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Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
- berdon 13y agoWas anyone else expecting the post to detail their plan to "translate" non-english Stack Exchange sites to English to continue content centralization?
- lucb1e 13y agoNot me at least. Was I the only one expecting some comment about planning a bot to translate non-English StackExchange sites to English when glancing over the comment thread and seeing your comment? (I was!)
- dmunoz 13y ago> Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia. Many Ruby developers won't have a problem with this.
- ScotterC 13y agoYup. Matz immediately came to mind. Also, to the question of english but not native would be Salvatore of Redis fame.
- angersock 13y agoSo, not to be mean, but can you name his FQJN (fully-qualified Japanese name) offhand? The score of people here saying "Matz" somewhat underscores the issue.
- w1ntermute 13y agoAnd how many people know that DHH is David Heinemeier Hansson? I don't think the use of a nickname or abbreviation is relevant.
- icelancer 13y agoMost, right? I don't write Ruby and I barely know who that is (I could pick him out of a lineup but that's about it) but I knew that.
- jrs99 13y agoThe thing about coming up with a Japanese name is that the names are going to be unfamiliar. Kind of like how I wouldn't be able to memorize 10 Swedish names as easily as I could British names. I'll remember a name like John Carmack much more easily than a name like Jonatan Söderström or Keiji Inafune.
- ScotterC 13y agoMatsumoto Yashamoto from memory. I'm probably off a few letters. EDIT: Yup I was way off. It's Yukihiro Matsumoto haha
- jeorgun 13y agoYukihiro Matsumoto. Do I win anything? In any case, I'm not really sure what the aim of the challenge was. Most anybody could probably name at least one non-native-English-speaking developer— Bjarne Stroustrup and Guido van Rossum both come to mind, maybe because I've got language developers on the brain. The only reason I can think of to restrict it to Japanese/Chinese/Russian developers is to use only nations with non-Latin character sets— which is a weird reason, and isn't a very compelling argument in favor of Portuguese localization.
- iopq 13y agoI've never written anything in Ruby and I know Matz
- bluedino 13y agoMatz came to mind the second I read that. And Russia? Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris).
- drdaeman 13y agoNot sure if Igor Sysoev is famous or not (his name wasn't remembered!), but his product certainly is.
- astrodust 13y agoHow him and Matz got omitted, I have no idea.
- daniel-cussen 13y agoTaiichi Yuasa and Masami Hagiya, are both from Japan, and I found their names again without googling. I just fired up ecl.
- msantos 13y agoRoberto Ierusalimschy Waldemar Celes Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo The folks behind Lua (programming language)
- schoen 13y agoThe Lua developers are Brazilians, hence also not from Japan, China, or Russia (as the original article asks for).
- msantos 13y agoI don't believe the OP actually meant, strictly speaking, Japan, China and Russia full stop. It was more like: name any famous developer from the non-English speaking world... And yes, the three names I listed are all Brazilians.
- gus_massa 13y agoIf you want only one programmer from the non-English speaking world, the canonical answer is: “Linus Torvalds”. My interpretation is that they wanted a programmer from a non-latin script language.
- Aloisius 13y agoI think it would be harder to state a famous developer from Japan, China or Russia that didn't also know modest English. I mean, Matz obviously knows English.
- joevandyk 13y agoalso igor of nginx.
- 10098 13y agoEven not counting Matsumoto, off the top of my head - Japan: Junya Ota (more known as ZUN, the author of Tohou series). Russia: Nikolay Likhachev (aka Kris Kaspersky) China: whoever made Baidu, can't remember their name without googling :)
- lflux 13y agoItojun, to which we owe a lot of IPv6 work.
- drdaeman 13y ago> We do want as much centralization as possible Yup, totally centralized. Spent half an hour figuring out where my question should go (StackOverflow vs Programming vs ServerFault vs SuperUser vs Ubuntu vs Unix-and-Linux). Ended up not asking the question at all. Shall they open some foreign embassies, I guess users'll spend 10 minutes more deciding in which language should they ask (i.e. whenever they prefer native language or bigger community) or duplicate the question.
- chc 13y agoThe idea of centralization is not inherently incompatible with the idea of categorization. And it's really not that hard in most cases. Is it an objective question about writing code? It goes on Stack Overflow. Is it about programming as a broader topic? It goes on Programmers. Is it about servers or systems administration? It goes on ServerFault. Is it about general computing? It goes on SuperUser. Is it a highly subjective question about programming? Stack Exchange is not interested in your question. (I do agree that SO and Programmers seem more like an artificial division than natural categories, but I still don't find it that hard to figure out whether a question is good for SO.)
- lelandbatey 13y agoSee, but what if I'm writing a little script using Bash to run on my server? Does it go in Unix? Or programming? Or serverfault?
- edmccard 13y ago>See, but what if I'm writing a little script using Bash to run on my server? Does it go in Unix? Or programming? Or serverfault? That would depend on why help was needed--is it a problem with expressing a certain programming concept in Bash? or with portability across various Unixen? Or with the proper way to invoke some server managament program? If someone genuinely doesn't know which stackexchange community has the most relevant expertise to help with a problem, there's a mechanism in place to handle that; just post a question somewhere and see if it gets migrated or closed as "belongs on xxx".
- te_platt 13y agoI have strongly mixed feelings on this. When I was a kid my family moved to Brazil for a couple of years and I learned Portuguese. When I was about 20 I moved to Chile and learned Spanish. Speaking the language of the culture you are in is hugely important - and not very easy. So on the one hand if the culture of programming is in English (is it?) then I would strongly encourage anyone wanting to program to learn English. On the other hand, helping inject a programming environment into another language seems a worthy goal as well. On balance it seems like stackoverflow is doing the right thing.
