[yorwba]

In a writeup on WeChat https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/MAkxKZ1eS4UwBkvgD91Xng , Prof. Bao Yungang mentioned that one reason for starting the project was that they felt the barrier of contributing to Berkeley's BOOM https://boom-core.org/ was too high, pointing out that only 8 people contributed more than 100 lines.

So at least they're aware of the problem, although that doesn't guarantee that they'll fare better in terms of attracting outside contributions.

[WanderPanda]

Oh man it’s starting, we will have to learn Chinese to get access to the whole picture of all the information out there. Some weeks ago I already heard that there are really good VUE.js sources in the Chinese web. This is quite terrifying, it seems like it is only a matter of time until state of the art scientific papers will only be available in Chinese :(

[krastanov]

I think you have already been underestimating the quality of resources available in French, Russian, German, and others, that do not exist in English. Just as a single example, the math section of the French Wikipedia was distinctly superior to the English one when I was in college (2012).

[girvo]

If you're into OCaml, French is a very handy language to know in my experience

[sudosysgen]

I can testify to the superiority of the math sections in French Wikipedia. They were so good I lost many hours just wandering.

[petre]

France's #1 export product us culture so I am not at all surprised. They also invest lots of money in this. French cultural centeres abroad are more funded and in many ways better than any other embassy operation.

[pjmlp]

When I was into university, lots of great 3D papers were available in German.

[lucian1900]

So many of us speakers of other languages had to learn English. Now you’ll just have to join us in learning Chinese. It’s not that hard, just very different.

[eunos]

See it on the other way around. The fact that there are more Chinese science/tech folks understanding English than non Chinese understanding Mandarin means that there will be massive information asymmetry.

[throwawaysea]

I guess I view it as democratizing rather than terrifying, particularly when there is broader acceptance of research and papers in non-STEM areas from outside the western sphere. For instance, psychology, history, linguistics, social fields (sociology, gender studies, etc) are all heavily tainted by a Western worldview/ideology bias due to the immense dominance of Western universities and academic spheres. Having a competing ecosystem is going to improve the diversity of thought we see.

[goodpoint]

> I view it as democratizing

Quite the opposite. Requiring most people in the world to learn a second and a third language to access science, technology and international job markets creates a higher barrier and increases inequality.

[girvo]

Though is that not already the case wrt. English?

[WanderPanda]

The idea is that everyone learns english as their second language so there is no need for a third language.

[fspeech]

I suppose the author Jean-Luc Aufranc can access Chinese because he linked to a most fascinating account of the development process https://www.zhihu.com/question/466393646/answer/1955410750 The key to getting where they are is commitment to developing design flow and tools that allow for fast iteration to explore and verify design changes.

[yorwba]

TFA links an article in the German c't magazine as the source, which also links to the Zhihu thread: https://www.heise.de/news/Offengelegter-RISC-V-Chip-aus-Chin...

[eunos]

Bit fascinating that there have been more information of Chinese tech in German than English. German's wikipedia entry for Chinese space program has more information than the English one.

[thiagoharry]

Well, the good part is that more people speaks Chinese than English. Less people will suffer with language barriers to knowledge.

[jcranmer]

> Well, the good part is that more people speaks Chinese than English. Less people will suffer with language barriers to knowledge.

That's actually not true. More people speak Mandarin as a first language than English (which is third, behind Spanish as well). However, far more people speak English as a second (or third) language than do as a first language, so that English is actually the most widely spoken language.

[thiagoharry]

The relevant in my comment is the first language.

English is popular as second language just because english is at the present moment the language with more access to documentation and resources, so more people needed to learn it to defeat language barriers. If in the future the language with more resources became Mandarin, more people will learn it as a second language.

[jhgb]

1) Speakers of Chinese are definitely not as equally distributed among global places with the need to access that knowledge as speakers of English.

2) Even if they were as equally distributed, you'd still be wrong about the number of speakers.

[krastanov]

For those like me that thought this is wrong because of how big India is: according to the last census, only around 15% speak English as first/second/third language.

[girvo]

Though your intuition is correct: the amount of English speakers outnumbers that of Mandarin, but Mandarin significantly outnumbers English in terms of native-language speakers

[melesian]

The number of English speakers (in correct English).

Amount is for uncountable nouns, like butter, sugar etc.

[pjmlp]

Like in computing, be a polyglot, embrace the world, and yes I do speak a few human languages fluently (6 + a couple of dialects).

[girvo]

Both Vue and React have amazing Chinese language resources; I've been very lucky that my coworkers are fluent!