Thomas Yandell skribis 2005-04-12 13:13 (+0100): > According to Wikipedia there are around 400 million native English speakers > and 600 million people who have English as a second language. Should the > remaining ~5.5 billion humans be exluded from writing perl code just so that > we English speakers can understand all the code that is written?
Yes. But your numbers are utterly useless, as they are counts of humans, not programmers. I think that the number of programmers who don't understand English is very small. They know English because historically, the programmer's world has been English. Of course, the level of comprehension differs greatly. That's why where things get hard, Perl lets you write the "wrong" thing, like 1th and 2th, maybe even 5rd and 7nd. And documentation should be written as simply and clearly as possible. If a word like "mnemonic" is used, it should first be explained. And keywords are new to any programmer anyway. Mnemonically, it may be easy to remember that say prints something, but it certainly doesn't say anything. And how is remembering "my" or "readline" or "try" any harder than the many not-at-all-english \W operators that Perl has? Then, there are books, documentation, mailing lists and fora, most of which are available in English only. A small part is translated, but I find it hard to believe that the translated portion can be enough. (Still, having them around does help many people, and that's why I think perldocs should perhaps come in several languages (as a different project, so translation delays don't delay Perl releases)). Juerd -- http://convolution.nl/maak_juerd_blij.html http://convolution.nl/make_juerd_happy.html http://convolution.nl/gajigu_juerd_n.html
