Drapetomaniac

Charles Nutter explains that “the Ruby community” has a serious problem because the Ruby language originated among Japanese speakers and continues to have its primary developers work in Japanese.  He continues by saying, “That leaves those of us English speakers on the ruby-core mailing list out in the cold.”  Tim Bray echoes the thought on his blog.

In the past, I’ve wondered about emerging markets like Brazil and India and whether or not we’ll see Hindi, Portuguese or other human languages form the basis of programming languages.  Of course, that was naïve as there are many in existence already. And of course there are other languages like Lua (and Ruby) developed by people whose first language isn’t English.

There are plenty of arguments for learning English, most having to do with our hyperexcited capital and markets.  However, other human languages tend to be more consistently structured than English, if that’s useful for programming at all.

RubyCorner.com is smart enough to include blog posts from the actual Ruby community, which is world wide.  Spanish, Portuguese,  Turkish and others.  You can even subscribe to an RSS of their blogroll by language.

Last month, Argentina on Rails asked its (Spanish speaking) readers about their programming habits. It’s something English dominant programmers probably don’t have to think of that often.  An example on of the commenters partially gives is:
if
Casa.include?(puerta)
then
puts ”La case tiene un puerta”
else
puts “La case no tiene un puerta”
end

You end up in Spanglish.   And with all of the “grammar” accomodation in rails, imagine organizing your restful application to be approachable by others.

Obviously, world diversity isn’t lost on much of the community.  But, you would think for a language initiated in Japan and its most popular framework created by a Danishprogrammer, others wouldn’t be so quick to jump on the idea that The Ruby Community depends on English speakers for survival.  Or that it’s a travesty English speakers are number two in the core speakers as opposed to number one.  It’s inconvenient, but it’s what the majority of the world deals with regularly and they still manage to build thriving communities and contribute.

If you want to know what ”out in the cold” feels like, try speaking something other than English or Japanese.

I think the internet is a great place to help learn languages.  Reading literature or news helps, but today we have social networks and blogs where you can get more immediate exposure to common language and easier gathering of topics.

With Arabic, you have to learn the alphabet to learn the language, but Yamli.com has introduced a search service which reduces the amount of time you have to spend switching between Arabic and English characters.  It also transliterates for you, so while you type the English Al Jazirah, below your typing space you can select from transliterated options like:
al-jazirah
It then does a Google search on the Arabic الجزيرة,.

Of course, you’ll notice Al Jazirah is different from Al Jazeera, which is how the company itself shows it’s name.  But Jazirah seems to be a more common transliteration for the arabic word for peninsula. Here are two more takes on the new site.“

Lifehacker has a tip regarding Gmail. They point out you can search gmail by language like:
lang:Portuguese
lang:Arabic

They mentioned you can’t search for English, but you can use two digit codes for the same languages and get results back.

I try to sort my blog and news reading by language, so it’s nice to be able to label or search my e-mails specifically by language as well.