It just struck me
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It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013The language knife cuts both ways. As a native English speaking, I have not experienced problems with coding due to language, however, when reviewing a vendor supplied database schema or data tree, the entities may be in a foreign language. For example, we were tasked with getting data from a vendor supplied database. The tables and columns were all in French, but the words largely had vowels removed - a method I've seen English speaking analysts use as well. Or, getting data from a DCS written by a Spanish firm; all of the items in the data tree are in shortened Spanish and no translation table was provided with both Spanish and English descriptions.
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Au contraire, I hate it when programs or Windows are in Dutch, but for 'normal' users things are different of course, always amazes me how bad some people are at speaking English :-\ But bonus points for thinking about foreign people (o dear, now a track of Foreigner is playing again in my head, you're as cold as ice etc. etc.)
GetFactuur() HaalOrder() Seen them both :D
Best, Sander Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
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CodeWraith wrote:
The customers are. It's hard enough to get them to specify their domain without using 20 different names for the same thing while each name they use has at least 20 different meanings. Getting them to do that in some obscure language, like English, is near impossible.
:D Sorry, but that is part of design and is not a problem; it is the devs' responsibility to make sure that he understands the domain of the user. The user cannot be tasked to model his data-structure, so the dev has to make those decisisons, and has to communicate that to the user in a way he/she can verify the idea. Writing code is the easy part of programming :)
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
it is the devs' responsibility to make sure that he understands the domain of the user
Good to know. How far can I go to accomplish that? "Find out what he knows, and then take care of him!"
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
so the dev has to make those decisisons, and has to communicate that to the user in a way he/she can verify the idea
Yes, based on what what we got out of him in the first place. I have a customer who has some problems overlooking the consequences of the things he demanded to get. What do you think would happen if I took the liberty to invent new names whereever I could?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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GetFactuur() HaalOrder() Seen them both :D
Best, Sander Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
New Order ! Blue Monday - YouTube[^] :-\
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I didn't mean to imply that I was feeling empathy. In point of fact, I was going to add "It sucks to be a foreigner" to the original message, but I didn't feel like pushing buttons today. I can see now, that decision is coming back to bite me in my redneck ass. :)
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013That's more like it, you are back again :-\
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The language knife cuts both ways. As a native English speaking, I have not experienced problems with coding due to language, however, when reviewing a vendor supplied database schema or data tree, the entities may be in a foreign language. For example, we were tasked with getting data from a vendor supplied database. The tables and columns were all in French, but the words largely had vowels removed - a method I've seen English speaking analysts use as well. Or, getting data from a DCS written by a Spanish firm; all of the items in the data tree are in shortened Spanish and no translation table was provided with both Spanish and English descriptions.
That's nothing, long ago I had to deal with VB6 software in Japanese ! We usually referred to those characters as 'flattened mosquitoes' :-\
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Eddy Vluggen wrote:
it is the devs' responsibility to make sure that he understands the domain of the user
Good to know. How far can I go to accomplish that? "Find out what he knows, and then take care of him!"
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
so the dev has to make those decisisons, and has to communicate that to the user in a way he/she can verify the idea
Yes, based on what what we got out of him in the first place. I have a customer who has some problems overlooking the consequences of the things he demanded to get. What do you think would happen if I took the liberty to invent new names whereever I could?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
CodeWraith wrote:
What do you think would happen if I took the liberty to invent new names whereever I could?
I'm not talking about inventing new names :)
CodeWraith wrote:
I have a customer who has some problems overlooking the consequences of the things he demanded to get.
That's your job; you can't expect the user to be knowledgable about development; similar we can't be expected to know everything about the niche we work for. So, you're expected to explain those things in terms that the user understands. That's why I keep saying that development is more than simply writing code; a lot of problems in IT projects can be traced back to insufficient communication :)
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013One of the great things about C is that it uses symbols more than words. (If you can trust Bing translate...)
