Markus Kuhn écrivit :
>"Patrick Andries" wrote on 1999-07-20 18:41 UTC:
>> This is very interesting: could you explain why switching from German to
>> English [in the use of identifiers] improved the quality of your source
code
>> ? This sounds counter-intuitive since one would expect that native German
>> speakers immediately recognize German words, remember them easily, type
them
>> with more ease than foreign words, finally these words would also
describe
>> their function in a more comprehensible and accurate fashion (the
developper
>> having a wider vocabulary in his mother tongue).
>
>Your intuition is wrong here. As somone who grew up in the same Central
>European tribe as Torsten, I can assure you that technical conversations
>between German information technology experts gain much in clarity if we
>use English vocabulary than if we tried to introduce localized
>equivalents - as the French or some elderly German computer science
>professors try to do. For technical terms like "port", "interface",
>"pixel", "socket", "byte", "header file", "thread", "backtracking",
>"routing", "back propagation", "pruning", "hashing", "little-endian",
>etc., it is *completely* irrelevant to us what the original
>pre-computing era English meaning of this word might be and what the
>most suitable German translation would be.
I wan't go into that argument even though there is a lot to be said in
favour of "indigeneous" technical terms (viz. coherent spelling,
pronunciation, derivability, transparency of meaning, etc.); also these
terms can be just as precise and abstract or even more than their English
counterparts (see "informatique" vs. "data processing" or "computer
science"). But let's leave it at that since this is obviously off subject.
To come back on the need or not of Unicode in identifiers and the ease this
may bring forth, let's say that "port" and "byte" are German words, I
believe you will agree with me that we still need to accept some "older"
Germanic words as identifiers (e.g. »Städte«,
»Österreich «, »Fußball«, »Länder«, »Kärnten«, etc.). Or should Austrian
application programmers and analysts developping a local application
translate in English all the intuitive concepts used in their
object-oriented world ? These older Germanic words might in fact be much
more frequent in identifiers that the "newer" ones. Obviously, an additional
degree in freedom in the way people can name their identifiers is mainly
beneficial and this should be a welcomed feature.
P. Andries
Dorval (Québec)
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