[kroger]

Wow, I'm surprised by some of the comments here and on SO. Talk about promoting diversity!

For people saying that programmers need to know English. I agree, I speak English as a second language myself. However, learning English is not easy for everybody as isn't learning programming. Some people find easier to learn something in their native language. They can learn English later. Also, you can be a good programmer without speaking English at all, provided you have access to learning material. (Naturally, speaking English will be a huge advantage)

In the 1600s you had to speak Italian fluently if you wanted to be a musician. Today you can learn the meaning of words like "forte" and "stringendo", without having to really speak Italian. Programming is pretty much the same; one can learn the meaning of things like "if" and "function" and learn the big concepts (abstraction, algorithms, etc) in their language.

EDIT: formatting

[noname123]

It's interesting that you use music as the example. Music has its own notation (sheet music, rhythmic units of melodies/pauses in measurements of bars), ingredients (scales/keys/modes) that is really independent of any language.

Code I suppose when you boil down to it is just a higher-level, human-readable representation of a set of logic operations that can be represented by logical operators. Of course, most programmers don't grow to learn that way but by hacking when they are young and groking the big concepts as you say, like Zen buddhists rumminating on weeks on koans under the guidance of the abbots of the temple (HN, Github, listserv, irc etc.)

I suppose that's the difference between looking at the two things as symbols operations or a narrative. So I offer the following koan, is it necessary to know the history of the Mississippi Delta or the ethics of Linus/RMS to be able to fully play the Blues or contribute a patch to the Linux Kernel?