12 Months, 25 Men, One Woman and a Dictionary (O'Reilly) [LWN.net]

Aidan Mark Humphreys discusses developers' spoken languages on O'Reilly's OnLamp site. "English is, to be sure, the closest thing we have to a lingua franca for software engineering. One of my involvements, the PHP-based PostNuke CMS Project, has over 200 developers from -- well, just about everywhere, with English as a common language. But there are many talented developers who, whilst quite happy to read the latest W3C spec or RFC, do not feel confident enough of their Franglais, Singlish, or Ginglish to hold their corner when flame wars break out."

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12 Months, 25 Men, One Woman and a Dictionary (O'Reilly)

Posted Jun 20, 2002 9:26 UTC (Thu) by sam (guest, #1329) [Link] (1 responses)

This is an issue which can not be ignored. The reason a lot of open source software does not have comments is that the developer is a native Spanish or whatever speaker. Since the FSF has, IMHO, a silly rule that comments must be in Engish, a lot of code ends up with no comments.

Personally, I would prefer comments in a foreign language than no comments; I can always use babelfish to translate the comments.

Too bad the Esperanto vision never took off. I hope there is some big social change which makes Esperanto a viable international auxilarry language.

- Sam

This is silly

Posted Jun 20, 2002 11:18 UTC (Thu) by Trav (guest, #2170) [Link]

> Since the FSF has, IMHO, a silly rule that comments must be in Engish,
> a lot of code ends up with no comments.

The FSF is not on a position to demand the language of comments in every
free software project.

Don't blame them for the laziness of Joe Programmer.