Steven D'Aprano schrieb: >> Unless you are 150% sure that there will *never* be the need for a >> person who does not know your language of choice to be able to read or >> modify your code, the language that "fits the environment best" is >> English. > > Just a touch of hyperbole perhaps? > > You know, it may come to a surprise to some people that English is not > the only common language. In fact, it only ranks third, behind Mandarin > and Spanish, and just above Arabic. Although the exact number of speakers > vary according to the source you consult, the rankings are quite stable: > Mandarin, Spanish, then English. Any of those languages could equally > have claim to be the world's lingua franca.
For a language to be a (or the) lingua franca, the sheer number of people who speak it is actually not as important as you seem to think. Its use as an international exchange language is the decisive criterion -- definitely not true for Mandarin, and for Spanish not nearly as much as for English. Also, there can be different "linguae francae" for different fields. English definitely is the lingua franca of programming. But that is actually off topic. Programming languages are not the same as natural languages. I was talking about program code, not about works of literature. -- René -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
