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VIA releases open source Xorg driverVIA releases open source Xorg driverPosted Sep 4, 2008 8:39 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524)In reply to: VIA releases open source Xorg driver by xtifr Parent article: VIA releases open source Xorg driver
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.
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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 (subscriber, #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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