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RickZeeland wrote: always amazes me how bad some people are at speaking English
Back in real life (i.e., as a chemist) it was always understood that the international language of science is broken English.
By and large, the domination of English is probably a consequence of it not shielding itself from "foreign influences" - some "schmucky" places think protecting their language ("think: surrender monkey") will maintain its strength. On the contrary - it is mercifully hurry its long-overdue demise.
Aside from the crazy spelling and other stuff, it's actually a rather welcoming.
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Regarding "not shielding itself from 'foreign influences'":
Old English was strongly influence by conquest. First by Old Norse (during the DaneLaw the Norse ruled most, sometimes all, of England). The roots of both languages were the same, but word inflection differed between the two. Middle English solved this by dropping almost all inflection. This was followed by two doses of French: Norman French, then Parisian French.
As for "crazy spelling": it was actually phonetically correct ... about 600 years ago based on the local dialect of the first Englishman to own a printing press.
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Steven1218 wrote: As for "crazy spelling": it was actually phonetically correct ... about 600 years ago based on the local dialect of the first Englishman to own a printing press. |
Actually, as I understood it, until comparatively recent times, spelling was ad-hoc.
Although not the first dictionary, Webster's Dictionary can be given some credit:
Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge. His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings, replacing "colour" with "color", substituting "wagon" for "waggon", and printing "center" instead of "centre". He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash", that did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828; it sold 2500 copies. In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. Standardization of spelling, which does not attack the validity of your claim, is rather recent. The influence of frog-speech* may have much to do with too-many silent letters.
* A language that didn't evolve past counting to 'sixty', having to go to 'sixty-ten' because seventy was just too much for them to comprehend.
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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To fully appreciate the inaccuracy of this comment, imagine a linguist with no programming experience trying to explain the issues with php.
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The language of "the country formerly known as Vichy France" is dying. They'd not make protective laws if they weren't clearly observing the proto-carcass decaying. That's the kind of thing you do when you're desperate.
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I was more referring to your suggestion that English is so widespread due to any linguistic qualities. English spread because at a time when they had bigger ships and guns than most of the world, one of the most imperialistic and genocidal groups of people in history decided to set forth across the world and force everybody to work for them, and these people were certainly in no hurry to learn the languages of the locals they encountered.
As for France's moves to keep their language "French", this is in no way a suggestion that the language is dying. French people, as well as people in various former French colonies are in no rush to stop speaking French. In fact ask any Frenchman and good luck convincing him that English is a superior alternative. All spoken languages naturally evolve over time, the change is artificially slowed if it's a written language, but no generation of any language speaker speaks the same as their parents did at their age. The French preservation efforts are basically the equivalent of refusing to sell T-shirts over size L to prevent people from getting overweight.
But there are many dialects of French alone within the country of France, not to mention various dialects and Creoles in its many colonies.
But since we were originally talking about programming, I would say English could possibly be the worst language to be required for second language speakers, because a grasp of syntax and grammar is not really required, just being able to spell the different terms in the programming language. And English is famous for its wildly unpredictable spelling. The only caveat to this is that apparently the world Boggle (or could be Scrabble) champion in English doesn't even know how to speak English, he just memorised the dictionary.
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 What a load of snail-turd! [ poop d'escargot]
France was quite the imperialist - and a bloody one at that. You do remember Napoleon? Ultimately, however, the English gave him the kick-in-the-ass he needed. By that time, the French gene-pool was reduced to drugs (and so it remains).
English became the world language in recent years - heavily do to influences not of war but of people like the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and the like. Everyone wanted to learn English. Here are two superior qualities to English: (1) everyone is welcome in to the language and can contribute, and (2) the best stuff to read and listen to is in English.
French is just a language of of the paranoid - having been the whipping boys for war for over a century (and stuck as to what comes after sixty-nine when counting), I can understand. Official list of names to pick from for children. Fines for using non-French words when a French equivalent exists. Hell, look here[^]! They've simply taken the title of "losers" and extended it to all things they have do.
As for spelling? Your spelling-champion blurb: it has no point and makes no sense whatsoever. The French equivalent of a dictionary appears to have been gone over by a random character generator. All the more reason why anyone would want to protect that corpse-in-waiting excuse for a language.
Well - apparently you do. Who knows. Be it a few weeks, months, perhaps even a few years and you'll be the only one left.
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I don't know what the French did to you to make you hate them so much but you'll be disappointed to learn that I'm not one of them, nor do I speak more than a few phrases in their language.
But if you think France is the only place in the world where they speak any dialect of French then you are hilariously out of touch with reality. Although, given that it appears you have a quote from yourself in your own signature I guess that has already been well established. Slight irony in that it contains a French phrase too.
If you think English is widespread because the world just had to listen to the Beatles then I don't even know where to begin. I think maybe you should pull your head out of your ass and read a history book or experience the real world instead.
