

Atwood rebuttal: Mandarin Chinese programmer communites - jhancock
http://odwks.com/2009/03/mandarin-chinese-programmer-communites/

======
riobard
"When Chinese use their native tongue, the knowledge exchange goes faster and
in more depth. It encourages greater participation by a wider audience."

I think that's a very important observation. One's mother tongue determines
one's thinking. I'm a native Chinese currently studying Computer Science in
Canada. Although I have no problem communicating in English, when it comes to
complicated cases, the logic engine in my brain seems to work better if it
thinks in Chinese. Another interesting observation is that I always count
numbers and do arithmetic in Chinese---I received my primary education in
China, which hard wired my brain in certain ways. Plus, English numbers are
just too irregular to express decimals properly (by comparison, Chinese
numbers are extremely regular and match positional notation perfectly, e.g.
12,345 will be literally pronounced in Chinese as "one 10,000, two 1,000,
three 100, four 10, five". )

Another defect in my English thinking process is that I can barely come up
with proper phrases or expressions for unfamiliar abstractions. I guess in
order to name things properly requires one to have very deep understanding of
the culture and its history, which takes a long time for non-native English
speakers. (e.g. There used to be an async-IO library for highly concurrent web
servers in Python called Medusa. I got the idea for the name immediately, but
if I were to name it myself, I'll never come up with such a smart name. )

That said, recently I noticed that somehow my brain starts to re-wire itself
and certain ways of thinking in English become more natural. But that's the
result of years of reading related stuff in English _only_ , which is
certainly not the case for many Chinese programmers.

~~~
eugenejen
It is interesting from what you said. I know most friends from East Asia with
the same habit. It takes a lot of training to perform small tasks in English.
And my German friends count their money in German event they speak fluent
American English.

I stayed in Taiwan for education until I got my Bachelor degree and served
military service. I forced myself to read textbooks in original version and I
read a lot outside textbooks when I was in high school. I spent first 3 months
in U.S. to count number in English reflexively. And so far my problem is that
if I remember anything in English, it takes me time to translate them back in
Chinese. Like every time I told my mom and sister about my phone number, I
need to think how to say them in Chinese by going through all numbers that in
my mind are pronounced in English. But I can type in exactly the digit as
someone else said. Another thing is I have problem to perform physics
calculation in Imperial system because all physics constants that I remember
are in Metric system.

Another problem is to explain knowledge in Chinese that I learn first in
English. Especially terms in computer science are not unified in Taiwan and
China.

At the other hand, I read both Chinese and English media. But it seems there
are two brains in my head that are complete separated. I am also ambidextrous
to the degree that I can write in both hands and using chop sticks in both
hands. So maybe my brain did not develop specialization well as others.

~~~
riobard
"Another problem is to explain knowledge in Chinese that I learn first in
English. Especially terms in computer science are not unified in Taiwan and
China."

I have the same problem, too. A much worse thing for me is that I use English
as my primary language for quite some time now, I sometimes have difficulty
finding the appropriate Chinese words when I need to talk to Chinese friends.
I guess that's the price one has to pay if one really wants to re-wire the
brain :|

"I am also ambidextrous to the degree that I can write in both hands and using
chop sticks in both hands."

This is quite an achievement. Is it a born gift, or you trained yourself? Very
amazing! :)

~~~
eugenejen
I don't think it is born. But I felt curious when I was in teens after reading
stories in Jing Yong's novel about Zhou Botong's trick. I started to practice
to hold chop sticks in left hand and after a month practice. I can do it
without problem.

But some friends noticed that I always unconsciously switch hands when picking
up trash on the floor or opening doors. They mistook me as left handed. And
you read from Wikipedia that a theory of ambidexterity is that most
ambidexterity are in fact left handed by birth. So maybe I just forget my
unhappy experience during the right handed when I was kid.

