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You're bringing a strawman. Obviously having an operation is slightly worse than learning english. Regarding the utility - the final utility of male and female
by fijal 14y ago
You'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.