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by crb
4519 days ago
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Interesting to see the change from 2009, in the Stack Overflow podcast 48: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/podcast-48/ >One reason localization has been a very low priority is that we feel for our particular audience, namely programmers, English is the de facto standard language. Not that other languages aren’t important, but it’s easier to get engineering work done when everything coalesces around a standard language. >Joel believes that there are five “important” languages that programming content should eventually be localized into: German, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Japanese. |
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> >One reason localization has been a very low priority is that we feel for our particular audience, namely programmers, English is the de facto standard language. Not that other languages aren’t important, but it’s easier to get engineering work done when everything coalesces around a standard language.
I'm gonna assume that Jeff Atwood said this. Does he speak more than one language? Because although how reasonable it seems that English is incredibly widespread among programmers, I think that any monolingual English speaker is going to have a very biased perception of the English literacy of programmers in a more international setting.
I have no problem believing that English is the most widespread auxiliary language in programming. But I'm not so sure about what percentage of programmers worldwide speak or write English, which the given quote seems to implicitly make a statement about.