[whitegrape]

The Anglocentrism of programming is a boon, at least in open source. It means that collectively hackers worldwide have been able to enjoy the fruits of each others' labors because we all communicate and share patches in the same base tongue. Allowing Unicode in source code is a mistake. Additionally for non-English speakers who want to learn English, wanting to learn programming is a better way to learn English than a passive classroom since you're actively going to be reading and writing English to figure out solutions to your programming problems. These projects to make the entryway into programming more smooth (by using the native tongue) sound nice, but I worry that those sucked into programming through this method will end up forming their own cliques based on language and essentially cut themselves off from the rest of the programming community.

[gbkn]

Why do you assume there is an innate pre-requisite to learn English to code? I challenge that assumption.

Do you not see the diversity/ingenuity of problem solving when you travel to different countries? What else are we missing in the Anglo world? Do you assume everyone should speak English when you travel to China, India or Peru?

Why can't open-source communities form in different languages? Many people speak more than 1 language and can share learnings across the communities, just like in the real-world.

Bottom line: the world is diverse, let's make coding reflect that.

[whitegrape]

Sorry I didn't reply to this right away. I don't believe I made the assumption that learning English is a prerequisite to coding, can you explain what made you think I made that assumption?

Of course I see the diversity of the rest of the world and want their ideas in the marketplace. But their ideas are so useless to me that they might as well not even exist if I can't read them or hear about them. So it is very important and good that if you care about your ideas getting exposure, and want to cultivate the exposure of more foreign ideas, those ideas need to be expressed in the most widely available language, which in the programming world happens to be English. I don't particularly care too much that it's English and not French or Cantonese, but I do care that it's something. Diversity of spoken language is not important in itself, diversity of the brains beneath the language (and to a possible extent how brains are shaped by different mother tongues) is.

(Semi off-topic, but I do agree with the late Lee Kuan Yew that China should make its official language English. ;))

Edit: I should also link to this as it's an argument along the same lines, and also includes a bit for why English in particular is useful over something else like e.g. German. http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4 Second edit: and yeah, humans have been communicating despite language barriers since the tower of babel fell, but it's inefficient.

[niccaluim]

Yeah, it's definitely the case that having a common language enables collaboration. What I imagine is kids who don't speak English getting interested in programming and learning the basics in their mother tongue, then moving to English programming as they get more advanced. Basically my hypothesis is that it's easier to jump one hurdle at a time than it is to jump two at the same time.

[elangoc]

I don't deny that the network effects of speaking the same language matter. They do. But if you're turned off to programming because it's too hard (b/c the language barrier), you may never care to put in the effort to get to the point of learning English for all of its relative benefits.

If you're interested, I brought up these considerations and tradeoffs in the talk I gave last year - https://youtu.be/MqjMZNwnYCY