And guess what, a couple of grammatical mistakes but otherwise its all in English. Now this may of course be a Dutch thing. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it is one more indication of a trend towards a very few international languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin perhaps) that the "internationally connected elite" can speak and the rest have to learn.
It is a Dutch thing, they've been learning it from 7 years old or something for decades and a lot of the movies and shows were always subtitled, not overdubbed. The Dutch were far ahead of everyone learning English on the continent, even before English was considered the modern lingua-franca, which personally I think really gathered steam with the adoption of the internet in the mid-90s. I can remember the French desperately trying to cling on to the delusion that French was still relevant.
I'm half-dutch and can only vaguely follow conversations in it, even 20 years ago when I'd go over as a kid everyone spoke it near fluently.
One of my professors at Uni complained that he'd tried to learn Dutch but found it nearly impossible because when he visited there as soon as they found out you were English they'd just speak to you in English.
My friend worked in banking over there for 2 years in Amsterdam, never learnt anything but basic hello/thanks/goodbye.
All I learned. Wait, also how to order a pancake which I remember as something like ick vil crack un pannecooke.
I was very impressed with the Dutch english when I've been over there. They approach it as a practicality and they also get fairly insulted if you ask them if they speak english.
I'm not sure I can agree that the world would be better if everyone spoke the same language, there's plenty of readily googlable research suggesting that multilingualism has cognitive benefits.
But if we're going to have one universal language, it will be java. Still happy?
> But if we're going to have one universal language, it will be java. Still happy?
This is a great retort, the more I think about it. There would be huge efficiences if Java was the only language in the world...and there would be huge holes too, just as if we banned every language and insta-translated all the great foreign works to English.
I think it's safe to say that some of the great works in non-Java languages might never have been possible or thought of if everything was all-Java. Can we say that some of the great non-English works would never have existed if everything was done in English? Probably.
If all people spoke the same language, every person on the planet could express their thoughts to everyone else. In my opinion, that would increase the feeling of community for the human race. The analogy to programming languages doesn't fit very well here.
In 1471 (apparently) Chinese navy sent an armada (no seriously, thousands of ships, one dedicated to being a grassed over flat hill growing vegetables - really an armada) to tour the Indian China seas wand show their power / negotiate trade agreements. There is even a suggestion some of the fleet reached the Anericas
Anyway ten years later internal Chinese politics meant the Emperor effectively shut down the Chinese navy and ended external exploration - just as Columbus opened up the New World for Europe.
China was a united political body - spoke one language, etc
Eirope was a crazy, disunited, warring agglomeration - that leaped forward in the New World and brought us kickin and screaming into the modern era
Lets imagine we have a lingua Franca, then closer political union across the globe and ... Humanity misses the next leap forward - or more worryingly all of humanity collapses at the same time
Many other regions on the planet had also been in discord and warring for millennia, without producing an Industrial Revolution.
However the unbelievable progress made in the last centuries and today wouldn't be possible without having a lingua franca. The difficulties you'll have programming without knowing English are an excellent example.
It's unfair to those speaking a different language. There's also the extinction of other languages (and all the work that went into them, and all the works that used them, literature and associated culture). It's like the extinction of species in the rainforest, except for memes (in the original Dawkin sense).
The reason is the network effect, in that the more people who use a communications system, the more valuable it is (given that communication is valuable). Language is a communications system.
This forms a natural monopoly: because of the value of larger networks, it is inevitable that one language will dominate - unless there are other barriers partitioning the network, akin to the lack of a telecommunications physical layer in centuries past.
People in the world speak several different languages. When they want to talk in a way that will be understood in many nations, they utilize a language widely known, at least to the portion of the society that is more literate. At a time it was Greek; later it was Latin, then French. Currently it is English.
I completely disagree, Github.com should NOT be localized.
I agree that making sure your language doesn't disappear is important, but it has nothing to do with Github. It is your job on a day to day basis.
Having localized versions might lead to messy projects having multiple languages in issues and everywhere. It will not help the open source community as a whole but dilute it. It may be sad, but English is the language of IT and I think it will just lead to a wider and better community to all talk a single language, whatever it is.
Plus, managing multiple locales in an app just sucks, it will lead to problems, they would have less time to work on feature which is the point.
Maybe a localized version of Github Enterprise would make sense, but certainly not Github.com.
As a bad analogy - It's like asking everyone to ignore other programming languages because C++ is popularly used and the others are not (even if they are more elegant and better structured)
It makes far more sense for 7300 cultures to learn one additional language than for 7301 cultures to learn 7300 languages. The former being difficult, and the latter being impossible.
Ah, but much of the original source and documentation for Ruby had Japanese section or was much more comprehensive in Japanese. This was even more true for early Ruby libraries - I can testify to it as of 2001-2003 when I was maintaining several English language libraries and writing a chapter for one of those unfortunate Syngress compilations (I was young and bad at saying no). If you're conflating Ruby and Rails, yes Rails is pretty much English-only - but though it's a common mistake, it's dead wrong if you're discussing actual languages. Even now I occasionally run into libraries with significantly longer Japanese documentation by character count and given relative density that probably means quite a lot longer in terms of actual content.
And guess what, a couple of grammatical mistakes but otherwise its all in English. Now this may of course be a Dutch thing. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it is one more indication of a trend towards a very few international languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin perhaps) that the "internationally connected elite" can speak and the rest have to learn.
Kind of bothers me but I cannot tell you why.