Comment by account42

Comment by account42 2 days ago

Actually, it would be great to have a lingua franca in every field that all participants can understand. Are you also going to complain that biologists and doctors are expected to learn some rudimentary Latin? English being dominant in computing is absolutely a strength and we gain nothing by trying to combat that. Having support for writing your code in other languages is not going to change that most libraries will use English and and most documentation will be in English and most people you can ask for help will understand English. If you want to participate and refuse to learn English you are only shooting yourself in the foot - and if you are going to learn English you may as well do it from the beginning. Also due to the dominance of English and ASCII in computing history, most languages already have ASCII-alternatives for their writing so even if you need to refer to non-English names you can do that using only ASCII.

simonask 2 days ago

Well, the problem is that what you are advocating is also that knowing Latin would be a prerequisite for studying medicine, which it isn't anywhere. That's the equivalent. Doctors learn a (very limited) Latin vocabulary as they study and work.

You are severely underestimate how far you can get without any real command of the English language. I agree that you can't become really good without it, just like you can't do haute cuisine without some French, but the English language is a huge and unnecessary barrier of entry that you would put in front of everyone in the world who isn't submerged in the language from an early age.

Imagine learning programming using only your high school Spanish. Good luck.

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nitwit005 a day ago

You don't need to become fluent in Greek and Latin, but if you want to be able to read your patent's diagnosis, you're absolutely going to need to know the terms used. The standard names are in those languages.
And frequently, there is no other name. There are a lot of diseases, and no language has names for all of them.

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- simonask 12 hours ago
  
  Sure, you can also look them up though, because it is a limited vocabulary.
  Identifiers in code are not a limited vocabulary, and understanding the structure of your code is important, especially so when you are in the early stages of learning.
  
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numpad0 a day ago

> Imagine learning programming using only your high school Spanish. Good luck.
This + translated materials + locally written books is how STEM fields work in East Asia, the odds of success shouldn't be low. There just needs to be enough population using your language.

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