- jaimebuelta 13y agoI have similar mixed feelings (Spanish is my native language, but I work on an English environment)
- astrodust 13y agoWhile learning English will help immeasurably when you're learning to program, the languages themselves are often highly English-baed, trying to tackle programming and English at the same time makes for quite a barrier. Since being able to ask difficult, technical questions in your native language would make it easier to learn, I don't see what's so bad about that. Yes, it fragments the community, but it also recognizes that the world is not English only. Right now there's large Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and French communities that are second-class citizens without a tool like Stack Overflow.
- vvvv 13y ago> Trying to tackle programming and English at the same time makes for quite a barrier. That's how I played all games as a kid :) Civilisation + dictionary FTW
- astrodust 13y agoMore than one of my non-native English co-workers has said the first English phrase they understood was: GAME OVER
- frade33 13y agoAdoption of English language is one of the major reasons, why 3rd world countries like our, India and Pakistan are thriving in IT. I feel sad for nations, who are stubborn in their adoption of English language, merely out of political reasons. Even from a political perspective, this is sad, because you can't convey your point of view to others. Oh and by the way, India is 2nd and Pakistan is 3rd largest country by number of English language Speakers, 1st of course is USA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-sp... Moreover, Do I need to name key Google and Microsoft Employees, who were born and bred in India too. :)
- fidotron 13y agoNot to disagree, but India and Pakistan are also great demonstrations that even if you can speak the words without cultural context you'll struggle. By far the most successful teams I've seen in India have been led by those that were educated in the west and went back to India (seemingly a growing trend), since they can effectively act as translators of intent.
- gumby 13y ago> I feel sad for nations, who are stubborn in their adoption of English language, merely out of political reasons. Even from a political perspective, this is sad, because you can't convey your point of view to others. Do you play music? I feel sorry for all those countries who are stubborn in their adoption of Italian, for whom "da Capo al fine" or simply "Largo" are rote words to memorize rather seeing them in an Italian context. Even from a political perspective, this is sad, because you can't convey your point of view to others. See how ludicrous this sounds? Yet indeed, just like our programming languages use "if" "case" "return" et al ("et al" is a Latin abbreviation by the way), music uses Italian keywords. Yet it's perfectly reasonable to read source code in French with anglicisms like new String scattered perfectly comprehensively throughout. It doesn't inhibit the programmer at all. Now to fully embrace your point: the number of Mandarin speakers (as a first or second language) is probably about 1.3x the total number of English speakers (as a first or second language). The implicit question of the linked article is: "perhaps there is, or soon will be, a larger pool of programming discussion for which YOU are excluded because you, merely out of political reasons, won't learn Mandarin Chinese. English is by far my favorite language to speak, but I know its limitations and don't always use it even when I can. I've noted that if I'm out with friends who all have multiple languages in common the conversation does not stay in only one of them. In programming or not, I will often read wikipedia articles on the same topic but in different languages. Quality is uneven and the most informative or insightful article is frequently not the one in English.
- gesman 13y agoprintf ("Olá, mundo!");
- fauria 13y ago> Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia. Yukihiro Matsumoto. Rasmus Lerdorf. Guido van Rossum.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoEgor Homakov :)
- timbre 13y agoYou're one for three.
- chc 13y agoRasmus is from Greenland and Guido is from the Netherlands, not China or Russia.
- NLips 13y agoJapan. Greenland. Netherlands. 1/3
- pcrh 13y agoWould Satoshi count? (I'm not even a programmer!)
- lmm 13y agoThe most plausible candidate I heard is actually called Mike.
- astrodust 13y agoRasmus Ledorf is Greenlandic and moved to Canada in 1980. I'm pretty sure he knew English before he wrote PHP.
- fauria 13y agoMaybe I should have added "Or Denmark. Or Netherlands.", but the idea is the same.
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- DyslexicAtheist 13y agoNein!
- jowiar 13y agoIt would be pretty sweet if they have some process of linking duplicate questions between the two, or if bilingual folks could ask questions in multiple languages. Translating questions and/or answers could be as valuable as answering questions.
- Argorak 13y agoWith a few friends, i've been running a ruby bulletin board in german and found that there is a definite need for localized assistance. While quite a few people can read english docs okay, it is far harder to ask proper questions and interact with people. There is always need for clarification. Assistance is far easier without a language barrier.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ishener 13y agoinstead of starting a brand new stack overflow in another language they should think of some way of letting people translate questions & answers and earn karma for that. this way, like wikipedia, you can always go from one language to another for the translation
- jaimebuelta 13y agoThat's actually a great idea...
- dm2 13y agoThat's basically what they are doing. If someone asks a question on the Portuguese then it would be easy for an English and Portuguese speaker to search the English site for the answer and then post to the Portuguese site and earn their karma.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- analyst74 13y agoThis is a GREAT idea, one of the best features of wikipedia for the multilingual-ed is you can see the same topic in a different language with single mouse click.
- vmarsy 13y agoI was thinking the same thing, this would be a great feature. You could get a few percentage of the karma of the original poster when the question/answer gets upvoted in the language you wrote it (And the original poster would get the karama too). The karma would have the same value across all languages. Users should be able to approve translations though
- dsr_ 13y agoWhen I tell someone I work at Stack Exchange, my absolute favorite response is: “I basically learned to code from posts I found on Stack Overflow” --- While I've never had anyone tell me that, I don't think I'd be happy to hear that in an interview.
