English is currently the international language of the computer programming sector

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

One fellow put a blog post on Github and talked about the need to offer full internationalization of Github, sort of like what Wikipedia has done. Over on Hacker News, the idea was met with a negative reception, as people suggested that English was the language that all computer programmers needed to know, at least right now in 2012:

I can understand where the github folks are coming from but it really is a thing not worth putting any effort into. I sympathize with the humanism but programming and programmer communication should be mostly pragmatic.

The open source community is a global thing and English has won a long time ago as the definitive choice for a global language. It seems like it’s easy enough to pick up for a lot of people all over the world.
In my opinion it works especially well for technical writing.

and also:

“Ruby came from Japan. Lua came from Brazil. Python came from the Netherlands.”

And all of them use English terms for language identifiers.
English is the lingua franca of IT & software development. As a Brazilian I can tell you that programmers that don’t learn at least how to read technical English won’t become good practicioners.

And GitHub is a social platform for collaborating on projects. In the vast majority of projects, English is the common language spoken by all participants.

Learn English and get over it.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886560
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