

How To Appear To Be A Sophisticated Programmer - bkudria
http://williamsportwebdeveloper.com/cgi/wp/?p=531

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quant18
So in which (human) languages do programmers (a) entirely use their own
languages with its own native technical terms; (b) drop English terminology
into sentences in their own languages; (c) switch entirely to English when
talking about programming?

My one data point of amusement: I once worked in Hong Kong (a Cantonese-
speaking city) with a team which had outsourced part of its project to
Shenzhen (a Mandarin-speaking city). In HK Cantonese, people usually use
Cantonese words for simpler technical terms like "web page" or "hard disk",
but more complex ones like "dual boot" or "buffer overflow" would be in
English. In Mandarin, and also Cantonese as spoken in the mainland, they use
almost entirely Chinese terms ... or at least a lot higher proportion than in
HK Cantonese. (A lot of those terms, of course, are just calques from
English).

Now, the HK guys could speak passable Mandarin, and some of the Shenzhen guys
could speak okay Cantonese (though not much English). So if the two groups
were talking about what to have for lunch, or about football, or whatever,
they could go on for hours. Once it came around to work-related topics,
though, the conversation slowed down to a crawl while the HKers tried to grok
the mainland-style technical terms. Us foreigners always made fun of them for
being unable to understand their own mother tongue.

I'm told an analogous situation exists among Hindi & Urdu speakers? Basic
conversation is fine, but when you get into highly academic topics, one group
apparently starts using Perso-Arabic words and the other group starts using
Sanskrit words and communication all goes pear-shaped.

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rglovejoy
The key thing I got from this article: in French, a buffer overflow is called
_un dépassement de tampon_. I plan to use this expression during my next code
review.

~~~
bkudria
Because a _tampon_ stops the flow.

------
mahmud
Phony.

Even francophone programmers switch to English among themselves in technical
speech; perhaps subconsciously, call it technical diglossia if you want.

You wanna _appear_ sophisticated? s/french/mathematics/, but learn it well and
back your words up with knowledge, not parroting technical lingo and hoping no
one notices you're full of it.

------
mgreenbe

      There are no French programming languages, not even Pascal 
      or Eiffel uses French words for the syntax, and all the 
      documentation is in English.
    

OCaml is implemented by _le French_ , and I've seen code that uses French
variable names. I haven't yet seen the camlp4 hack that lets you say _laissez_
instead of _let_ , though.

------
maxwin
Learn to speak Indian since it appears that most sophisticated programmers are
from India. :) By the way, i am not from India.

~~~
uninverted
There's no language called "Indian". They speak Hindi and English in India.

~~~
plinkplonk
"They speak Hindi and English in India."

We do and with Hindi and/or English you can get by almost everywhere.

In practice, the language spoken changes every 200 miles you travel (and India
is a big country). Most educated Indians speak 3 or more languages.

From Wikipedia,

"According to the most recent census of 2001, 29 languages have more than a
million native speakers, 60 have more than 100,000 and 122 have more than
10,000 native speakers.

The government of India has given 22 "languages of the 8th Schedule" the
status of official language."

