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VIA releases open source Xorg driverVIA releases open source Xorg driverPosted Aug 29, 2008 22:35 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)In reply to: VIA releases open source Xorg driver by bmur Parent article: VIA releases open source Xorg driver No, you don't need to know English to write C. You need to know the meaning of a few keywords that happen to be English words, but that's a far cry from being able to communicate in English. Over the years I've seen a lot of code where the comments, variable names, etc. are chosen from some other language.
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VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 30, 2008 11:38 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
But then again, the variables and comments in the code of the kernel, xorg and such are English. Don't those porgrammers neer to check the source of the larger programs that they write for?
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 30, 2008 15:02 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Sometimes, yes but people can manage without understanding all of it. When Staroffice was released under a free software license, it used to have lots of comments in German and it probably still has but despite that people have managed to understand the code and contribute improvements. The situation for non English speakers is comparable. Also, for many of them, they do understand English to some extend but they are not comfortable speaking in a public forum which is going to be archived pretty much forever.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 30, 2008 19:19 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
Would it not be the same with proprietary software -- the SDKs and documentation will mostly be in English?
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 31, 2008 2:47 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
This is by no means a open source specific issue however proprietary software organizations might be able to buffer it by moving people between sites and there is less of a cultural shock and fear associated with the whole process. The local education system also plays a important role here
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 1, 2008 8:05 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Speaking of Microsoft, most of their books are (well) translated to other languages (Spanish here). Also, all of the online documentation is automatically (crappy) translated. This reduces the entrance barrier for new developers considerably.
Regarding English, the distance from being able to read to being able to express yourself is considerable. I haven't been to Taiwan, but in mainland China the percentage of people that can read English is very small.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 31, 2008 20:25 UTC (Sun) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]
You need to know more than "a few keywords". Any non-trivial program will draw heavily on libraries (starting with the standard libraries) which have APIs generally written in English. Note that the classic, trivial "Hello World" program which starts the most famous introductory book to C in the world uses only one word that is (arguably) a keyword (#include, which is really part of the preprocessor, not, technically, a core keyword). Although you can substitute whatever you want for the text string "Hello World", to understand even this simplest of C programs, you need to recognize the English words "include", "main" and "print" (the latter in a confusing form with an extra letter on the end). And you still haven't gotten to the keywords.
And, of course, without a knowledge of English, the fact that "stdio" might be short for "standard input/output" will be completely lost on you. (Even with English, this might not be obvious at first.)
Ironically, because the default locale is 8-bit ascii, you'll need to know <em>more</em> English words to write a program that works in another language than you would to write one that works in English. At a minimum, you'll need to learn "locale" and "set". Neither of which, again, are keywords or even parts of keywords. :)
This isn't to say that you <em>can't</em> learn to program in C with only a bare minimum knowledge of English--we've both seen it done. But the bar is still higher than you suggest--"a few keywords" is far from sufficient.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 1, 2008 14:45 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] ASCII is 7-bit. The default locale is usually asked during the installation. In Fedora, it's en_US.UTF-8.
Non-English-speaking programmers Posted Sep 4, 2008 5:55 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
xtifr claims, essentially, that one cannot program in C well without knowing English. This is manifestly false; a very great deal of good C code is written by people who don't speak any English. They have to work harder, but many people are capable of working hard. They may depend occasionally on an English-speaking colleague, but one such colleague can serve many programmers.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 4, 2008 8:39 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Sure. But these are domain-spesific words. Knowing and recognizing them are different from knowing the language in general.
You may need to understand what printf, strstr, mutex, heap, CreateNode, while, string, for and a lot of stuff like that means.
But the fact that these are origined in english is almost completely unimportant, a non-programming english-native would not be able to tell what a "heap" or a "mutex" is in this context any better than a non-programming Indian or Norwegian or whatever.
When he -does- learn programming, he also learns the spesific meaning of the most common words, he learns more when he uses libraries etc. But here's the thing; this spesific meaning is so specialised that knowledge of what the word means in everyday english is almost completely irrelevant.
It's -not- much easier to learn what a "heap" is in programming-context if you're a native english-speaker than it is if you know no english at all.
Try asking your grandmother (assuming she is english native, and does no programming) what a "string" or a "heap" is. You'll get an answer, but not one that would help much in understanding a C-program.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 4, 2008 9:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
But when you're writing code you have to *come up* with names as well. In
a lot of languages it's still impossible to come up with names in your native language (C only recently gained support for Unicode identifiers, for instance), so you're going to have to come up with names in, probably, English. And that's harder than learning a bunch of names by rote.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 5, 2008 12:14 UTC (Fri) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
It's still not that hard. Plus, in many MANY languages outside of english, you can easily write in ascii.
German, Norwegian, French, Italian and Spanish all have a few extra letters and/or apostrophes or whatever. Nevertheless it's simple to use norwegian (or german, or italian) names for variables, functions and components.
Even if you -do- decide to use english names, that's STILL not equivalent to needing to know the language. You don't need hearing-comprehension (harder than reading-comprehension for many) you don't need grammar. You don't need pronounciation. You don't need comma-rules, capitalization-rules etc etc etc.
Learning a few nouns and a few verbs isn't more than a small part of learning a language.
Knowing english is helpful. It's in no way required.
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