Cultural issues in programming languages [closed]

Question

I'm wondering if productivity can be correlated to whether a programmer is a native English speaker or not. I work in Japan and I can tell you that Japanese programmers struggle in getting the English part of a language (reserved keywords, function names, tutorials etc), it's just not natural for them and their thinking process is slow down by a language mapping overhead. Can you share your experience in dealing with non-native English speaker programmers, is it easy to overcome this barrier or will native English speakers forever have a little advantage?

Answer 1

I'm not a native speaker of English, yet I've been quite productive as a programmer in many countries (including the USA, where I live and work now)... but that's because I've always put some effort into being as good at English as my non-native-speaker condition will allow. I do believe a strong competence in English helps performance in programming (and many other kinds of engineering -- I started out designing chips and HW systems -- and more generally "knowledge work") in many, many ways.

As a recognized authority in Python, and pretty strong in C++ and other programming languages as well, I'm often asked "what language should I study to enhance my career"... and my answer's long been "English"!!!

I give this answer to native speakers, too: the amount of careless (or dyslexia-caused, it's hard to tell) spelling mistakes, syntax bloopers, and malapropisms of all kinds, that I've seen perpetrated by native speakers of English, isn't much lower than the number I've observed from my fellow non-native-speakers. Each such mistake hurts communication effectiveness and precision... and knowledge work (including programming) is about communication first and foremost!

Answer 2

I am a German native speaker myself and I haven't experienced any problems with keywords or naming conventions in APIs that would have had an effect on my productivity, but I have to admit that I had a basic understanding of English by the time that I picked up my first programming language.

I am currently working in Taiwan with a mixed team of Taiwanese (Chinese), Swedish, Spanish and several English native speakers (US, South Africa) with English being the common denominator for meetings, code documentation, specification etc. and I have not observed that the native language of a programmer had significant impact on coding skills.

In the scenario I am describing, everyone involved has mastered at least a basic level of English. You can see the difference in proficiency due to the occasional spelling mistake in function names or comments, but based on my experience, you cannot directly link that to code quality.

Also, given that most documentation and tutorials are available in English only (or at least first, before the first translations pop up) for most new projects, I'd assume that most programmers world wide would have picked up a decent level of passive English for reading - not necessarily for actively communicating in it - and that's all I would guess it takes to deal with language intrinsic issues like keywords and function names, even though I wouldn't even consider language keywords an issue. The for keyword does not really relate to "for" in the English language, if you look at the syntactic construct as a whole, does it?

A different issue is communication in general. If your team does not have a common language in which everyone can communicate efficiently, that has a huge impact on productivity. But that language is completely unrelated to the programming language used by the team and does not have to be English at all - based on my experience all technical terms will still be English though, weather the discussion is in German or Chinese.