8 ms·

I applaud efforts like this. zmguy writes that we should work to defragment the world. But who are english speakers to expect everyone to speak english? I think

I applaud efforts like this. zmguy writes that we should work to defragment the world. But who are english speakers to expect everyone to speak english? I think we need more fragmentation. We've defragmented enough already. Diversity is a great thing. The more diverse we are, the more diverse our worldviews are and the more creative we become. Maybe there is more conflict, but who is to say that more conflict is a bad thing? As I recall there were studies on different personalities in multilingual people. (Although I believe it's true observing myself, you know how every study can have a study disproving it). When I started learning programming there were a few resources available only in russian on russian forums(RE related) same with chinese. At the same time people who didn't know any better think russians are technologically behind and still do. I recently had a discussion with someone in the University who was blaming them(them including russians, chinese speakers and others) for not making information more readily available to him. China, Japan, Russia, Iran, probably a bunch of Arab countries, Germany(although this one is argueably moving to english as scientific language) have vibrant scientific communities, that you can only understand if you speak the respective language. If the numbers are right [1] (which i doubt, i assume both the chinese and the english l2 speakers to be much more) then maybe it is us who should make more available in chinese. Also keep in mind that for a very long time Arab was the defacto scientific language of south east asia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... edit: i don't normally ask for explanations, but if you downvote i'd appreciate an explanation in this context.

