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The argument comparing to gay/woman is just a fallacy. you can learn english, everyone can. You cannot stop being a woman or being gay (despite the latter being
by fijal 14y ago
The argument comparing to gay/woman is just a fallacy. you can learn english, everyone can. You cannot stop being a woman or being gay (despite the latter being argued many times in the past).
And you should learn english. The problem is not because you have to. The problem is to communicate better and to share more. The exclusion principle will still apply, but instead excluding bigger group (people not speaking language X) instead of a smaller group (people not speaking english), unless we actually have completely-automatic translation (and then there is no issue). See what's going on in ruby community - you cannot participate in the design of the language, if you don't speak japanese. As simple as that.
- raganwald 14y agoyou can learn english, everyone can. You cannot stop being a woman or being gay That argument doesn't persuade me. Let's say you could stop being a woman, perhaps by taking hormones and having an operation. Would it suddenly be ok to have a male-only company, since obviously people are choosing to remain women? Your second paragraph is simply arguing something I already agree with, namely the utility of everyone using English.
- fijal 14y agoYou're bringing a strawman. Obviously having an operation is slightly worse than learning english. Regarding the utility - the final utility of male and female company is known to be better than a male only one, even if for a short period of time it drops. A utility of everyone speaking the language he pleases ends up with a situation of lack of communication, which is certainly worse than everyone speaking broken english. What I would argue instead (and it has been on HN) is that we should allow more broken english and be less nazi about it. It's fine to restrict people who know english better to use only simple words (for example) to lower barriers of entry. It's also ok for people to use english that's not gramatically correct (like no doubt, this post).
- snogglethorpe 14y agoWhat seems to happen in practice is that either: (1) If a majority of particpants are skilled in English, the less skilled will just submit the best they can, and the better speakers will correct (e.g. at patch-review time) anything too confusing in the same way they correct code bugs. (2) If the majority of speakers aren't skilled in English, you often end up with amusingly misspelled variable names and odd comment grammar, but most people can't tell the difference anyway, so it's cool.... [I work for a Japanese company, so many internal projects just use Japanese for most comments/commits (although I'm free to use English if I want, because most people can understand it more or less).... but because of character-set restrictions, variable names are still mostly amusingly-misspelled English...] E.g., there doesn't really seem to be all that much of a problem.
- toothlesstiger 14y agoNonsense. To take your example of a Brazilian programmer, he doesn't have to stop speaking Portuguese to speak English. Your hypothetical woman has to stop being a woman. Same applies to your other examples of exclusion. If I learn Japanese to participate in the direction of Ruby language, I don't have to stop speaking English, German, or Chinese to do so. Exclusion based on lack of knowledge is fundamentally different than exclusion based on innate characteristic.