Your perspective has been an eye-opener for me. I won't be replying after this.
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grolarbear wrote: I won't be replying after this.
You needn't replay, as promised.
But like essentially all of your posts, it's presumptuous and incorrect. In this hemisphere we have Quebec - also ![Elephant | [mastadon]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/elephant.gif) ing with people so that they induced an exodus of English speakers (the province on welfare). We also have Haiti. Martinique, although unlike the others, at least it isn't an disaster. A few African nations are similarly cursed. Belgium. By and large, however, no place that is important does the frog-croak. Ego - it's all they have left.
Too bad you didn't address anything in that link - recounting a tiny example of the ludicrous excuse they have made of there culture.
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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English can be called a lot, but not difficult. Since most development is traditionally in English, I'd be assuming that any dev knows the language well enough to follow a movie without going for the dictionary.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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The developers are not the problem.
The customers are. It's hard enough to get them to specify their domain without using 20 different names for the same thing while each name they use has at least 20 different meanings. Getting them to do that in some obscure language, like English, is near impossible.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: The customers are. It's hard enough to get them to specify their domain without using 20 different names for the same thing while each name they use has at least 20 different meanings. Getting them to do that in some obscure language, like English, is near impossible.
Sorry, but that is part of design and is not a problem; it is the devs' responsibility to make sure that he understands the domain of the user. The user cannot be tasked to model his data-structure, so the dev has to make those decisisons, and has to communicate that to the user in a way he/she can verify the idea.
Writing code is the easy part of programming 
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: it is the devs' responsibility to make sure that he understands the domain of the user
Good to know. How far can I go to accomplish that?
"Find out what he knows, and then take care of him!"
Eddy Vluggen wrote: so the dev has to make those decisisons, and has to communicate that to the user in a way he/she can verify the idea
Yes, based on what what we got out of him in the first place. I have a customer who has some problems overlooking the consequences of the things he demanded to get. What do you think would happen if I took the liberty to invent new names whereever I could?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: What do you think would happen if I took the liberty to invent new names whereever I could?
I'm not talking about inventing new names
CodeWraith wrote: I have a customer who has some problems overlooking the consequences of the things he demanded to get.
That's your job; you can't expect the user to be knowledgable about development; similar we can't be expected to know everything about the niche we work for.
So, you're expected to explain those things in terms that the user understands. That's why I keep saying that development is more than simply writing code; a lot of problems in IT projects can be traced back to insufficient communication
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: The user cannot be tasked to model his data-structure, so the dev has to make those decisisons, and has to communicate that to the user in a way he/she can verify the idea.
That, right there, is the most difficult part of my job. I've come up with a rule about it: people don't know what they want until they see what they don't want.
The only way to get technical direction out of non-techies is to do iterations of what they are asking for and show them, until they get an idea of how their ideas work out in reality and get a sense of what they really want. Sitting around a meeting table talking about what's needed is just the first step to showing them what they don't want.
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StatementTerminator wrote: That, right there, is the most difficult part of my job. I've come up with a rule about it: people don't know what they want until they see what they don't want.
Yes, modelling and analyzing is not something that is very common anymore; most build agile and change their ideas along the way, guessing their way to a design.
I prefer to plan ahead, and waterfall my way to a list of definitions. It takes longer to get started with the actual coding, but I cannot imagine to work without.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Except for the fact that there are more dyslectic people in English speaking countries than anywhere else....
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Sounds like a weird fact; would imply that English causes dyslexia more often?
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I did not say causing...
However, there are striking examples of people being dyslectic in English, whereas they are fluent in another language; I read about such a person, born in a mixed marriage, who moved from England to Japan for this reason...
Think about the many many words looking/sounding the same or similar/very different in English, like hart, hard, heart, heard, herd... plough, tough, though, thought, thaw... led, lead, lead, read, read, red... (there are a lot more of these...)
Hard for spelling, but also for dyslectic people te read back...
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By the way,
I am not a native speaker, but I always prefer English for "communicating" with my computer:
be it the Default language of my operating system, the names of variables and/or objects and comments
in my source code...
But I still wonder how that would all work if I were to use Esperanto in stead 
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JSOP, feeling empathy for foreigners?
WTF is wrong with my browser this morning?
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I didn't mean to imply that I was feeling empathy. In point of fact, I was going to add "It sucks to be a foreigner" to the original message, but I didn't feel like pushing buttons today. I can see now, that decision is coming back to bite me in my redneck ass.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
modified 12-Mar-18 8:39am.
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That's more like it, you are back again 
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consider that a large number of the virii etc [supposedly] come from China, Iran etc where not only are the words different but their style of scripting, and word order, syntax even direction is not based on 26 distinct letters left to right...
... yet they manage ok.
The language may differ, but business functions and logic still all work the same, 1 + 1 = 2 no matter what you call it or how it's written.
And even many "English" programming languages have some odd names/terms, word order and syntax as compared to natural English.
Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.
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