- cbaleanu 13y agoBecause knowing not to write a bubble sort or fizz buzz implementation in Modula-2 without googling for some language reference makes you so much better. SO is a part of a developers every-day life, like it or not. This is not the 90s anymore, we have knowledge at our fingertips, we should access it and deliver that product or whatever is we're working on faster, without getting stuck in stuff that can be solved with one google search. edit: spelling
- TillE 13y agoStack Overflow is great for reference or solving specific problems. It's pretty awful for learning anything in depth.
- tsm 13y agoThis is one of the few situations where I side strongly with ESR: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4 http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4
- raganwald 13y agoEven if he happened to be right about his contention, this isn't the point at all. The question here is, "Should a programming service be offered in a language other than English?" Whereas ESR is claiming, "Programmers should learn to write English proficiently." Imagine, if you will, that Silicon Valley is THE place to live if you want to be a programmer. Alice has job advice: "Move to Silicon Valley." Now imagine that Bob wishes to open a hackerspace code+cafe in New York. Should we really tell him that this is a bad idea? Is it somehow a terrible idea to help programmers who chose to ignore Alice's advice to be productive? Is it somehow undermining TheGrandPlan™ to support a programmer in New York City? Are we "fragmenting the hacker community" by opening a cafe in NYC? I can't think of any good reasons not to make Stack Overflow available in Portuguese. And any or every other language. An argument to keep SO English-only might as well be accompanied by an argument that there should be no conference talks in any language except English, no programming books in any language except English, and no help or online documentation in any language except English.
- angersock 13y agoHere's one: Because any language other than English is brainfucked in string support. There, I said it.
- _random_ 13y agoNo, let's use other languages for naming stuff in programming languages that support Unicode sources!
- AndyKelley 13y agoSo why start a duplicate place for knowledge? Seems much simpler to integrate a translation system into the canonical English database. Existing entries can be translated into other languages and then improved upon. Hell, you could automate the entire first step and then crowd source the improvements.
- Guvante 13y agoActually they are kind of doing that already. Someone who is fluent in both can arbitrage between the two for reputation. Honestly you wouldn't want to translate all of SO anyway, there is a lot of cruft when you build up a huge database of information.
- mhp 13y agoIf the only goal was to present what exists in other languages, this would be a great idea. Your suggestion results in translations for all the people searching for content in a language other than English. But it doesn't allow those people to participate in return. You need the community of PT speakers to succeed (which is the whole reason we have separate sites for different topics, and the reason why we believe our model is better for expert answers than Yahoo Answers, Quora, et al).
- davidcollantes 13y agoA really bad idea. Now a really good answer or tip that would otherwise be on the 'regular' stackoverflow (albeit in broken English) will remain, unknown, on a 'pt.overflow.' That is one drawback. Another drawback, an English only stackoverflow helps a Portuguese speaking person to learn another language that is, now, more universal. Yet another, it fractures an otherwise more unified community. My mother tongue is Spanish, yet I have no issues with an English only stackoverflow, at all.
- lmkg 13y ago> * Now a really good answer or tip that would otherwise be on the 'regular' stackoverflow (albeit in broken English) will remain, unknown* This assumes that, had the Portuguese site not existed, the question would have been answered on the English site. There is also the possibility that the question would not have been answered at all.
- davidcollantes 13y agoSight. Sorry, I really can't explain it well. Have you ever encountered something, sometimes, that you know doesn't click, but can't explain why? I really think this is a bad idea, and somehow, a waste of resources, a repetition of things. But... It will affect me little if I pretend it doesn't exist and continue using stackoverflow as I have been until now. Just ignore 'the news' and move on.
- Dewie 13y ago> My mother tongue is Spanish, yet I have no issues with an English only stackoverflow, at all. Someone who knows English has no problem with an English only Stackoverflow. Amazing. The fact that non-native English speakers might prefer English only sources is a red herring; they already know English. Of course perusing English sources makes more sense to us; we already know English to such degree that communicating in it is about as painless as communicating in our native tongue, and focusing mostly on English sources gives is a looot more meaty information. I could read some Wikipedia article in my own tongue, or I could get 5 times more information of perhaps higher quality by reading it in English.
- mathattack 13y agoI like it. I wish there was a reference to Orkut worked in there. That social network thrived for a long time purely because a couple Brazilian open source celebs latched on to it.
- lucian1900 13y agoAs a non-native English speaker, I have pretty strong feelings about English in engineering in general: everyone should just learn English. I see it as a remarkably good thing that engineering (and to some extent science) has standardised so much on English and I can only hope that all other walks of life will as well. It would be so nice if everyone on earth spoke excellent English.
- speeder 13y agoMy dad (that is a excellent programmer, and tried very hard for 20 years already to learn english and failed) disagree with you.
- sabbatic13 13y agoAnd your dad's alternative would be what? To balkanize science and engineering? To create dozens of separate islands of knowledge? To slow the spread of knowledge, because everything deemed significant has to be translated to and from 20 languages to gain general currency? How is one or even a thousand persons' inability to learn another language an argument for how science should be practiced?
- sdm 13y agoScience and engineering are already "balkanized" by language -- at least with respect to Mandarin, Russian, and German. I remember in uni taking "German for technical and scientific reading" courses just for that purpose. It make much more grow the communities than shut most people out because they don't speak English.
- dwaltrip 13y agoThe assumptions, the arrogance, the blame passing, the lack of understanding of contexts not your own... You are basically impling all non-english speakers should be so very ashamed that they are holding back broad human progress with their stupid insistency in continuing to use their native tongue. Which I find absurd. (Btw, I only speak English). As technologists, maybe we could find solutions that, ya know, don't force massive, life altering requirements on billions of people?