/* German C dialect */
define wenn if
define während while
define fort do
define anderes else
define brechen break
define weiterhin continue
define schalter switch
define fall case
/* etc. */
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It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
That's nothing, long ago I had to deal with VB6 software in Japanese ! We usually referred to those characters as 'flattened mosquitoes' :-\
RickZeeland wrote:
'flattened mosquitoes'
Awesome. :laugh:
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question? The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism. Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013I'm bilingual, but my first / home language is Afrikaans (close to Dutch). All my IT study material was in English, so when I work I think in English and it's probably the same for a lot of IT professionals. The computer terms in Afrikaans are quite funny.
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It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013Especially when the non-english programmer used bad spelling and grammar naming methods. RecieveThing :~
GCS d-- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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One of the great things about C is that it uses symbols more than words. (If you can trust Bing translate...)
/* German C dialect */
define wenn if
define während while
define fort do
define anderes else
define brechen break
define weiterhin continue
define schalter switch
define fall case
/* etc. */
Argh! Reminds my of the times when there was localised Basic versions. Even VB.Net still supports some German keywords: Schlüsselwörter (Visual Basic) | Microsoft Docs[^]:
Fehler Error
Beenden Exit
Nächste Next
Objekt Object
Aktion Task -
It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013I live in Germany and am born in Russia, nowhere near English, but after a while, it becomes second nature (or third, in my case). The internet is English, the scientific and engineering communities use it and most video games are better in English that in German. After a couple years, English became so natural to me, that I even mix up German and English in my own code because I process both languages at the same level.
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It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
It just struck me
Only just? Yes, IT is an English only discipline. And almost all IT jobs globally can be done speaking English. I have wondered whether two programmers, of different nationality, could communicate only using programming words. :)
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I live in Germany and am born in Russia, nowhere near English, but after a while, it becomes second nature (or third, in my case). The internet is English, the scientific and engineering communities use it and most video games are better in English that in German. After a couple years, English became so natural to me, that I even mix up German and English in my own code because I process both languages at the same level.
English and Dutch mix well, so I imagine English and German do too (English being a Germanic language, it kind of works well anyway, and is quite amusing. Like 'fuckoffen', 'to go home'. :) ). But yeah, English has become the worlds language through the net and IT.
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Imagine how long the class names would be!!!!!
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It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013In one project I worked on, we evaluated one open source library which had received quite favorable reviews: We would have to extend it, and all the comments and variable/function names were in French. None of the project members mastered French, so it was completely impossible to understand what the code was intended to accomplish. We had to reject it for another alternative that turned out to be not very well suited for our use. Even if you understand the "other" language: Switching your mind back and forth between two languages, English for the reserved/predefined words and another language for names and labels, strongly affects your speed of comprehension, in a very negative way. So I always insist on one single language: If keywords are in English, so are all names, labels etc. - and also: All comments, source file names etc. Furthermore: There should be no non-English string literals. Or phrased somewhat differently: Since the UI should be in the language of the end user, there should be no language dependent literals in the code at all! Not even English ones. Keep all strings out of the code, use string references so that the French strings can be replaced by German strings, Swedish strings, Latin strings etc. without affecting the code. (Actually, as early as in 1983 when I was working on an office automation system that strictly followed this rule, a university professor offered to translate all the UI strings to Latin. We never offered the Latin text files to the market though - we didn't have any sales office in the Vatican...) Any code module should be 100% language-agnostic, with respect to UI. Not to forget: "UI" is more than "text on the screen", it also includes e.g. database column names, which may be visible to the user through other tools.
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It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013The same thing happens in nudist colonies.
«... thank the gods that they have made you superior to those events which they have not placed within your own control, rendered you accountable for that only which is within you own control For what, then, have they made you responsible? For that which is alone in your own power—a right use of things as they appear.» Discourses of Epictetus Book I:12
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It just struck me that it must be difficult to be a programmer in a non-English-speaking country because all of the classes and function names in a given framework are in English, so picking the correct class/method must be somewhat difficult.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013Here's a Russian perspective: The language of programming[^]
