

Do you have to know English to be a Programmer? - johns
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DoYouHaveToKnowEnglishToBeAProgrammer.aspx

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stuartcw
It can be advantage not to be fluent in English sometimes.

I have met many Japanese programmers who could not speak English but could
read enough to figure out APIs from English documentation.

They were really great at debugging and figuring out difficult code that was
originally written in the US as they did not get confused by broken comments
and mislabeled variables. i.e. "cnt" didn't strike them as meaning "count"
they looked at how it was currently used by the program without supposing that
originally it was meant to hold a "count" of something.

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blasdel
Yes, for nearly all programming languages, and absolutely for traditionalish
Procedural-OO environments.

One of the unique arcane things about AppleScript is that they attempted to
have multiple concrete syntaxes for source code -- not just vocabulary but
also word-order/grammar. The source code is stored in a AST format with the
dictionaries (libraries) pre-linked. They only ever made English and Japanese
syntaxes.

~~~
blasdel
Correction: There were English, Japanese (in MacRoman form), French, and
Italian syntaxes published, and a C-like non-natural-language one was
developed.