- rdtsc 13y agoProgramming specific I think is easier in English. I speak 3 languages and understand 4. Talking about programming, computer science and technology in non-Engish is awkward. It either is necessary to just use English terms anyway for every other noun or struggle with awkward translation of them. Things like kernel, doubly linked list, hash table, binary tree, greedy algorithm, they are all invented in English and when translating them to other languages, they have a translation but it just sounds very awkward. So you can have 2 people talking and one uses all translated terminology one uses the "native" equivalent. And yeah if both happen to speak English they'll understand what they mean, but if they don't then they might as well speak different languages. But if they already speak English and it is a public forum, might as well try to speak English. Anyway that is just my perspective.
- pcrh 13y agoPerhaps the point isn't so much the translation of technical jargon, but the ability to discuss meaning and explain nuances. If you work in say, a Japanese environment, you might well pepper your Japanese conversation with terms like "kernel", "hash table", but the sense of your conversation is mostly contained within the Japanese portion of the vocabulary used.
- guelo 13y agoI wonder how corporate programmers in non-english speaking countries communicate about programming. I would imagine that they use their local language for docs, commit descriptions, email lists, etc. I think most of the source code people can look at is for open source projects and they always go with english as the default even when there are mostly non-english speaking programmers. But what does it look inside private corporations?
- phaer 13y ago> But what does it look inside private corporations? In my experience (technical companies in countries where German is the main language) most of them use either English straight away or their native language mixed with a lot of english nouns. I never ever saw someone translating "commit" for example.
- yeukhon 13y agoI am an immigrant from China and I came to the States after finishing sixth grade so I can still read and write in Chinese. Perfectly excellent. The advantage of that is I can utilize more resources that are only available in Chinese. You'd surprise how often Chinese programmers leave useful code snippets or tips in Chinese. So knowing a foreign language can definitely help. While I agree having a non-English version helps growing the community (as pointed out in the article it could help a young girl to get started), but I am worrying about fragmentation. Also, SO tends to be pretty strict about the way a post is written - so a little girl who is making a post will either be closed or forced to edit. I don't know - it is as if I want people to take the hard route because it can benefit them in the long run. I really have a mixed feelings about this too. Side note: That probably limits the list of potential candidates to Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian... Hmmm it's Chinese since people write in Chinese characters. Mandarin is a dialectic.
- couchand 13y agoA point of clarification: the new site has intentionally relaxed rules. SO is a mature site that can afford to have stricter criteria, but pt.so is still in its infancy and the protocol is growing to meet the needs of the community that forms there.
- lucb1e 13y ago> the new site has intentionally relaxed rules That sounds like the complete doom of stackexchange, or that site at the very least. Eternal February.
- lucb1e 13y ago> SO tends to be pretty strict about the way a post is written - so a little girl who is making a post will either be closed or forced to edit. Questions are only closed if nobody can understand them, not because of grammar. So this little girl wouldn't have gotten her question answered regardless of whether the question was closed, simply because it wasn't clear. If grammar is lacking but it's understandable, people will either leave it be or edit it to upgrade the English. At least, that is my experience on the IT Security StackExchange site (the only one I'm really active at).
- moron4hire 13y agoThis is great, and I think multilingualism is something we should encourage amongst dedicated developers. I mean, it's not like we don't already have to learn a variety of languages already. I personally get a kick out of communicating with people in other languages. It almost seems like a super power.
- lucb1e 13y ago> I think multilingualism is something we should encourage amongst dedicated developers. Why in the world would you do that? Languages are the biggest timesuck in the history of humanity. How can you build knowledge together if you can't even communicate with one another beyond drawing a square rectangle in the sand? We finally got around to doing counting in, well, mostly one universal system, but languages are still a major PITA for everyone involved. Sure it may be fun and great for you that you get a kick out of it, but the existence of different language for the sheer fun of it is about as useful as forcing entire nations to play violin. > I mean, it's not like we don't already have to learn a variety of languages already. Uhm, no? I know English and my native language (Dutch) and that is more than enough. The only language I had to learn besides my own was the one that most of us on here see as the universal one: English. And for all I care the Dutch language can die a quick and silent death.
- pacofvf 13y ago> Why in the world would you do that? Languages are the biggest timesuck in the history of humanity. A language not only express the ideas of the speaker, it also carries a lot of historical and cultural data, I love learning new languages even if I don't become proficient in that language. Being said that, I don't think it's a good idea for non-native Portuguese speakers to ask/answer questions in pt.so > Uhm, no? I know English and my native language (Dutch) and that is more than enough. The only language I had to learn besides my own was the one that most of us on here see as the universal one: English. And for all I care the Dutch language can die a quick and silent death. I'm a native Spanish speaker, being the second language with most native speakers in the world only behind mandarin, why would I settle just with English?, Spanish is more useful for me in all other activities of my life, I only use English on the Internet, even my Brazilian boss is a fluent Spanish speaker.
- oscargrouch 13y agoPeople barely now this, but theres a social inclusion aspect by creating the portuguese version of StackOverflow. In Brazil, at least, only the kids of wealthy families have access to private english courses.. In regular school its just too weak to make a difference.. and of course there are the self-taughts.. a minority.. So, there are a very good social inclusion aspect in all of this.. make the rookie programmers start with the portuguese version.. then maybe they will just hit the english with time.. imposing a language barrier is a sort of elitism that will create a virtual barrier that doesnt do good to anyone.. I dont know why people rant about it, since all the good content is already in english language.. Allow even more people to enter into the technology world is a good thing.. let them learn english later, when theres a need..
- gorrillamcd 13y agoThis! People aren't realizing that in a lot of countries, english classes in the normal school system are a joke. And there are many people that don't have the resources to go to college or private classes to learn this. I have some young friends in Mexico that don't even have assurance of their next meal and would like to learn some skills to help land a better job than washing cars, but they're stuck. It's a catch-22 and having programming information and curriculum in their native language would remove one more barrier to them getting out of that situation. It'd also help me teach them since I wouldn't have to translate so much.
