Python Worst Practices

[Steven D'Aprano]

Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> The language of science and technology is American English.

Not so. Despite claims that "99% of science publishing is done in English",
there are still significant amounts of science and technology published in
non-English languages. And the majority which is published in English
doesn't necessarily use American English. 

E.g. I searched for article titles containing "colour" in The Lancet, the
world's premier medical journal, and found 328 results, versus 8
for "color".

http://www.thelancet.com/action/doSearch?searchType=quick&searchText=colour&occurrences=articleTitle&journalCode=&searchScope=fullSite


Likewise Nature uses Oxford spelling:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling



Not surprisingly, the use of English varies by field and nationality.
According to this study:

http://www.researchtrends.com/issue-31-november-2012/the-language-of-future-scientific-communication/

Dutch scientists publish in English forty times as much as they publish in
their native language, while Chinese scientists do so only twice as often.

According to astronaut Chris Hadfield's autobiography, being able to speak
and read fluent Russian is essential for astronauts on the ISS, especially
if they want to fly a Soyuz. I would expect that robotics is mostly written
in Japanese.

It is not a given that science and technology should be (1) monlingual, and
(2) using the language of the dominant political superpower. As this
article points out, monoglot science is neither historically inevitable,
nor necessarily a good thing:

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/how-did-science-come-to-speak-only-english/

Don't imagine for one second that the entire world is willing to meekly
follow the path to American cultural hegemony:

http://www.goethe.de/lhr/prj/diw/dos/enindex.htm

(The irony of Germans publish pro-German articles in English has not escaped
me, but if they had published them in German I wouldn't have found them.)

As Russia flexes its muscles and tries to reclaim it's co-superpower role,
I'm sure that there will be more hard sciences and mathematics published in
Russian. Chinese is already one of the world's major diplomatic and trade
linga francas, and somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of Chinese science and
technology journals already publish in Chinese. If you want to specialise
in solar power engineering, I suggest you learn German and Chinese.

In IT, we have this:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/02/cant-we-all-be-reasonable-and-speak-english/


I suspect that we're probably close to peak Anglophone science, and that in
the next decade or so the trend will reverse. My prediction is that over
the next half century, we'll return to a polyglot situation.


> Learn it like everybody else has to.

Stockholm Syndrome :-)

"I learned English, and so everyone else should too."

I often get the impression that many coders have an attitude that suffering
is good for their art. "If it was hard for me to write, it should be hard
for you to maintain" is part of it. Far too many coders love languages that
make good programming *hard* (but not too hard, of course), and resist
languages with garbage collection, compiler enforced safety, etc. It's not
a universal thing, of course, otherwise Python, Java, etc. would be tiny
niche languages, but the myth of the heroic genius programmer dies hard. I
think that inside every hacker there is tiny bit of admiration for Mel the
Real Programmer:

https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

even if he didn't use a magnetised needle and a steady hand.

http://xkcd.com/378/



-- 
Steven