pjmlp 13y ago
Up voted you. As a non English native speaker and fluent in six languages, I think is very valuable that people have access to learning resources and tooling support in their native languages.
- throwaway344 13y ago
  Wow, six languages. What languages do you speak, and how did you learn them?
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Portuguese - native speaker Spanish - I used to spend my summer vacations as a child, quite close to Spain, which allowed me to follow Spanish TV (80's no cable back then) and have a few Spanish friends French - Three years at high school in Portugal. Lived in France for a couple of years while working at CERN. English - Five years at high school. Reading English since the late 80's, as a way to get information about ZX Spectrum and similar systems in Portugal. Local press was quite limited. Working in international environments since I graduated. German - Living in Germany since a few years. Always took care to learn the language. Italian - Thanks to my knowledge with the other Latin languages, Italian friends, occasional vacations in Italy and lots of books and movies in Italian Plus ability to understand Catalan, Galician and Mirandese.
    - jacquesm 13y ago
      You'll have a head start on Romanian as well. Probably you could understand quite a bit of it without doing any work at all.
      - pjmlp 13y ago
        Probably, never got around to try it though.
- icebraining 13y ago
  For learning and documentation, sure. But as another native Portuguese speaker, keep your code and comments in English, please! I really don't want to have to learn another human language just to read someone else's code. (I shudder at the thought of having to code in, say, G-Portugol: http://gpt.berlios.de/site/ http://gpt.berlios.de/site/)
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Remember Spooler? Once they had a Portuguese version of Pascal for learning purposes.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      Remember Spooler Not really, we didn't get them in our daycare :D I never really read programming magazines; I had a couple of books, but it was the late 90s, so I learned mostly on the web.
zmguy 13y ago
While I do want defragmentation of technical and scientific research (imagine the duplication that occurs given that lack of a unified scientific research dependency tree), I specifically qualified myself with "...as a second language." A world where everyone speaks one language would be boring as fuck, not to mention probably a dozen generations in the future before it would happen. But realistically the future global language of Earth is probably going to be Arabic, Arabic speakers are reproducing at a rate that virtually guarantees it. I can't remember to attribute this quote/sentiment accurately but here it goes... "The war against the West will not be won on a battlefield but in the wombs of our mothers..." I also can't speak to the accuracy of the claims in the following link, but they are thought provoking and worth a watch/read. http://religionresearch.org/martijn/2009/05/05/islamizing-europe-muslim-demographics/ http://religionresearch.org/martijn/2009/05/05/islamizing-eu...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway344 13y ago
  I'm curious why you think that Arabic is so predestined to be "the" language of the future. I'm saying that, as the number of people who speak English (840 million) is four times as many as the number who speak Arabic (221 million). That's not even including the lack of mutual intelligibility between different flavors of Arabic.
  - justinmk 13y ago
    Because s/he is extrapolating a curve based on the current birth rate. > Arabic speakers are reproducing at a rate that virtually guarantees it. That's ridiculous. In the 1970s, Chinese birth rate was ~5/woman [1]. It turns out that dynamic systems change with time. Anyways, to get back on topic: more accessibility will only improve things. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
    - unhammer 13y ago
jacquesm 13y ago
Don't forget about Spanish!
krick 13y ago
While I like the idea of arabic lisp (BTW it shouldn't be hard to make "arabic Clojure") simply because it looks so much better than english, I disagree with your reasoning in general. My primary language is russian and I'm absolutely sure we should defragment the world. And I'm completely fine with using english as the only language for computing-related stuff. No, we haven't "defragmented enough already". Not even close. You may not know that, but there already exist programming languages "in russian". One is called 1С[1] and although probably unknown outside of russia, it's very much used for bookkeeping apps (because of being part of quite useful proprietary app, not because it's good). It's basically VB with "если" instead of "if". It proved to be totally useless and horrible. And there're more examples like that. Translating docs and such to other languages is always good, but not crucial. The reason is: you need to know english anyway, because there is and always will be useful stuff written in english, so people who are crying over absence of russian docs instead of learning english (unfortunately there are plenty of them) aren't really worth paying attention, because they aren't really in trouble, they are just lazy. One more example of fragmentation on language basis might be Ruby community. Even now there're two "main" mailing lists, one is japanese-only. Now it's not really a problem, because all important stuff is doubled in english, but a while ago it was not so easy for people that don't know japanese. Why english and not chinese? Because english is fairly simple. Simple compared to russian, simple compared to chinese and japanese, simple compared to finnish. (Seriously, the only problem with it is the "correct" spelling is sometimes very far from how the word is pronounced). It might be not as expressive sometimes, but that's a matter to reflect about for language-lovers, not a real problem. Hieroglyphic writing systems are complicated. I don't know chinese, but I do know japanese for some extent and the funny thing is even many native speakers cannot write properly in japanese… well, I know, many native english speakers cannot write properly as well, but for japanese it's even worse, seriously. And to be fair: I absolutely love japanese typography. Phone entries and posters look so much better in japanese than in latin/cyrillics. But it is complicated. Why not spanish? I don't know. It would be fine to use spanish as "the" language, I guess. It just happened so the main language for computing is english. Let it be english. Fine. [1] - http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_1%D0%A1:%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B5 http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%... (sorry, russian only)
nnq 13y ago
> I think we need more fragmentation. We've defragmented enough already. Are you fk kidding?! We aren't at even 10% of "defragmenting" the world's conceptual space... When we'll be close to 99.9%, then tell me it's "enough already". And when it comes to programming languages, we're reinventing the wheel over and over and over and over again because we don't have a small number (I'd call less than 5 a "small enough number") or dominant programming languages and VMs so we can just port features from one to another. Same for all other aspects of computer science and engineering. Everything new takes aaaaaages to implement because we can't freaking standardize on a small number of languages and protocols. > have vibrant scientific communities, that you can only understand if you speak the respective language If you've ever worked on any half-serious scientific project anywhere in the world, you'll know that if you can't speak and read/write English fluently (the read/write part is more importantly than the speaking part in science), you're not part of any real scientific community but just of a pseudo-nationalistic group playing as if they are doing science. Technology and science need standardization and homogeneity when it comes to langauges and communication, like at least 50% more language/protocols standardization and homogeneity than we have now, just so we can have more diversity of ideas. If everyone spends 50% of their mental energy translating from one language/standard/protocol to another, whether programming language or natural language or whatever, you will have less diversity and less innovation because event if it may seem fun, any kind of "translation" type of activity is a huuuuuge drain that brings benefits to nobody. And in software, we already spend 90% of our brainpower in translation-type-activities and reinventing wheels all day long, so I'd take anything that brings me less fragmentation in all aspects of my life at all costs, and do everything I can to impose even forcefully less fragmentation in all aspects of existence in general.
lmm 13y ago
> who are english speakers to expect everyone to speak english? I lost all awkwardness about this after meeting some Lithuanians on a train in Slovenia. If there's any nation you'd expect to support linguistic diversity it's Lithuania, where just speaking the native language was an act of resistance against Soviet oppression. They spent the whole train journey bitching about these Slovenians who wouldn't speak English. > When I started learning programming there were a few resources available only in russian on russian forums(RE related) same with chinese. At the same time people who didn't know any better think russians are technologically behind and still do. Most of us who program or do science want it to be useful. Look at Linux - started by a Finn, but internationally successful (and not just in English-speaking countries - a lot of developers are German), because he wrote it in English. > China, Japan, Russia, Iran, probably a bunch of Arab countries, Germany(although this one is argueably[sic] moving to english as scientific language) have vibrant scientific communities, that you can only understand if you speak the respective language. Which means a lot of duplicated effort that could be better spent (duplicating science can sometimes be useful but if we could coordinate then we could be much smarter about it). > maybe it is us who should make more available in chinese. Also keep in mind that for a very long time Arab was the defacto scientific language of south east asia. Sure, there's nothing particularly special about English (well, there are a few conveniences like ASCII and the ease of new coinages, and the existing spread of people who know the language). I don't have a problem with non-English languages that are already major world languages in the field. But let's stop deliberately erecting barriers to communication in the name of "diversity". Let's not turn Computer Science from a field where all participants can understand each other into a field where one half can't talk to the other half. Let's make education in English and other true world languages as widely available as possible (and stop wasting our children's time teaching them a language that would only let them talk to 5 million people, all of whom speak English anyway - bitter welsh guy here).