- 6cxs2hd6 13y ago> 10% of the world’s programmers are in China > 1.4% of our visits come from China > Only 4.8% of our visits come from China, Japan and Korea combined > So, if the data tell us that we’re getting roughly 80% less activity from Asia than we should in the absence of language constraints, why does it feel so obvious that all serious programmers speak English? That data says it's less. It doesn't say the reason why is language constraints. p.s. With or without this data, sure, it's obviously false that "all serious programmers speak English", and obviously true that some more people will participate using their native language.
- analyst74 13y agoWhen I first started, I used to hang out and ask questions in one of the major Chinese programmer forums. I knew some English back then, but looking at a wall of English text was daunting in itself, now imagine a wall of English text that is not easy to understand even for native English speakers.
- 6cxs2hd6 13y agoOh I'm totally sympathetic and think it's great to have it in more languages. I just didn't understand their logic. They seemed to say, the only thing holding back those 80% is the language barrier, and once we break it, the numbers will shoot up. Well maybe. But it reminds me of circa 1999 market math: "If get just 1% of the Chinese market..." says someone, followed by investors taking a haircut as a result of lame business plan.
- BoppreH 13y agoUnintended consequence #1: duplicated questions. http://pt.stackoverflow.com/questions/4021/numero-de-vezes-que-um-documento-ja-foi-visualizado-no-amazon-cloudsearch http://pt.stackoverflow.com/questions/4021/numero-de-vezes-q... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21550842/amazon-cloudsearch-show-the-number-of-times-a-document-has-already-been-seen http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21550842/amazon-cloudsear... Corollary: answer "arbitrage" (translating existing answers for duplicated questions).
- NSAID 13y agoCompletely intended, by my read. It wouldn't make any sense if you couldn't ask a question that was already asked in a language you don't know. FTA: "we expect almost every question asked on the Portuguese site to also be asked (and answered) on the English site."
- BoppreH 13y agoIt was the same user asking the same question, and the English version may or may not be machine translated. It feels spammy, specially since the English version isn't up to par. I'm not sure this is what they had in mind with that quote.
- NSAID 13y agoAh, I missed the identical users. That is an interesting situation, especially if a user might be fluent in both languages (which may or may not be the case in this situation).
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- x0054 13y agoMost Russian programmers I know speak enough English to get by in most situations. I can't speak for other countries though.
- soneca 13y ago"It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them." Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the more stupid mistakes I make; e.g., i usually write "no" instead of "know" or vice-versa, just because in my brazilian mind they sound exactly the same. And at my most voted comment ever I wrote "maked" instead of "made". No one mentioned (?) it, but I still feel the shame. I think it is a great move by SO, lots and lots of developers I meet here (i am not one) don't speak fluent english. Our basic education is very poor (in every aspect, including english language there). If we want a world where everyone can learn to code/develop early in life, this sure come in hand in Brazil, where there is a huge just-got-out-of-poverty youth that didn't learn english at all, but could easily learn to code. Congrats SO! edit: I noticed I just wrote "de" instead of "the". Stupidest mistake I often make. Again, just because in my mind they sound exactly the same - and "de" is a word (of) in portuguese. Gosh, I make this mistake for so long, I should have learned already.
- waterside81 13y agoYour written English is great - don't sweat it. Many native English speakers write worse than you.
- soneca 13y agoI am a little proud of my writing skills in portuguese (and always a little frustrated that I lose these skills in English). But the point is that it is not all that natural to me. Requires effort, a lot of thought. I know the final result can be good, but gets in the way of "being part of a community" as the OP put it. Example: i started to play a little with Dogecoin, but I gave up being part of their reddit community because of the language (it gets worse when it is coloquial, informal).
- icelancer 13y agoYour written English is better than the vast majority of our current undergraduate college students in America, so I really wouldn't worry about it.
- blah32497 13y agoMaybe this is a dumb question, but why not just use Google translate? (or some equivalent) If you don't know any English and you were to auto-translate your question. I think the vast majority of the time you'd get the answer you're looking for. You don't even need the result to be very grammatically correct or to sound natural. Most of the time you just need to get the gist of it and get a code snippet. It'd be helpful if there was a translation scheme that was targeted towards the programming field so keywords were translated appropriately (so like, whatever the Portuguese equivalent of 'namespace' would translate accurately to 'namespace' etc. etc.). I feel like creating of map of terms would be relatively easy. In the grad scheme of things I really really hope knowledge is consolidated in English. It's the lingua franca of the world, and it's also one of the most expressive languages. I spend some time working in Japan, and they had so much knowledge squirreled away from the world b/c they were effectively too lazy to learn English. (they're large enough, and advanced enough that they can afford to maintain trade journals and online technical communities in Japanese)
- DanBC 13y agoI want people to give you careful detailed replies in their native language, with a Google Translated copy of their answer too.
- jaydles 13y agoWe'd love to be able to take all the info we have, and make it available in every language. But here's why it's harder than it looks: `This is probably a dumb question , but why Google Did not translate simply use ? (Or equivalent ) You do not know English , and if you did, I will automatically convert to your question . I think most of the time , and want to get the answer you are looking for. It grammatically correct is very , or not require a result , you also , to sound natural . Most of the time , you need to and get the gist of it , to get the code snippet you . (Such as , what so that you will translate well to etc. ' space ' Portuguese equivalent of ' space ') because it was translated properly , keyword if there is a conversion method that targets the programming field I think that can help . I feel like the creation of the map of the term would be relatively easy to me. The graduate scheme of things , I hope knowledge is connected in English really . It is a common language in the world , and it also , it 's one of the most expressive language . I spend some time working in Japan , and the knowledge of many , they were crowded world away from the B / C was trouble they will learn English very effectively . ( They are large enough , they're advanced enough that you can afford to maintain the online technical community and trade press in Japan )` I translated your text above to Japanese and back. (To be fair, that's two "lossy" transfers, not one, but it's pretty clear that you couldn't possibly have a two way discussion that way.
