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I've often said that English is to programming as Latin is to medicine. Programmers will be writing "if" statements and "for" loops long after no one uses "if"
by jballanc 13y ago
I've often said that English is to programming as Latin is to medicine. Programmers will be writing "if" statements and "for" loops long after no one uses "if" or "for" in daily conversation.
So it is as important for programmers to understand English as it is for doctors to understand Latin. Of course, most doctors may understand Latin, but they wouldn't be able to converse in Latin. In that sense, English is also the programmer's lingua franca.
That term -- lingua franca -- is an interesting one. In addition to being used as a colloquialism for "a common language" it was also, itself, a language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca . Just as Lingua Franca eventually took on a life (and grammar and vocabulary) of its own, I expect "hacker English" will, over time, do the same. In fact already my (English-speaking) wife thinks that I'm speaking a foreign language half the time when I'm talking with colleagues over Skype.
It's less important to know "English", and much more important to speak, converse, and communicate with other hackers using the lingua franca of the day.
- jacobr 13y agoI work in Sweden for an international company, and I have several non-Swedish colleagues in my office. I never have any problems expressing myself in a work-setting, but as soon as we start talking about every-day things it's more of a challenge. Knowing the name of different kinds of food, house-hold items, literature... you immediately notice a language barrier that is not there when we use the "programmer lingua franca".
- loxs 13y agoActually English has completely replaced Latin in medical circles as the Ligua Franca. Even the terminology (still based on Latin though) is English.
- jballanc 13y agoEnglish is the Lingua Franca, but the terminology is (last I checked) still heavily Latin. Anterior this, Rostral that...a this-ectomy or a that-otomy...even "heart attack" is properly a Cardiac Infarct, from the Latin "infarctus": stuffed into. I realize that the days of requiring Latin as part of a medical education are behind us (though not that far behind us), but Latin's footprints are all over the practice of medicine. I think the reason this isn't more obvious is that, in medicine, "Latin" is mostly interchangeable with "jargon" or "terminology" -- it's just "something you learn". Someone else asked about a programming language like Ruby, which was developed in Japan and whose early users were all Japanese, why does it still use "def", "if", "for", etc. As an English speaker one is tempted to ask, "Why do the Japanese use English", but I would wager that the Japanese would respond, "What English? This is just programming terminology."
- loxs 13y agoYeah, but most of the time, Anglicized forms of the Latin words are in use. Increasingly so, even in the non-English speaking world. Even in your example, the correct Latin form is "Infarctus Miocardii" and Cardiac Infarct is heavily Anglicized. And although we still learn the Latin terms in Bulgaria, I can't really see that lasting very long.
- ivanhoe 13y agoEnglish is now what Latin used to be in times of Newton or Leibniz. All scientific works back then were written in Latin. Today English plays that role...