Also, an open source project maintained in, say, Spanish is one I and others can't easily contribute to. That would be a disaster.

And guess what, a couple of grammatical mistakes but otherwise its all in English. Now this may of course be a Dutch thing. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it is one more indication of a trend towards a very few international languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin perhaps) that the "internationally connected elite" can speak and the rest have to learn.

Kind of bothers me but I cannot tell you why.

I'm half-dutch and can only vaguely follow conversations in it, even 20 years ago when I'd go over as a kid everyone spoke it near fluently.

One of my professors at Uni complained that he'd tried to learn Dutch but found it nearly impossible because when he visited there as soon as they found out you were English they'd just speak to you in English.

My friend worked in banking over there for 2 years in Amsterdam, never learnt anything but basic hello/thanks/goodbye.

All I learned. Wait, also how to order a pancake which I remember as something like ick vil crack un pannecooke.

I was very impressed with the Dutch english when I've been over there. They approach it as a practicality and they also get fairly insulted if you ask them if they speak english.

It shouldn't bother you more than utf8 and tcp/ip. If everybody in the world spoke the same language, the world would be a better place.

The discomfort probably stems from the fact that some languages will die out. That's sad but there is always room for bilingualism.

But if we're going to have one universal language, it will be java. Still happy?

This is a great retort, the more I think about it. There would be huge efficiences if Java was the only language in the world...and there would be huge holes too, just as if we banned every language and insta-translated all the great foreign works to English.

I think it's safe to say that some of the great works in non-Java languages might never have been possible or thought of if everything was all-Java. Can we say that some of the great non-English works would never have existed if everything was done in English? Probably.

In 1471 (apparently) Chinese navy sent an armada (no seriously, thousands of ships, one dedicated to being a grassed over flat hill growing vegetables - really an armada) to tour the Indian China seas wand show their power / negotiate trade agreements. There is even a suggestion some of the fleet reached the Anericas

Anyway ten years later internal Chinese politics meant the Emperor effectively shut down the Chinese navy and ended external exploration - just as Columbus opened up the New World for Europe.

China was a united political body - spoke one language, etc

Eirope was a crazy, disunited, warring agglomeration - that leaped forward in the New World and brought us kickin and screaming into the modern era

Lets imagine we have a lingua Franca, then closer political union across the globe and ... Humanity misses the next leap forward - or more worryingly all of humanity collapses at the same time

However the unbelievable progress made in the last centuries and today wouldn't be possible without having a lingua franca. The difficulties you'll have programming without knowing English are an excellent example.

The reason is the network effect, in that the more people who use a communications system, the more valuable it is (given that communication is valuable). Language is a communications system.

This forms a natural monopoly: because of the value of larger networks, it is inevitable that one language will dominate - unless there are other barriers partitioning the network, akin to the lack of a telecommunications physical layer in centuries past.

I completely disagree, Github.com should NOT be localized.

I agree that making sure your language doesn't disappear is important, but it has nothing to do with Github. It is your job on a day to day basis.

Having localized versions might lead to messy projects having multiple languages in issues and everywhere. It will not help the open source community as a whole but dilute it. It may be sad, but English is the language of IT and I think it will just lead to a wider and better community to all talk a single language, whatever it is.

Plus, managing multiple locales in an app just sucks, it will lead to problems, they would have less time to work on feature which is the point.

Maybe a localized version of Github Enterprise would make sense, but certainly not Github.com.

However, confining ourselves to one language makes us all think the same way. Research has proven time and time again, that learning other languages will help us apply different ways to think about problems, because different languages uses different grammar to convey the same meaning.

Effectively, if we continue to strive to eradicate localised IT and software related words from non-English languages and replace them with English words instead, language development will stagnate and all languages will eventually become English. And that is not a positive prospect.

I don't need Github localised, but I would like to localise it for the purpose of creating technical terms in my own language. I fear that most of the localisation into Danish would simply be English words instead, despite the fact that Danish actually has words for 'push' and 'pull' (»puf« and »hal«, respectively).

And English shouldn't be so cocky either, by its current usage, English is slowly becoming less than a language and more of a tool. And with both foreign and native speakers' continue abuse of the language, English will soon be derived of all its beauty, for the purpose of minimising communication.

Are we really that lazy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Present_s...