- eknkc 13y agoThey are spreading thin. It used to be StackOverflow, I'd go search for something and ask if the search would yield nothing. Now they have a thousand sites and I don't know which one to look at, or ask questions on.
- unwind 13y agoI believe the solution to that is to not aim for a specific site and use its search; use a regular web search instead and trust that SO and gang make their sites indexable. That certainly seems to be the case. I have a particular SO question I often reference in order to link to it in answers and comments; I always just google two words to find it.
- RomanPushkin 13y agoThis post will not be complete without mentioning Claude Piron http://dotsub.com/view/54b18453-7176-44ef-b686-952b239975f9 http://dotsub.com/view/54b18453-7176-44ef-b686-952b239975f9
- rogerthis 13y agoRecent research in four universities in Brasilia (federal capital) area has shown that 50% of students are functional illiterates. As I said before, we g(b)razilians can't write or understand or own mother tongue, imagine doing it with English.
- _random_ 13y agoI struggle to imagine a developer who is _talented_ (in actual real sense of this) in programming yet cannot ask/answer a tech question in English (I am not a native speaker). Has anyone met a person like this?
- marijn 13y agoI, for one, am amazed that this would need justification at all. (And that half the comments here seem to be saying that devs should 'just learn English'.) Languages with many speakers have their own 'world'. Kids, and people without higher education in such language areas won't have much opportunity to pick up English. They'll start out without access to English language programming communities. The only way they'll get anywhere in the field is to have alternatives in their own language.
- crazygringo 13y agoAs an America who spent years in Brazil (hence the username), both teaching English, and programming together with a lot of software developers there (always speaking in Portuguese), I think this is great. I never met a developer who had zero English skills. But I also met very, very few developers who could really converse fluently in English. I realized how much additional difficulty a lot of them have with coding, because a lot of them time they can't "just Google it" to find a snippet of code that fixes their problem, or that documents a known platform bug. And remember that learning English, while not living in an English-speaking country, generally takes years of dedicated work -- you're probably either going to become a good programmer, or good at English, but most people are not going to have the time for both, that's just reality. So this is a great move on Stack Overflow's part. Kudos. (Plus, Brazilians are basically the world's most active social-network users, so there's always that, too.)
- JohnnyBrown 13y ago> we’re getting roughly 80% less activity from Asia than we should in the absence of language constraints Bit of an assumption here: absent language constraints, Chinese and anglophone developers would use Stackoverflow at the same rate. I'd say it's pretty likely that China has a popular programming QA site of its own.
- kriro 13y agoI think this is a very good idea. The point about being interested in programming way before you ever considered learning English is the selling point for me. Portuguese seems like a good starting language as well, well done (I'd like to see German added to the list though). As long as it doesn't lead to more native language (from people that actually speak English) code I'm 100% on board. I come across code in German and French somewhat regularly and...yikes (unfortunately I know of quite a few universities that actually teach programming with native language class and method names and the like)
- aquadrop 13y agoTheir explanation would be good in static world - we give non-english speakers opportunity to be a part of global SO. But I'm afraid that in the future it will hurt main SO, since core community of each language will move to its own *.SO, leaving english section for native-only speakers. Of course, maybe that won't be the case and I hope they will watch for negative effects. English language as an intermediate for all programmers is a bliss. Imagine how it would be nice if all people had one language and there were no communication barriers (damn Babylonians :) It's not possible in common case, but with programming we almost have it.
- goshx 13y agoThis is AWESOME! I even get emotional about this and here is why. TL;DR: I am a Brazilian and it would have been much easier for me if I had the resources I needed available in my mother language. Long story: I am a Brazilian. I was born in a small town in Brazil (population: 13k) and I only had access to public schools. Public schools in Brazil do have English classes, however all I remember was them teaching the verb "to be" in every single grade. When I was 15, in 1998, my mom found a way to finance a cheap computer for me. My first access to a computer. Everything was in English. I did not have access to internet initially, but the computer came with a few softwares installed. At the time I also asked my mom to buy me a translation dictionary, so I could learn English. Translating most of the things I was seeing on the screen did not make sense at all, so I just assumed them as part of my vocabulary giving them meanings, but not translations, like "software", or software names... Later, with access to internet (long distance dial up after midnight), it was really, REALLY, hard to search for stuff related to programming because there was almost nothing available in portuguese. I had to learn how to translate properly what I was looking for before I could even do the search. Not sure native English speakers understand this part. So what I tried to do instead was to learn English. I did that by finding lyrics of the songs I liked online (they were easy to find since no translation was needed) and translating them with the help from my dictionary. And this is basically how I learned most of the English that I know. (In fact, I never went to a real English school/class, as you can probably tell at this point by reading this). But dude, I was able to do this because I put A LOT of effort and hours, and nights, doing this, day after day, because I really wanted to learn. (It paid off... I am a H1B living in Miami today) Learning English is not for everyone. Learning another language is not for everyone. Learning how to code IS WAY MUCH FUN than learning how to speak another language. While I always tell people to try to learn English, because they're going to have better chances, I believe this should not be a barrier for the average people to learn programming. Or anything, really. You have no idea of how many great developers in Brazil do not speak proficient English. So, thanks to the guys at Stack Overflow for doing this. I'll make sure I share this with everyone I know that always wanted to learn programming but had English as a barrier. I am confident that the IT industry in Brazil will be thankful for this in the long term. Thank you guys.
