However, I have heard people say that all software everywhere should be written in English, including things like personal projects and internal tools for companies in non-anglophone countries. I think that's kind of ridiculous.
Best-case is still engligh, though; working in another language is like doing science in American units. It works fine as long as you stay localized, but if you need to hire foreign devs to supplement your team, good luck (see the infamous Mars rover crash.)
What if the people you want to understand aren't English speakers?
I'm not opposed to people developing tools in their native languages, but let's not pretend like projects that use this language aren't going to be completely isolated from most of the rest of the world.
For better or for worse, the world has settled on English as the lingua franca for business.
I feel there is a point you want to make, but am not sure what it is.
Ironic that in order to say this, you used a latin phrase that translates to "language of the Frankish people".
> The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca, the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from late medieval times, especially during the Renaissance era, to the 18th century. At that time, Italian-speakers dominated seaborne commerce in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire and a simplified version of Italian, including many loan words from Greek, Old French, Portuguese, Occitan, and Spanish as well as Arabic and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" (in the generic sense) of the region.
> In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua means a language, as in Portuguese and Italian, and franca is related to phrankoi in Greek and faranji in Arabic as well as the equivalent Italian. In all three cases, the literal sense is "Frankish", leading to the direct translation: "language of the Franks". During the late Byzantine Empire, "Franks" was a term that applied to all Western Europeans.
There are 800 million Chinese internet users almost all are mobile only. Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much time for public works after 9 to 9 6 days a week.
What's that supposed to imply? Just Googled "number of software developers in China" and "number of software developers in the world". Got 5.79 mil (2017) and 23 mil (2018) as answers. Not sure how accurate but can't be that far off.
> Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much time for public works after 9 to 9 6 days a week.
I didn't pay too much attention to that story, but having talked to a few software developer friends in China myself, I'm inclined to say it may be a widespread problem but probably not universal. Whether that's true or not, I certainly see a fair share of popular open source projects coming from China these days, not one in five of course, but given their relative isolation and my inherent U.S./Western bias the number that caught my eyes are still quite impressive.
Not to mention there are a lot of corporate open source in China as well. In fact, just like in the U.S., a good chunk of high profile open source projects are corporate-developed or corporate-backed.
Moreover, whether one in five is accurate wasn't even the point of my post.
>You can already see this happening with some open source libraries coming from China, where the documentation and all discussion being in ZH already completely blocks foreign contribution.
You
>Given that one in five person on the planet speaks Chinese as their first language, lack of “foreign” contribution will probably work out okay for them.
The point is you are using number of native speakers as a proxy for the population of developers being sufficient to support development.
First thing is the single most popular l1 language in China manderin is more like 1 in 8 humans, next the distribution of talent is nothing like distribution of speakers. It looks a lot more like the distribution of wealth because access to computers during formative years or indeed at all is of substantial importance.
There are of course still many Chinese developers of substance. But because highly educated developers in China are both a smaller portion of the population and likely to speak English starting a manderin only software project would mean choosing between only Chinese developers and Chinese devs and the rest of the planet as well.
Wrong in this context.
1. People who speak other dialects like Cantonese overwhelmingly use the same written language, so there's no barrier in written communication;
2. AFAIK Mandarin is the mandatory teaching language in Mainland Chinese schools, so even if you want to be pedantic I'd say 1 in 5 has native or bilingual proficiency in Mandarin.
> starting a manderin only software project would mean choosing between only Chinese developers and Chinese devs and the rest of the planet as well.
First, there's no such thing as a "mandarin-only software project", you use Chinese the written language as explained above.
Secondly, it's still a reasonable choice if the author finds the alternative mentally draining, or the primary audience does. No point in global-proofing your project if the primary audience need to spend extra time and energy to communicate worse. I don't necessarily advocate for it, but I don't pretend that every project on earth has the obligation to make it convenient for me to contribute.
That’s not how it works. Programming proficiency isn’t randomly distributed across the population.
So what's wrong if the language also is not in English? Can you not imagine that some projects don't care whether you specifically can contribute or not?
It's not the first language not in English actually, WLanguage for example from WinDev can be written in English, French or Chinese.
How do you think non-english speakers read documentation in english?
That English has become the lingua franca [1] of the world is a recent development. If we would like people to read our documentation, it is reasonable to expect that we should do our best to learn how to read theirs, too.
It does bring to mind that Mathematics isn't really done in 'english', it's a pidgin of latin and arabic symbols (and like most or all pidgins, has some whole-cloth inventions).
Instead of making most people learn a new language, should everyone have to learn a new language? Like they used to teach college in Latin in Europe?
The problem is that the only programming language I know of that tried to be its own language-language was APL and thoughts of coding in that give me nightmares.
UML tried to remove some of the english and fared better than APL but that's a wide chasm to cross and they too ended up at the bottom of it.
We are very, very slowly replacing some text in programming languages with more symbols, and with more parsers accepting Unicode characters for string literals we also should have access to the entire panoply of mathematical and scientific symbols (I'd really love proper multiply, not, and exponents to start, then maybe we can talk about sigma for some reduce operations) but the tipping point into "let's go ahead and remove the rest of the english" seems so far off that I'll probably never see it.
Have you ever actually tried learning APL, or are you just trolling?
“Learning a new language” as in programming language, sits in the days-to-months range, while “learning a new language” as in Arabic takes months-to-years, so you’re building a much, much deeper chasm for others to cross and contribute, even though the source code remains English-based.
You can already see this happening with some open source libraries coming from China, where the documentation and all discussion being in ZH already completely blocks foreign contribution.