Programmers need to know their English

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror was concerned about how english was language de lingua franca in the world of programming. To be honest this notion doesn’t bother me and I’m a non-native english speaker. It can be rather puzzling standing point for people that are not in the programming biz.

I do believe that if you’re calling yourself a programmer and can’t read english documentation then you’re hardly a programmer at all. There are several reasons why the use of english shouldn’t bother us a lot however they are all an equal hurdle for beginning programmers:

• Most programming languages use english keywords in their syntax. 
• Most useful documentation is available in english and even if they are translated a lot of the technical jargong is still in english.

If you manage to learn english, I can vouch for that you are smart enough to learn programming. It was because of computer games that I started to actively learn english and this was long before I started coding. In the 80’s the games were all in english. The only exception to this rule was that instruction manuals were translated… but who reads those things anyway? As a small kid I learnt playing games by doing instead of reading manuals. This rule still applies for anything I do, even when programming I do so by trying. Back when I was a small brat learning english I also had the help of passive language acquisition through the constant bombardement of american and british tv-shows. These shows were airing in the national tv station and later also in the 90’s cable tv stations. The tv-shows were subtitled rather than having an audio dub because Scandinavians weren’t big enough of a market to warrant an audio dub at the time. This has been a contributing factor why scandinavians are so exceptionally good at english in relation to other european countries. Not everyone in Sweden knows english, but a substantial amount of people do.

When I started programming I did ponder to use my native language in my code by exactly the same reasons that the DDD guys would say about using native language when choosing names in your problem domain. However back in the 90’s when I tried this the Swedish alphabet include characters that doesn’t fit the standard ASCII-table and the use of such characters in code led to a myriad of problems both in compile time and in run time. In the end I shunned the idea since mixing english keywords with non-english wordings on classes and variables didn’t make sense to me. It still doesn’t make sense to me. I always translate the word for class names into english instead. Anything that I write in source code is english to the best of my abilities. The only exception would be to use it in declarative programming language that use the native language in their keywords.

So for any beginning programmers out there, embrace english in every way possible.

The Collective of Chauvinistic Hypocrites (or How Stack Overflow Ruined My Day)

Since the private beta, I’ve been a member of the StackOverflow site. A perfect place for me to quench my thirst of knowledge by asking programming related questions and help others by answering theirs. One of its key objective is to be nice and keeping the site on topic, i.e. programming topics. Today however I was unfortunate to find out the hard way how it is to be on the wrong side of the fence in this particular collective of programmers. If something my experience has taught me, it is to not let wrongdoings go. Even one person has said it with his infinite wisdom in these matters:

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. 
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Together with my own curiosity I didn’t want to stay silent and for that I’ve been battered, tarred and feathered. I could’ve been beating my pillow at this point, but instead I’ve written this post about it. This is my story about how this ordeal happened. Earlier today I read a very interesting question:

Which female programmer do you admire most, and why?

Do you know any female programmers? I don’t know that many public figure female programmers so I was interested to know that myself. Unfortunately, the question was downvoted and closed. This was wrong, so I tried it writing the question myself and be more specific about it:

The programmer workforce is predominantly male. A fact I find to be ironic because the first programmer is known to be Ada Lovelace, who wrote for Babbage’s yet-to-be-built machine. Also in the days of the birth of the “modern” computer a lot of women were programming for von Neumann.

So in order to raise Stackoverflowians awareness of women in computing, have you met any women in programming and how was the experience?

Little did I know that I opened a can of worms… or what us boys refer to as “cooties”:

OMG COOTIES!

Maybe I asked it wrong, I don’t know, but the response I’ve got from fellow StackOverflowians hasn’t been a very positive one. If I was fresh conscript of Stack Overflow, it would all seem like these programmers do not like to have questions about women. It would seem as if these female specimen that I was speaking of were filled with an imaginary bacteria dangerous to the Stack Overflow community. I’ll address the criticism I had here… lets start out with the case of sexism.

It is hard to understand what this criticism was about since the critics didn’t bother to explain why it was so. They assumed that I wrote exclusively to be a sexistic troll:

I’d like to point out that this ‘question’ is sexist. PintSizedCat

But I have to disagree because I didn’t write anything in my question that was demeaning about either of the sexes. In fact some of the most influential people that I met and had huge impact to my own professional work are women. I just wanted to know more about women programmers because I wished to know more about them, but clearly nobody in the programming community wants to talk about it.

Fortunately I wasn’t the only one who thought there was bad logic behind the criticism and some SO users summed that up well such as Sara Chipps and this fellow:

The question mentions sex (as in male/female), but is in no way offensive or sexist. Have people forgotten men and women are different. This isn’t sexists… if it was, so is the olympics because women and men compete speparately.
Scott Langham

Here is the deal, if you close down a topic because it was about women you effectively send out a discriminating message that women are not welcome in this forum. That in itself is a male chauvinistic act. So who is the sexist now?

The other half of the criticism is that Stackoverflow is only for programmers doing programming things and thusly was off-topic:

[This question is] just completely off-topic for what most people think this site is for: mainly asking and answering questions directly related to programming. Not discussions/polls about programming culture.
 p5ycho_p3nguin

Unfortunately this statement is complete hypocrisy because there are several questions in StackOverflow that have evolved into pure discussion threads. Don’t believe me? Here is a list of threads falling under discussions about programming culture.

• What is your favorite “programmer cartoon”? 
• Which power drink do you recommend?
• What is the single most important programmer book?
• What is the one programming skill you have always wanted to master but haven’t had time?
• What was your first home computer?

…and the list goes on and on.

Think about it, what message do these SO members send to others? That it is okay to deny threads about women who program but accept threads about men who do the same? Do you know what that smells like? It smells like we, the Stack Overflow community, are just a bunch of chauvinistic hipocrites.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand by such an informal policy because what happened in this case is a dysfunctional behaviour. In this community I want all programming people, like me, to ask their honest questions and get clear answers. Start answering the questions instead of becoming evil by bantering the people behind the questions.

Be nice!