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by h2s
5141 days ago
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I wish more developers treated learning to program like learning a foreign language. When you're learning a foreign language, your #1 goal is to cast off any poor grammar or pronunciation and sound like an intelligent native speaker. It's been my experience that people often don't care very much about doing this with the programming languages they use. Routines that are too long and ought to be refactored into smaller ones are akin to run-on sentences. Leaving out semicolons in your JavaScript is like speaking French in an Italian accent because you already know Italian and French people seem to more or less understand it. And people who refuse to follow prevailing code style guidelines? Those are your "Everyone there speaks English anyway" folks. Such poor communication skills would be humiliating when trying to communicate in a foreign language, but for some reason people often wear them like a badge of honour when trying to communicate in a programming language. |
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I'm not sure that's true at all. When I learn a foreign language, my aim is to be able to communicate. The extra effort required to be perfect far outweighs what I need from it. The native speakers I talk to are quite capable of taking my bad grammar and understand my meaning. Wanting to sound like an intelligent native speaker isn't just at the bottom of my list of needs; it's not even on the list.
When learning a programming language, I have no choice; I must have perfect grammar.
"Such poor communication skills would be humiliating when trying to communicate in a foreign language"
Not at all, in my experience. Simply having some simple grasp of the local language is met with delight; just having made the effort goes a long way, even if the locals themselves prefer to speak with me in English.