pjmlp 13y ago

Up voted you. As a non English native speaker and fluent in six languages, I think is very valuable that people have access to learning resources and tooling support in their native languages.

throwaway344 13y ago
Wow, six languages. What languages do you speak, and how did you learn them?
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Portuguese - native speaker Spanish - I used to spend my summer vacations as a child, quite close to Spain, which allowed me to follow Spanish TV (80's no cable back then) and have a few Spanish friends French - Three years at high school in Portugal. Lived in France for a couple of years while working at CERN. English - Five years at high school. Reading English since the late 80's, as a way to get information about ZX Spectrum and similar systems in Portugal. Local press was quite limited. Working in international environments since I graduated. German - Living in Germany since a few years. Always took care to learn the language. Italian - Thanks to my knowledge with the other Latin languages, Italian friends, occasional vacations in Italy and lots of books and movies in Italian Plus ability to understand Catalan, Galician and Mirandese.
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    You'll have a head start on Romanian as well. Probably you could understand quite a bit of it without doing any work at all.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Probably, never got around to try it though.
icebraining 13y ago
For learning and documentation, sure. But as another native Portuguese speaker, keep your code and comments in English, please! I really don't want to have to learn another human language just to read someone else's code. (I shudder at the thought of having to code in, say, G-Portugol: http://gpt.berlios.de/site/ http://gpt.berlios.de/site/)
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Remember Spooler? Once they had a Portuguese version of Pascal for learning purposes.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Remember Spooler Not really, we didn't get them in our daycare :D I never really read programming magazines; I had a couple of books, but it was the late 90s, so I learned mostly on the web.

zmguy 13y ago

While I do want defragmentation of technical and scientific research (imagine the duplication that occurs given that lack of a unified scientific research dependency tree), I specifically qualified myself with "...as a second language." A world where everyone speaks one language would be boring as fuck, not to mention probably a dozen generations in the future before it would happen. But realistically the future global language of Earth is probably going to be Arabic, Arabic speakers are reproducing at a rate that virtually guarantees it. I can't remember to attribute this quote/sentiment accurately but here it goes... "The war against the West will not be won on a battlefield but in the wombs of our mothers..." I also can't speak to the accuracy of the claims in the following link, but they are thought provoking and worth a watch/read. http://religionresearch.org/martijn/2009/05/05/islamizing-europe-muslim-demographics/ http://religionresearch.org/martijn/2009/05/05/islamizing-eu...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
throwaway344 13y ago
I'm curious why you think that Arabic is so predestined to be "the" language of the future. I'm saying that, as the number of people who speak English (840 million) is four times as many as the number who speak Arabic (221 million). That's not even including the lack of mutual intelligibility between different flavors of Arabic.
- justinmk 13y ago
  Because s/he is extrapolating a curve based on the current birth rate. > Arabic speakers are reproducing at a rate that virtually guarantees it. That's ridiculous. In the 1970s, Chinese birth rate was ~5/woman [1]. It turns out that dynamic systems change with time. Anyways, to get back on topic: more accessibility will only improve things. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
  - unhammer 13y ago

jacquesm 13y ago

Don't forget about Spanish!