- smoyer 13y ago
- Walkman 13y agoI have been in Portugal two years ago and everybody, I mean EVERYBODY told me that all Portuguese people speak English, because every movie comes with subtitles only (no sound translation), and most of the films are English. They only translates cartoons for small kids. I mean, is Portuguese the best language to start with?
- dcustodio 13y agoI think the idea of starting with portuguese is because of the large brazilian community that struggles with english. In portugal most programmers speak english fluently. I, for one, will continue to use english.
- smackfu 13y agoOdd that they waited two weeks to write this blog post. Should have been out on day 1, because obviously people are going to have questions about it. Instead they just had an explanation blog post in Portuguese: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-announcing-stack-overflow-in-portuguese/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-announcing-s...
- diogene 13y agoIs it going to be Portuguese from Portugal or Brazil?
- pjmlp 13y agoI imagine this is a rhetoric question.
- diogene 13y agoHow is it rethoric? Portuguese is a language that mutated a lot between the countries that use it. For more informations check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthographic_Agreement_of_1990 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthographi...
- pjmlp 13y agoBecause if you bothered to read the article you would have seen it is Brazilian Portuguese, assuming you are Portuguese native speaker like myself.
- ufo 13y agoYou are allowed to use either. Kind of like how in the English SO or in Wikipedia you can use either the American or British dialect.
- pjmlp 13y agoAs Portuguese I congratulate SO. Now I just hope it means all Portuguese variants (Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe) and not just Brazil.
- marcosdumay 13y agoWritten Portuguese has very little variance now. That's what last year orthographic change was all about. Most of the difference are on names, and on IT we use a completely different lingo anyway.
- pjmlp 13y agoYes, now imagine a discussion thread on SO using multiple speakers from all Portuguese speaking countries.
- notastartup 13y agoI am afraid that stackoverflow has become a very hostile environment for the sake of some delusive over optimization as a code bank for every single question out there. The thing about questions is that although there are similarities, they often are not placed in the same context, stackoverflow mods zealously flag even relevant questions like "what libraries should I use for X" because it's not a really answerable question but they are forgetting that this optimization by downvoting (negative user experience) and censuring the question asker leaves a very bad taste in new comers experience. Even I, as an old timer on stackoverflow get harassed (the usual passive aggressive and cold hearted engineer style) with time to time by people who otherwise do not have any reason to be commenting on the question itself such as "if OP doesn't know this, it's a miracle that he does X" or other ad hominem remarks. Stackoverflow really has become a hostile place to ask questions provided they don't censure you for variety of subjective rules. These days I find Ask HN to be far better user experience.
- tucif 13y agois there is any major open source project that is being developed by Portuguese-speaking people only? i.e. mailing list, bug tracker and comments all in Portuguese.
- devgutt 13y agoI think this is not the correct way to tackle the problem. Build a website in Portuguese will only divide instead of stimulate the participation of users which doesn't have English as native. I'd like to propose a different approach: For the users that speak Portuguese natively, make the questions, answers and comments all written in Portuguese FIRST, and, a English version MANDATORY afterwards (which would be the standard language). The Portuguese-spoken users would see all this items also in Portuguese, and the remains in English. The same for users of other languages. For those who speak only English, it would be no difference. This approach has several advantages: * It makes the user think in their native language, giving much better answers. * The user is forced to make a second review in the answer when it was translated to English. * The user will identify their language peers easily. * The user will be more comfortable to participate, because the barrier to write in English is tremendous (much bigger than a lot of people think). This way, I think you are able to keep a single website for ALL developers, stimulating participation. ====================================================================== Same comment in Portuguese (my native language, just for illustration) ====================================================================== Acho que isso não é uma forma adequada de tratar o problema. Criar um site em português irá dividir ao invés de estimular a participação destes usuários que não tem inglês nativo. Gostaria de propôr uma solução, que no meu ponto-de-vista, seria bem melhor: Para os usuários que falam Português nativamente, façam que todas as perguntas, respostas e comentários no site sejam escritos em Português, primeiramente, e adicionada, OBRIGATORIAMENTE, uma versão em inglês (que seria a língua comum). Os usuários que falam Português nativo veriam automaticamente estes itens também em português, e o restante em inglês. O mesmo para usuários de outras línguas. Para aqueles que falam apenas inglês, não teria nenhuma diferença. Essa abordagem tem várias vantagens: * Estimular que o usuário pense em sua língua nativa, fornecendo respostas muito mais precisas. * Força o usuário fazer uma segunda revisão na resposta quando for traduzir para o inglês. * O usuário nativo vai identificar os seus pares rapidamente. * O usuário vai ficar mais confortável em participar, pois a barreira de escrever em inglês é enorme (maior do que muitos pensam) Acho que desta forma poderia fazer um único site para TODOS os desenvolvedores, estimulando a participação.
- blahedo 13y agoThis is an interesting idea, but I wonder about the practicality. When you say something is MANDATORY, whose responsibility is it? The question writer, who may not have English at all? Someone else? Who?
- oofabz 13y agoI think it's great to see North American developers reach out to their South American brethren. We spend so much time thinking about Europe and Asia that we often forget about our next door neighbors. South America may not have such a high GDP, but they are also a lot more receptive to partnership. Europe and Asia mostly want to be left alone to do their own thing.
