Ask HN: How much English must you know to use modern programming languages? - renegadus
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cimmanom
To use them? Not all that much. It'd be much harder for someone whose first
language uses a non-latin alphabet. But understanding that a certain sequence
of characters represents a specific purpose in the language isn't really all
that different from English speakers using terms like "html", "redis", "jira",
"foo, bar, baz, quux", etc.

However, _learning_ a language, and working _with a team_ are different.

Even many codebases written by teams with a shared non-English first language
use English for variable/function/class names. It's much easier to understand
a codebase if you understand what the terms used in naming represent. However,
this is another case where if you spend enough time in the codebase, you may
just learn that certain terms represent certain concepts, even if you don't
actually know how to translate the terms themselves. The same goes for
standard libraries and third party package ecosystems.

And for learning, language barrier is even more problematic. English is
dominant for resources like documentation, tutorials, and Q&A sites. Some of
those are difficult enough to parse for native speakers; I can't imagine
Google Translate makes them particularly accessible.

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sillyguy123
To use mainstream languages not so much. But to understand documentation is a
different kettle of fish. That’s why it’s also good if documentation pages
have code snippets

