// thinkbeforecoding

Must know English to be a programmer ?

2008-11-21T13:55:36 / jeremie chassaing

I found through Scott Hanselman's blog a conversation starting from

"If you don't know English, you're not a programmer."

I was 8 when I started playing with BASIC on the TI-99/4A my father bought in the early 80's, and at that time I had never learnt an English word... But that was not a problem as long as the documentation was in my native language.

I had no need to know English since I knew what For, Load, Run, Save did. Ok my pronunciation was a bit sloppy (Load was Lo - a - d, with a big french a) but I knew what the computer would do when I used those commands.

Of course you can achieve a better style and discover libraries ways faster when knowing English, but I don't think it's a requirement. It's better though to use a widely spread language when you want to share your code. I've had already hard time reading Italian code, but this is more a problem about languages in general than a problem about programming.

Don't be stopped by your native language, programming languages are languages per  se, and you should learn a new [programming] language every year. Why not English ?