~~~
riobard
Emm, interesting. I'm always curious of how to work more with left hand (I'm
right handed). I started with using mouse/touchpad with my left hand, but when
it comes to writing with a pen or using chopsticks, my left hand always makes
me feel dumb ... I guess more practice is needed. Gonna try that in the next
month. Thanks! :)

------
a-priori
I found Atwood's post to be very anglocentric. While for practical purposes
it's probably a good idea for any programmer to be functionally literate in
English, I certainly don't think they should all use it all the time. I'm
Canadian, and I grew up in a very multicultural city. This may have something
to do with my views on these issues.

In my first programming job, several co-workers were Chinese and amongst
themselves usually spoke Mandarin. At a programming competition I attended a
few years ago, several teams were from Quebec and most of them spoke French
within their team. All these people could speak English, but chose not to
because they were more comfortable speaking their native languages, even about
technical issues. I think this is pretty normal, and will continue to be for
the foreseeable future.

------
jerryji
Kudoz to the author for his understanding and appreciation of pragmatism:

    
    
      use the right _language_ for the right job
    

or in a longer form:

    
    
      English is better than multi-language
      Although multi-language is often better than *only* English
      Practicality beats purity

------
galactus
I think its a great post. The strength of stackoverflow is obviously the
community of users. It is perfectly logic to use a local language if it helps
to grow a new community somewhere else.

------
DannoHung
We could all try learning something simple and unambiguous like Lojban...

Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

------
d0mine
He makes an interesting point on the side - "the world is not flat".

------
btw0
It's always right to learn the discipline in a language that has the most
abundant material, most of time it's the language that the discipline
originally came to being.

As for computer science, learn it in English, because that's the language it's
written in. Whatever anglocentric or *centric it may sound, it's the way you
will get most out of it, it's that simple.

------
mmphosis
[http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&...](http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=n&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnprog.com%2F&sl=zh-
CN&tl=en)

------
carlosrr
It benefits everyone when individuals speak on the language that they feel
more comfortable with. If what they have to say is valuable it will be
translated to other languages anyway.

~~~
sketerpot
I think you have a very high threshold for "valuable" content. Most of the
stuff I read and consider valuable has not been translated to another
language. There's just too much valuable content for someone to translate all
of it, unless it comes in the form of anime. But that's a special case.

~~~
carlosrr
I did not mean that people would do a literal translation. I think that people
can translate the _value_ of the content into other languages.

------
jhancock
This link just sent to me, worth reading.

[http://kjctech.net/blog/archive/2009/03/31/stackoverflow-
is-...](http://kjctech.net/blog/archive/2009/03/31/stackoverflow-is-being-
cloned---contd.aspx)

Claims that Jeff and Joe were approached by the guys that built the China
clone to StackOverflow and that Jeff and/or Joe didn't want a Chinese version.
Their loss for believing the world is flat.

------
shiranaihito
It shouldn't be a big revelation to anyone that a Chinese person can
communicate more efficiently in Chinese than in English, or that the same
applies to other nationalities and native languages too.

~~~
Raphael_Amiard
Well i think you're quite wrong to put all languages on the same level here. I
mean, as programmers we know very well than some languages are closer by
spirit than others, even if their syntax differ greatly.

It's exactly the same thing for spoken languages. I'm french, and i learnt
English, German, and a bit of Spanish. Once you learnt one, you can learn the
others more easily, not only because of your mind adapting to other languages,
but also because those languages share a lot, be it from a vocabulary
perpective or from a grammatical one.

I'm no expert in asian languages, but from my past in linguistic and
ethnology, i aquired the strong belief that theses languages are different
enough to really "wire" your brain differently.

And you must also take into account the cultural penetration of the
english/american culture into a country. Even if this penetration happenned
everywhere, Western Europe has much more exposure to this culture than , say ,
China.

The bottom line is : French people will probably never need a french
StackOverflow as badly as Chinese people.

The world is not flat !

~~~
riobard
I'm native Chinese. I speak English quite well, and now I'm learning German. I
definitely agree with you that German is much much easier to learn if one
knows another Latin-based language before. I guess same is true for French or
Spanish--They are just way too similar. And they share a lot of cultural
background so differences seem very trivial compared to the painful transition
from Chinese to English.