- V-2 13y agoThere's a Polish clone of StackOverflow: http://devpytania.pl/ http://devpytania.pl/ The reasoning behind it was more or less the same. It's not very active though and a good number of questions wouldn't meet SO standards (subjective ones, "list" questions etc.)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- V-2 13y agoI see nothing wrong about programmers who want to discuss or exchange experience etc. in their native language. I'm one of such guys... English is not my first language, either. The thing is that the SO format is not suited for extended discussions. Its power lies and shows in brevity. Like it or not - good working knowledge of English is a must if you consider yourself a professional. (In this field, of course; it's very specific). If your English doesn't allow you to freely elaborate on the caveats of system architecture, working culture and whatnot, it's perfectly fine in my opinion and nothing to fret about. But if you can't ask a brief technical question, or you stumble trying to answer one, that's a shortcoming that should be addressed. For your own good, nobody's else
- csense 13y agoThis originally had the same title as the article, namely, "Can’t We All be Reasonable and Speak English?" It's apparently been edited by a mod. But why? HN's title guidelines state: "If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway...Otherwise please use the original title..." I can understand an edit which moves a title in the direction of compliance with the title guidelines, but in this case, the edit actually increases the number of title guideline violations by two: It changes the title to be different from the title of the post, and it also inserts the name of the site into the title. What's up with that?
- anovikov 13y agoVery poor idea, if you're a coder you've got to speak decent English. There is no way to get around that, period.
- loomio 13y agoThis is fantastic! Congrats to Stack Overflow and here's to more languages in the future. We were shocked and delighted when our international user community had massive enthusiasm for translating our app into different languages, and now it's live in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonian, Dutch and several other languages, with more like Telegu, Malayalam, and Japanese in the pipeline. It's opened up whole worlds of users who otherwise wouldn't have ever had access to the tool. As some other commenters have noted, there is definitely a social inclusion aspect to releasing in various languages - not everyone has the same access to education around the world. Furthermore, we'll have a much richer community and society if we open communication to everyone and don't expect everyone to learn English, which is a more or less arbitrary standard. We've also recently released a feature where you can translate comments in the app instantly, meaning people who speak different languages can communicate in the same conversation! It's so cool to see. We've had a great time using Transifex and I can recommend it to any software project hoping to support a translation community. For us as an open source project, we have been very grateful that all our translation has been done by volunteers, and Transifex makes it really easy to coordinate with them. If any other projects are interested in how we manage translation on a technical level, we wrote a blog post about it [0] and will be publishing another, more in-depth one, shortly. [0] http://blog.loomio.org/2013/10/01/translating-loomio-2/ http://blog.loomio.org/2013/10/01/translating-loomio-2/
- magicroundabout 13y ago"That probably limits the list of potential candidates to Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Spanish. " Apropos of nothing but the sheer size of the language community, I am quite surprised that Arabic doesn't feature in this list.
- whizzkid 13y agoSolution to this idea should be reconsidered in my opinion. Instead of creating pure language specific sites, smarter approach can be more helpful to everyone in the community. Let's give it a try; 'Argument is not numeric (ArgumentError)' What is there to write/ask differently about it in English or Portuguese? If a subsystem to stackoverflow is created for each language, you might be able to see the answers written by other native speakers. An accepted answer will always be in English but for the ones that can not understand what is going on, they can click on their preferred language button and see the explanation in Portuguese. This would also give better overview of which country actually has more involved to specific topic and so on. To keep in short, every question asked in stackoverflow has a localization button to see answers from different languages. If someone is not comfortable writing the answer in English then they can write it in Russian. Then, when an American checks the question in english with no answers, he/she can try to translate the answers from other languages. Which is a win/win for both parties
- hattenn 13y ago(Here's the comment I posted on StackOverflow, I wanted to share it here too.) I haven't read all the comments, so forgive me if I'm just repeating the same stuff (on another note, I hope I am). This is a horrible idea, if you ask me. Language barriers are there because there are languages. If you keep supporting languages, there will always be language barriers. English speakers, especially Americans, feel bad about "making people speak their language". I have seen this many times. But it's just ridiculous. We don't need more than one language. Having more than one language: 1) Creates a language barrier, thus slowing down advancement. 2) Gives people a reason for discrimination, just like nationalism, racism, and religion. When you say that "If just one little girl in Brazil sticks with programming because an answer on this site helped her finish her first project, well… that’s not good enough!", it sounds like a really humble thing to do, but it in fact is the opposite. You are overlooking the fact that there's a lot of information regarding programming and many other things in many different languages already. I'm not a native speaker of English, and I learned English thanks to my interest in programming. First I started with reading stuff in my own language, then I realized that I could learn much more if I read stuff in English. And that's how it should be. I don't care if it's English or any other language, but we only need one language, not three, not two, only one. The rest is just noise. To wrap it up, disguised by a seemingly humble thing, you are supporting language barriers, by supporting languages. I'd expect better from you guys.
- dcarmo 13y agoI totally agree with you. It's not because it's English per se, it's because we need one universal language. English is the better choice because all the code that we have to write is based in... English. "while", "for", "if", "switch", "return", those are all English words that weren't picked at random: they have actual meaning on what you're doing. If you are programmer and don't know English, you'll never be a great programmer because you'll never understand the basics of the programming language you're working with. By the way, I'm Brazilian. You want to start programming? Great, learn English first. It's not hard and it's gonna make more good than harm to you.
- K0nserv 13y agoThis is the opinion I was looking for in the comments. All though the general sentiment behind pt.stackoverflow.com is good the execution is not. As you say this will only create additional segregation by separating developers based on their proficiency in english. The programming community benefits enormously from having a single common language. Just imagine the problems that would occur if we had libraries that did not use the common language. However the problem of english proficiency and the barriers it creates for aspiring programmers is still very important. I say: let's not try to localize programming and further the segregation of the community, instead let's try to combine english education with programming education in a meaningful way. First language is swedish by the way.