Atwood rebuttal: Mandarin Chinese programmer communites

http://odwks.com/2009/03/mandarin-chinese-programmer-communites/

by jhancock • 17 years ago

44 27 17 years ago

d0mine• 17 years ago

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

galactus• 17 years ago

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.

jerryji• 17 years ago

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

a-priori• 17 years ago

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.

carlosrr2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

carlosrr2• 17 years ago

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.

riobard5• 17 years ago

"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.

eugenejen2• 17 years ago

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.

riobard5• 17 years ago

"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! :)

scorpion0322• 17 years ago

Like the difference between native apps and VM apps ;) The former ones work better than the latter.

Altho' my mother tongue is an Indian language, I think _natively_ in English now. I think its a matter of time and exposure.

graemep• 17 years ago

Indian languages are from the same family as English. Chinese is not.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

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

Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

btw0• 17 years ago

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.

shiranaihito2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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 !

riobard5• 17 years ago

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.

shiranaihito2• 17 years ago

I'm Finnish myself, and have studied English, Swedish, German, Chinese, Japanese and now a bit of Korean, so I understand your point about differences between languages.

It seemed to me like the point of the article was that your communication is at its most efficient/natural in your native language, instead of English for example, if it's not.

I just thought it was obvious.

Well i think you're quite wrong to put all languages on the same level here.

Every language is someone's native language, so they're on the same level as far as that point is concerned.

mmphosis• 17 years ago

http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&...

jhancock• 17 years ago

This link just sent to me, worth reading.

http://kjctech.net/blog/archive/2009/03/31/stackoverflow-is-...

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.

Atwood rebuttal: Mandarin Chinese programmer communites

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