It turns out language does color perception, but not as profoundly as we estimated, and not in all ways.

In any case, even if it did profoundly color perception, who is to say that it does more so than other experiences? Like learning about anthropology or philosophy, or having a life changing event, or taking up art, or doing shrooms? I don't think we know.

A bilingual myself, I've always supported people learning a second language, for some vague impression that it made you a better person. Now I'm not so sure. When most people learn a second language, they don't learn enough to be immersed into a new culture altogether, or to start thinking in that language. Is this really a profound experience? The cost/benefit ratio seems a little skewed. I don't really blame people who know English by birth for not trying to learn another language.

It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with being able to communicate. Would you learn all of japanese, chinese, russian, spanish, german, french, italian, polish, swede and english in order to be able to contribute to projects in these various languages? Unlikely.

We need a "babel fish", and currently that babel fish is simply "learn english". At various places and times in history it's been french, chinese, latin or greek. That is not a problem, it's just how things go so that people can talk with one another across countries and cultures, and work together.

What I meant to say is that languages are becoming more and more plain. It seems people - and sometimes with language institutions with them - are accepting that the languages should be less complicated, so we can say the same thing with fewer words.

An obvious example is people writing 'u' instead of 'you', but is actually even more obvious in other languages than English. For instance, I am not a fan of people saying 'issues' in Danish, when we have the word »problemstillinger«, simply because the English word 'issues' is shorter. Should English use »arv« instead of 'inheritance' because it is shorter?

Languages' vocabularies shouldn't cherry-pick.

I do not oppose a lingua franca, I merely advocate keeping each language separate.

At the same time, I do understand where you are coming from. Having such a large proportion of your population be fluent in English - and thus more influenced by its culture, is potentially an issue for the Danish culture.

Today, the Internet, globalisation, etc. have decreased the number of languages in the world dramatically (last thing I heard is one language dies every two weeks) and there are approximately ~7000 languages alive.

While I know that most of these languages that are dying are spoken by very few (otherwise it wouldn't die). It is now more important than ever to keep each language unique.

What was great before (loanwords and such) may actually be a problem now.

There is also another factor at play here. "Proper" languages (that is, not dialects) have hundreds of years of written material behind them, and this is critical to ensure a language's survival.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

This would only be true if a language only consisted in IT and software related words :)

> I don't need Github localised, but I would like to localise it for the purpose of creating technical terms in my own language. I fear that most of the localisation into Danish would simply be English words instead, despite the fact that Danish actually has words for 'push' and 'pull' (»puf« and »hal«, respectively).

Having had the misfortune of spending this week working on a Javascript codebase partly coded in French, let me tell you it's a very bad idea. The disconnect between variable/function names and language identifier is jarring. Please, just code in English, even if your English is bad.

I have prior knowledge in the area so pardon me if what I'm saying is nonsene, but learning a programming language doesn't have the same benefits of learning any other language in this case?

I mean, if you are used to something like C, learning Haskell or Lisp or Brainfuck is a big mind shift.

I often find that choice of programming languages confines people to restrict themselves to certain ways in each language. Which obviously makes sense, as each programming languages were created with a need in mind that was sufficiently being fulfilled in other languages.

There are things you'd write in C, but not in Haskell. Like say, a driver.

It's different with spoken languages, they all try to solve the same issue; communicating. But do so differently.

"I know many developers in Poland who prefer (as Joel mentioned) to get English documentation rather than Polish translation and the reason for that is that translations were not always accurate."

That made me remember how before the Web sometimes I could not get an original book but would be able to buy a translated one. Many times the translations made no sense at all and I had to mentally translate it back to English to understand what the original author meant.

I've experienced this myself twice so far, with Ruby and with TokyoCabinet (earlier HyperEstraier). Upon investigation of lower-level problems I would eventually hit a brick-wall in the disguise of a japanese mailing list.

This seems to be improving for Ruby nowadays, but I did actually stop using HyperEstraier (years ago, before the rise of SOLR) for this reason.

One counter-example could be nginx where lots of discussion still happens in russian, yet the code-quality remains excellent. This is more of an outlier than a role-model, though. Most projects are not blessed with a lead-developer as talented as Igor.

It's worth noting that international support is also useful for people wanting to add issues, not just coders. And that revision control systems can be used for more than just code.