Re:The Ugly American Programmer
by tokenadult on Monday March 30, 2009 @12:22PM
(#538693)
This post gives me the overpowering urge to write a rebuttal in Japanese just to prove that an American can.
I'd love to try my hand at reading it. Chinese is my stronger language, but I can read a lot of Japanese for meaning.
Agreeing with your point that everyone, especially a native speaker of English, is well advised to learn the language of customers, I still agree with Jeff's main point that if we want an interlanguage (a "lingua franca") for programming, that language will have to be English for the foreseeable future. Not because Japanese and Chinese and Korean people are unimportant, but for the same reason that Japanese and Chinese and Korean people very often use English for conversations among themselves that include no native speakers of English--an interlanguage gains usefulness from network effects, and English dominates all other conceivable choices of an interlanguage in its network advantages.
I'd love to try my hand at reading it. Chinese is my stronger language, but I can read a lot of Japanese for meaning.
Agreeing with your point that everyone, especially a native speaker of English, is well advised to learn the language of customers, I still agree with Jeff's main point that if we want an interlanguage (a "lingua franca") for programming, that language will have to be English for the foreseeable future. Not because Japanese and Chinese and Korean people are unimportant, but for the same reason that Japanese and Chinese and Korean people very often use English for conversations among themselves that include no native speakers of English--an interlanguage gains usefulness from network effects, and English dominates all other conceivable choices of an interlanguage in its network advantages.
頑張って