Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 2, 2018 7:03 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (guest, #31018)
Parent article: Quotes of the week

I always thought that, to work on the Linux kernel (and thus with the community that comes with it), you had to know C and English.
And if you want to travel at all, English is your best bet to be understood. I believe most countries teach their pupils English as first language these days.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 2, 2018 12:38 UTC (Thu) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (5 responses)

It somewhat bothers me that English, being the lingua franca of of free software development, excludes a pretty huge parts of the world from participation. I thought that for a significant part of the world, writing an English commit message has to be more difficult than writing code.

Exclusion

Posted Aug 2, 2018 13:37 UTC (Thu) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link] (1 responses)

It is unreasonable to expect that everyone will learn every other natural language, and machine translation is notoriously awful. So projects typically pick one language for the purposes of collaboration, and that is practically always English (for a large variety of reasons). English isn't a *better* language than any other, but it has a huge number of speakers and has a wide geographical distribution.

I think it is important that programs support internationalization for *end* users. But kernel messages are too low-level for typical end-users, who just want the computer to work and will call in an expert if they encounter a kernel error.

Exclusion

Posted Aug 2, 2018 15:51 UTC (Thu) by admalledd (subscriber, #95347) [Link]

As a example on projects tending to pick one language: one of our libraries we use is developed by a French team. Eventually they decided having the docs in only French wasn't useful... So they added German. The interfaces/code is still 100% French though.

Thankfully with both French and German, google-translating both tends to give a correct-enough answer, and if not reading the source code itself works.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 3, 2018 12:04 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

The problem is - writing a commit message in any other language is more difficult to a more significant part of the world. Also don't forget that many other languages might not even have the words required to write a commit message (e.g. mutex, spinlock, livelock).

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 3, 2018 12:37 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

The fact that the German language has no native word for “mutex” has never kept anyone from calling a mutex a mutex in German-language technical communication. I suppose the same applies to most other languages.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 8, 2018 2:36 UTC (Wed) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link]

English has no native word for mutex. Try playing it in Scrabble some time.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 3, 2018 17:09 UTC (Fri) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]

> I always thought that, to work on the Linux kernel (and thus with the community that comes with it), you had to know C and English.

The kernel error messages aren't necessarily aimed at people who work *on* the kernel. Many of them are surely aimed at people who *use* the kernel.