"Non-English speaking" or "English as a second language" programmers

[VisualLab]

Its better to keep it to one language.

I cant say how many times i have used bad words to describe that excel translates the formulas to your locale, i hope someone was fired for that decision.

And different locales (and thus different separator with CSV). IIRC I also had some weird problems with serving CSV from a website and getting them to open correctly in both Dutch ( fieldsep=;   decimal=, ) and English ( fieldsep=,   decimal=. )  Excel. (or at least properly popping up the conversion wizard)

Microsoft employees (programmers, management) did not know (and probably still do not know) that they were using incorrect separators. Only continental European separators are correct

[dtoffe]

This got me to wondering if all of you who don't speak English as your first language find the
internet, and programming sites in particular, to be a burden to read and understand. I
personally have a hard enough time as it is understanding programming discussions in English.
I can't imagine trying to follow a technical discussion in Russian.

    I had three years of English in secondary school and two more in university, mostly basic grammar, idioms and translation skills, which were just enough to allow me to translate programming books with a dictionary at hand, just in case. In first year of university ('89) we had a Spanish translation of Wirth and Jensen book on Pascal in the library, but we quickly learned that later, most books were in English, so I hurried up to enhance my English to a level good enough to be able to read without having to stop for a dictionary lookup.
    Some of the books were translated, but the quality of the translations varied. Even when technical books are way easier than more complex texts, there were translation problems, and we had to adapt. Languages have subtle differences and when we read the Spanish equivalent of "the variable is hosted in the tiny hill" our brains quickly mapped to the English "the variable is allocated in the heap".
    Nowadays, I feel confident enough with my English, even when my speaking skills are a bit lacking, and prefer to spend a bit of time enhancing my Italian through about B1-B2 level.

Daniel

[VisualLab]

Though, I mentioned AI because no matter how much I personally despise it, it seem to be staying with us and governments and businesses (in their haste to keep up with the current/latest  buzz) keep hopping on the bandwagon not realizing their heritage and go for the quickest/fastest/cheapest solution(s). It would be a shame if that was to be dealt the same fate as your examples (mind, not the terminology and usage but the language used to train the models itself). As per your examples the models will already be riddled with non native speakers terminology).

Let's hope that this will gradually include models working on content in different languages and not just English. So that a similar pathology does not arise as in the case of character encoding (code pages).

[VisualLab]

I'm croatian, and proud of it.

But, believe me, you never want to see "croatianized" english (or german.... or any other language for that matter)....

because you'd get first place in the annual "WTF"-contest (who can swear WTF the most in a single year)

I'll give you a hint why: croatian language is spoken as it is written, and it is written as it is spoken

Because this is characteristic of most Slavic languages. Perhaps this is a problem in learning the correct pronunciation of English for many people in the world.

[VisualLab]

And in French, we have
"temps" meaning "time" and also "weather"

B->

It is the same in Croatian: "vrijeme" means time and weather.

It rather sounds similar to the Russian: время.

[Kays]

As a native American […]

Really?  A native?

It's great that Apaches/Comanches/Chejennes/Siux (etc.) are interested in programming

Native Americans as a people are capitalized. For example, you write “the North Koreans” (people of DPRK), not “the north Koreans” (inhabitants living in the North of the Korean peninsula).

TMH just expressed he or she was born and raised in America. From context we can infer that in all likelihood an English‑speaking region in America is meant.

^{I guess you know that so consider this an explainer for other people following this thread.}

Define what counts as "speaking a language"?

Easy.  You speak a language reasonably well, almost fluent, when you  can listen to a week's worth of news […], know every word used and fully and _effortlessly_ understand everything that was said.

I say "almost fluent" because news rarely include many idioms and word play which is, IMO, a necessary condition to claim fluency.

The Common European Framework of Reference for Language has a more formal definition of language proficiency levels.

[ojz0r]

Its better to keep it to one language.

I cant say how many times i have used bad words to describe that excel translates the formulas to your locale, i hope someone was fired for that decision.

Do you mean the function names? If so, then unfortunately, "Libre Office Calc" also suffers from the same disease.

That is probably because of excel set the president, but two wrongs does not make a right.
OTOH its easy to set language in libre office but keeping other locales, something i believe is impossible in office unless you buy the english version. (Please correct me if im wrong, i havent looked into it)

[Zvoni]

Its better to keep it to one language.

I cant say how many times i have used bad words to describe that excel translates the formulas to your locale, i hope someone was fired for that decision.

Do you mean the function names? If so, then unfortunately, "Libre Office Calc" also suffers from the same disease.

Ok, to get that misconception out of the way:
Excel (and probably Calc) store formulas in both ways: locale and „original“ (english?)
And before you disagree: i know that for a fact, since i‘ve used both in my VBA code

If you don't believe me, do the following:
Fire up Excel
in A1 enter a Formula (doesn't matter which one, or if it returns something, but should be syntactically correct).
I entered
"=SUMMEWENN(F1:F7;"=Test")"
(german Excel)

Go to the VBA-Editor (ALT+F11)
In The project-Explorer double-click on that sheet, or the Workbook-Object
Paste this code there:

Code: [Select]

Sub main()
Debug.Print Worksheets(1).Range("A1").FormulaLocal
Debug.Print Worksheets(1).Range("A1").Formula
End SubWith your Cursor inside that "Sub" hit F8 for single-stepping through the code

Call up your immediate Window with CTRL+G
You'll see something like

=SUMMEWENN(F1:F7;"=Test") --> Locale version
=SUMIF(F1:F7,"=Test") --> Original version

NOTE: Look closely at the Argument-Separators: The german locale uses semicolon, but internally Excel translates that to comma for the "original"

And the thing is: Assigning formulas from VBA-Code works both ways:
Assign to FormulaLocal if you want to use the "locale" Version
Assign to Formula if you want to use the "original", and i've used this to actually find out what the "locale" Formula is called, when i only could find the "original" during research

[alpine]

As a native American […]

Really?  A native?

