(Still OT) Nationalism, language and monoculture [was Re: Python Worst Practices]

[Mario Figueiredo]

On Mon, 02 Mar 2015 17:30:42 +0200, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net>
wrote:

>Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info>:
>
>> But for Britons to use American English is, in a way, to cease to be
>> Britons at all.
>
>Did Hugh Laurie have to turn in his British passport?

The concepts behind an actor performing and a programmer programming
are so distinct, I don't think your reply warrants an answer (even
though I suspect you would want to draw some cheap analogies).

I don't know if you realize who bad your stance looks like from the
position of someone who doesn't even use english as a primary
development language. You are not telling just Brits they should use
your flavored dialect, you are telling everyone else that on top of
their efforts to learn the english language, they will have to care
about national dialects, if they wish to... how did you put it
before?... conform.

I'm from a country where we face the same language issues as English.
There are many dialects of the Portuguese language. It is spoken
officially in 5 continents, it's the second fastest growing language
in Europe and it is the fith most spoken language in the world. We
tried to solve the problem by officially standardizing the written
language between all dialects. There is today an official Portuguese
language across all countries that should be a standard for written
communication. It is mostly a mixture of the portuguese and brazillian
dialects, government-approved by all countries of the CPLP. (As if
governments should decide how people speak and write, but whatever).

This worked out so well that 10 years later we are still missing
formalized plugins for our programs and no one is insterested in doing
them. So if I wish to code in standard portuguese (as opossed to pt-PT
or pt-BR, for instance), I won't have many options in the way of spell
checkers. So good luck to you too trying to impose your en-US flavor
of standard english.

I'm also wondering how you think your stance works out in community
development environments. Namely, how will it look like to everyone
else when your next pull request on github includes a project-wide
rename of the variables/identifiers analogue, colour and analyse. Or
when you let everyone else know how annoyed you are at the Pyjamas
development team.

Software development bases most of its success in its ability to
communicate. Not just ideas, but also code. One of the strengths of
Python is, they say, how easy the language communicates its code
intentions to a layman. Contrary to what you are thinking, trying to
impose your kind of language barriers, stiffles that communication
process. By forcing everyone to adapt to a standard dialect you are
slowing down the ability of the worldwide community to express their
ideas as they have now to learn a written language on top of a
programming language, and you are growing the window for errors where
before there was none.