krick 13y ago

While I like the idea of arabic lisp (BTW it shouldn't be hard to make "arabic Clojure") simply because it looks so much better than english, I disagree with your reasoning in general. My primary language is russian and I'm absolutely sure we should defragment the world. And I'm completely fine with using english as the only language for computing-related stuff. No, we haven't "defragmented enough already". Not even close. You may not know that, but there already exist programming languages "in russian". One is called 1С[1] and although probably unknown outside of russia, it's very much used for bookkeeping apps (because of being part of quite useful proprietary app, not because it's good). It's basically VB with "если" instead of "if". It proved to be totally useless and horrible. And there're more examples like that. Translating docs and such to other languages is always good, but not crucial. The reason is: you need to know english anyway, because there is and always will be useful stuff written in english, so people who are crying over absence of russian docs instead of learning english (unfortunately there are plenty of them) aren't really worth paying attention, because they aren't really in trouble, they are just lazy. One more example of fragmentation on language basis might be Ruby community. Even now there're two "main" mailing lists, one is japanese-only. Now it's not really a problem, because all important stuff is doubled in english, but a while ago it was not so easy for people that don't know japanese. Why english and not chinese? Because english is fairly simple. Simple compared to russian, simple compared to chinese and japanese, simple compared to finnish. (Seriously, the only problem with it is the "correct" spelling is sometimes very far from how the word is pronounced). It might be not as expressive sometimes, but that's a matter to reflect about for language-lovers, not a real problem. Hieroglyphic writing systems are complicated. I don't know chinese, but I do know japanese for some extent and the funny thing is even many native speakers cannot write properly in japanese… well, I know, many native english speakers cannot write properly as well, but for japanese it's even worse, seriously. And to be fair: I absolutely love japanese typography. Phone entries and posters look so much better in japanese than in latin/cyrillics. But it is complicated. Why not spanish? I don't know. It would be fine to use spanish as "the" language, I guess. It just happened so the main language for computing is english. Let it be english. Fine. [1] - http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_1%D0%A1:%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B5 http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%... (sorry, russian only)

nnq 13y ago

> I think we need more fragmentation. We've defragmented enough already. Are you fk kidding?! We aren't at even 10% of "defragmenting" the world's conceptual space... When we'll be close to 99.9%, then tell me it's "enough already". And when it comes to programming languages, we're reinventing the wheel over and over and over and over again because we don't have a small number (I'd call less than 5 a "small enough number") or dominant programming languages and VMs so we can just port features from one to another. Same for all other aspects of computer science and engineering. Everything new takes aaaaaages to implement because we can't freaking standardize on a small number of languages and protocols. > have vibrant scientific communities, that you can only understand if you speak the respective language If you've ever worked on any half-serious scientific project anywhere in the world, you'll know that if you can't speak and read/write English fluently (the read/write part is more importantly than the speaking part in science), you're not part of any real scientific community but just of a pseudo-nationalistic group playing as if they are doing science. Technology and science need standardization and homogeneity when it comes to langauges and communication, like at least 50% more language/protocols standardization and homogeneity than we have now, just so we can have more diversity of ideas. If everyone spends 50% of their mental energy translating from one language/standard/protocol to another, whether programming language or natural language or whatever, you will have less diversity and less innovation because event if it may seem fun, any kind of "translation" type of activity is a huuuuuge drain that brings benefits to nobody. And in software, we already spend 90% of our brainpower in translation-type-activities and reinventing wheels all day long, so I'd take anything that brings me less fragmentation in all aspects of my life at all costs, and do everything I can to impose even forcefully less fragmentation in all aspects of existence in general.

lmm 13y ago

> who are english speakers to expect everyone to speak english? I lost all awkwardness about this after meeting some Lithuanians on a train in Slovenia. If there's any nation you'd expect to support linguistic diversity it's Lithuania, where just speaking the native language was an act of resistance against Soviet oppression. They spent the whole train journey bitching about these Slovenians who wouldn't speak English. > When I started learning programming there were a few resources available only in russian on russian forums(RE related) same with chinese. At the same time people who didn't know any better think russians are technologically behind and still do. Most of us who program or do science want it to be useful. Look at Linux - started by a Finn, but internationally successful (and not just in English-speaking countries - a lot of developers are German), because he wrote it in English. > China, Japan, Russia, Iran, probably a bunch of Arab countries, Germany(although this one is argueably[sic] moving to english as scientific language) have vibrant scientific communities, that you can only understand if you speak the respective language. Which means a lot of duplicated effort that could be better spent (duplicating science can sometimes be useful but if we could coordinate then we could be much smarter about it). > maybe it is us who should make more available in chinese. Also keep in mind that for a very long time Arab was the defacto scientific language of south east asia. Sure, there's nothing particularly special about English (well, there are a few conveniences like ASCII and the ease of new coinages, and the existing spread of people who know the language). I don't have a problem with non-English languages that are already major world languages in the field. But let's stop deliberately erecting barriers to communication in the name of "diversity". Let's not turn Computer Science from a field where all participants can understand each other into a field where one half can't talk to the other half. Let's make education in English and other true world languages as widely available as possible (and stop wasting our children's time teaching them a language that would only let them talk to 5 million people, all of whom speak English anyway - bitter welsh guy here).