung for the vent hole of a cask, or a tap for drawing liquor from a container): from Old French fausset, from Provençal falset, from falsar ‘to bore’. The current sense dates from the mid 19th cent. > Old English tæppa ‘peg for the vent-hole of a cask’, tæppian ‘provide (a cask) with a stopper’, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch tap and German, Zapfen (nouns). Both had the same classical meaning from different origins, but the British chose the German/Dutch word while the Americans chose the French/Latin word.
- alsetmusic 4y ago> Both had the same classical meaning from different origins, but the British chose the German/Dutch word while the Americans chose the French/Latin word. One of the most interesting books that I've read in a long time: Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme--And Other Oddities of the English Language [0] This gave me incredible insight into the formation of modern English. I read it voraciously. Very good book to understand why it's such a mess. I bought it after hearing an interview with the author on a podcast.[1] I think anyone (English-speaking) who enjoys and appreciates language (and podcasts) will get a kick out of it. The author is passionate and excited by the topic, so very entertaining. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55332395-highly-irregular https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55332395-highly-irreg... [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-and-worse/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-an...
- jstarfish 4y agoAt least OP didn't have to navigate disambiguating "gloryhole."
- GekkePrutser 4y agoSo what's the British English equivalent to 'gloryhole'? Ps asking for a British friend
- meepmorp 4y agoAccording to the OED, the use of faucet as a tap for drawing liquid out of something dates is attested as far back as 1400s - I'd consider that current sense (as does the OED).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- joe__f 4y agoI remember there was a level called something like 'Open the Faucet' in WarioLand 2, and I was similarly confused
- annadar 4y ago"culturally sorry metaphor" just because you cant understand doesnt make it "culturally sorry".
- cameronh90 4y agoIt took me ages to realise that "sandbox" meant sandpit. I didn't really think about the word, but I never made the link.
- Beltalowda 4y agoI'm not a native English speaker, but when I was explaining some basic programming to my English ex-girlfriend I mentioned "parenthesis" at some point, and she had no idea what they were. Turns out, they're "brackets" in British English; I didn't even know parenthesis is American English. Even though I typically use British spelling and idioms I still prefer and use parenthesis because it's just clearer and less easily confused with square brackets. She also kept typing "colour" and such in CSS. Since then I've always made sure "color" and "colour" both work whenever I add a setting of CLI for it. I wish the English-speaking folk could agree on a way to spell things; can you all maybe have a war over it or sort it out some other way?
- wizofaus 4y agoI've never thought of "parentheses" as being a US-English term, after all we have the word "parenthetical"*. I'd agree "parentheses" is a bit technical compared to "brackets", but I'd certainly expect any native speaker to know what it meant. *) Plus there's the very English joke, and no this isn't something generated by ChatGPT: One day, Shakespeare and Marlowe encountered an elderly man with a very straight back and bandy legs. After the old man passed by, Shakespeare turned to his colleague and said: "Marlowe, if you were to include that man in your next play, how would you introduce him?" Without any hesitation, Marlowe replied: "Lo! Here comes a venerable gent, his back is straight, though his legs are bent." Marlowe then said: "Will, how would you put it?" Shakespeare pondered a moment then suggested: "What manner of man is this, who wears his balls in parenthesis?""
- tarsinge 4y agoI’m French and the similitude of a lot of words in British is problematic, because I’m never sure I’m not inventing words. Colour for example sounds like a misspell of “couleur” for me, whereas color feels more English. But maybe it’s just because I consume a lot more American media than British.
- maximus-decimus 4y agoAnd then there's French Canadian and French French. I find it weird how a lot of English native speakers see them as 2 different languages, as if they were more different than the Texas and London English dialects. hint : nobody's gonna call you a muppet in Texas.
- ketralnis 4y agoThis is a commonly cited problem with using IQ tests outside of their specifically applicable cases. They tend to assume a common world and then ask you questions about navigating that world, but not everybody lives in that world to start with.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoHuh, I have done a lot of IQ tests in my life but none assumed a certain world view. They were all abstract figures and a question like 'after figure A, B and C, which follows?', the answer to which was usually pretty obvious in a weird kinda way. I've not seen any that made any reference to the real world.
- ketralnis 4y agoMy Psych 101 class decades ago covered it in more detail so I'm just speaking from very loose memory but just from some naive googling: https://nrcgt.uconn.edu/newsletters/winter052/ https://nrcgt.uconn.edu/newsletters/winter052/ https://www.iqtestcouncil.org/faq/are-iq-tests-culturally-biased/ https://www.iqtestcouncil.org/faq/are-iq-tests-culturally-bi... https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/iq-and-testing-culture-education-and-iq-scores https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-a... There might better sources than those, the first one in particular has a lot of its own cites. My memory from class was a bit of a different angle than fairness which is what those talk about. The issue brought up there was that IQ tests were designed for the specific purpose of placing a corpus of students with varied prior education levels in the right grade. For that purpose it worked well: if you didn't do well on the English portion because your English is non-native and the school is charged with teaching you English, practically speaking we do need to send you back a grade because you need that specific skill and that's where you'll get it. But being non-native English doesn't mean that you're less intelligent, so the score isn't really applicable for measuring that basically unrelated thing. Despite the name, measuring intelligence isn't what it was for. I also vaguely remember it having story questions like "the left tap is cold water and the right tap is hot water, how much do you need to turn each to get 25% warm water" being asked of people that didn't have running water in their homes and that being a problem. But again don't lean too much into my memory, I could be remembering this all wrong.
- ciconia 4y agoI live in France. When trying to teach my kids some Ruby, I showed them how to use _puts_ to print stuff. That would always crack them up, as it sounds (in French pronunciation) just like a not so nice word.
- maximus-decimus 4y agoIn Quebec, it sounds mostly like the sound of a car horn :p "POUT! POUT!" C'est surtout utilise dans le jingle d'une rotisseries tres populaire : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvzukGgd5_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvzukGgd5_Y
- c7b 4y agonow imagine what it's like for natives of a different language. you stumbled over a single, rather specific keyword - they might have confusing or no associations at all with terms like for, switch, case, instance, compile, parse,... they might have a textbook in their language (or not), but the statements might feel like hieroglyphs or, worse, lead their mind in the wrong direction