4 ms·
How exactly do you (we?) expect someone who doesn't know English to become a programmer? Sorry to break it to you, but you can't have one without the other.
by atmosx 12y ago
How exactly do you (we?) expect someone who doesn't know English to become a programmer?
Sorry to break it to you, but you can't have one without the other.
- mseebach 12y agoI knew what most of the BASIC keywords did on the computer before I understood their meaning in english. I'm not sure I even completely grasped that they were words in a language until then. But yeah, english is pretty undisputed as the lingua franca of most things computer, and so developing professionally beyond a certain threshold is difficult without english.
- pgeorgi 12y agoI've seen French and German code that got by with no significant English (outside whatever wrapped the core functions). It's easier in some languages than in others. Back in the good old BASIC days, there were even hacks to make those tokenizing interpreters on home computers use German symbols for their keywords. (nice side effect of the tokenized representation: the code remained compatible) Excel and {Open,Libre}Office Calc work with localized symbols for their functions, too. I think I've even seen a C header file that wrapped keywords (through macros), types and libc names in translated versions. Luckily those are rare... So, programming without English is possible - but I really wouldn't recommend it.
- alphabetam 12y agoI learnt how to program before learning English. Most of my colleagues aren't really fluent in English, and yet they can write code.
- Tomte 12y agoFortunately I only ask people who understand that it's a joke.
- bulte-rs 12y agoThat's why we have assembly instructions. Hex-values are language agnostic