[Python-Dev] a slightly more coherent case

[Moshe Zadka]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2000 gvwilson@nevex.com wrote:

> Agreed.  Perhaps non-native English speakers could pitch in and describe
> how easy/difficult it is for them to (for example) put properly-accented
> Spanish comments in code?

As the only (I think?) person here who is a native right-to-left language
native speaker let me put my 2cents in. I program in two places: at work,
and at home. At work, we have WinNT machines, with *no Hebrew support*. We
right everything in English, including internal Word documents. We figured
that if 1000 programmers working on NT couldn't produce a stable system,
the hacks of half-a-dozen programmers thrown in could only make it worse.

At home, I have a Linux machine with no Hebrew support either -- it just
didn't seem to be worth the hassle, considering that most of what I write
is sent out to the world, so it needs to be in English anyway. 

My previous machine had some Esperanto support, and I intend to put some
on my new machine. True, not many people know Esperanto, but at least its
easy enough to learn. It was easy enough to write comments in Esperanto in
"vim", but since I was thinking in English anyway while programming (if,
while, StringIO etc.), it was more natural to write the comments in
English too.

The only non-English comments I've seen in sources I had to read were in
French, and I won't repeat what I've said about French people then <wink>.

--
Moshe Zadka <mzadka@geocities.com>. 
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com