It's great that Apaches/Comanches/Chejennes/Siux (etc.) are interested in programming

Native Americans as a people are capitalized. For example, you write “the North Koreans” (people of DPRK), not “the north Koreans” (inhabitants living in the North of the Korean peninsula).

TMH just expressed he or she was born and raised in America. From context we can infer that in all likelihood an English‑speaking region in America is meant.

^{I guess you know that so consider this an explainer for other people following this thread.}

Perhaps we can try to put a bit of humor in it (no offense intended), IMO it is on-topic, since the capitalization rules together with the words meaning can be part of the confusion:  https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/common-vs-proper-nouns/ .

While the above is true also in my (n)ative language, can you tell me how the common/proper noun is distinguished at a start of a sentence or in a title where all the words are capitalized (not so in my language)? How is it in German language where all nouns are capitalized and adjectives are not?

We are programmers and the semantic matters, isn't it?
BTW FPC is case insensitive 

And I always wondered how the US of America is just shortened to America, as for me it is a name of a continent (two in fact) - can't Brazilians also say "I'm native American too"?

[Thaddy]

I forgot to ask if OP was maybe from America, Limburg, the Netherlands?
Home to a great band: Rowwen Hèze! They play Cajun syle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4TJd1Lu6rA
Great place to dump Trump: it has ~2000 inhabitants, so harmless.
Furthermore in the Dutch constitutional law there is no such thing as a president, so that is also harmless.  (Except for the president of the high counsil, that is, but that is taken by the king)
He will probably never notice where he is President of, and nobody would care except of course the 2000 inhabitants of America.

[VisualLab]

Its better to keep it to one language.

I cant say how many times i have used bad words to describe that excel translates the formulas to your locale, i hope someone was fired for that decision.

Do you mean the function names? If so, then unfortunately, "Libre Office Calc" also suffers from the same disease.

That is probably because of excel set the president, but two wrongs does not make a right.
OTOH its easy to set language in libre office but keeping other locales, something i believe is impossible in office unless you buy the english version. (Please correct me if im wrong, i havent looked into it)

I have never checked how the Calc module would behave in the following scenario:

1. I create a spreadsheet file (i.e. enter data and formulas),
2. I save the created sheet to a file,
3. I open the previously prepared file in the Calc module set to EN-US,
4. I check whether the sheet works properly.

I've been using Libre Office since it was called StarOffice back then and was available on Linux (since 1999, I think it was a Red Hat distribution). But somehow I never had the need to check what I described above. I'll do it sometime in my free time.

[VisualLab]

Its better to keep it to one language.

I cant say how many times i have used bad words to describe that excel translates the formulas to your locale, i hope someone was fired for that decision.

Do you mean the function names? If so, then unfortunately, "Libre Office Calc" also suffers from the same disease.

Ok, to get that misconception out of the way:
Excel (and probably Calc) store formulas in both ways: locale and „original“ (english?)
And before you disagree: i know that for a fact, since i‘ve used both in my VBA code

If you don't believe me, [cut]

On the contrary, I think you're right. I haven't tested this. I also suspect that the functions used in the spreadsheet cells have some form of identifiers that are written to the file along with the cell addresses (or literals if used in the formula). This would reduce the size of saved files.

[VisualLab]

As a native American […]

Really?  A native?

It's great that Apaches/Comanches/Chejennes/Siux (etc.) are interested in programming

Native Americans as a people are capitalized. For example, you write “the North Koreans” (people of DPRK), not “the north Koreans” (inhabitants living in the North of the Korean peninsula).

TMH just expressed he or she was born and raised in America. From context we can infer that in all likelihood an English‑speaking region in America is meant.

^{I guess you know that so consider this an explainer for other people following this thread.}

Perhaps we can try to put a bit of humor in it (no offense intended), IMO it is on-topic, since the capitalization rules together with the words meaning can be part of the confusion:  https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/common-vs-proper-nouns/ .

While the above is true also in my (n)ative language, can you tell me how the common/proper noun is distinguished at a start of a sentence or in a title where all the words are capitalized (not so in my language)? How is it in German language where all nouns are capitalized and adjectives are not?

We are programmers and the semantic matters, isn't it?
BTW FPC is case insensitive 

And I always wondered how the US of America is just shortened to America, as for me it is a name of a continent (two in fact) - can't Brazilians also say "I'm native American too"?

And there are probably more Native Americans in Brazil (in numbers and percentages) than in the US (even if you include legal and illegal migrants).

[Joanna from IRC]

There are some people in fpc community who cannot communicate in English at all and rely upon Google translate, fortunately we still have the pascal language in common.
I’ve always found it to be sort of arrogant how some people feel entitled to have everyone speak English to them even in non English countries.

Another thing I find strange is how two German guys in my chat channel talk to each other in English instead of german, which would be much easier for them .. sometimes it seems like people are ashamed to speak their native languages and I find that sad.

Maybe the reason that so much material regarding programming is written in English is because it seems that Anglo American culture has taken over the world and Therefore many people want to learn English.

[Curt Carpenter]

Perhaps we should all just be happy that the initial innovations in electronic computation weren't made in China, leaving us with the necessity of mastering a twenty thousand key keyboard.