I'm not sure software is "english-centric" so much as english being the linga franca of computing, much like diplomacy used to be mostly (if not solely) in french. You need a common language to share, and english was as good as any (better, in fact, since most early research [Church, Turing, Von Neumann, McCarthy] in CS was in english as were pretty much all the early implementations (Colossus, ENIAC, FORTRAN, ALGOL, BASIC, …)
> I'm not sure software is "english-centric" so much as english being the linga franca of computing, much like diplomacy used to be mostly (if not solely) in french.
At the very least: Diplomatic phrasing. But diplomacy is important. If I'm going to be audacious enough to ask the majority of the human race to conduct their business in my native language I can damn well try to be excessively polite about it.
But it does go beyond that. "English-centric software" could be interpreted as "software designed primarily by and for English speakers". And we wouldn't want to advocate that, because that has historically been a problem. Before Unicode, software supported English character sets much better than foreign-language character sets (and Western Europe better than Eastern Europe, and Europe better than Asia...). Even now, a lot of software doesn't support right-to-left languages. This kind of English-centrism is not good. We don't want to perpetuate it.
What the OP is advocating is "English as a lingua franca of software engineering", which is in fact a different thing.
For the record, the original poster's native language is French (and he even makes some English grammar mistakes if you pay attention, so I doubt that he learned English so long ago that using it is entirely simple for him).
> But it does go beyond that. "English-centric software" could be interpreted as "software designed primarily by and for English speakers".
Exactly, that's how I interpreted it (and thought others might interpret it as), and I completely disagree with it (though many softs are indeed english-centric I don't believe software as a field is).
That's of course all very true, but not very pertinent, as Ruby's support for convenient Japanese encodings was, for the longest time, as broken as all its haracter set and character encoding support. Ruby has never been a language for developing in Japanese or for developing for the
Japanese.
That's pretty much my point: the "A" in "ASCII" stands for "American", and software as a culture has remained plagued and characterized by that ever since. What I found remarkable about this post is that Ruby's development culture is distinctly not run in English, and it's creating the predictable amount of friction.
The Japanese are no less insular than Americans when it comes to actual belief in the independent existence of anything off their shores - I find it fascinating to see that reflected in the Ruby project.
I'm not sure software is "english-centric" so much as english being the linga franca of computing, much like diplomacy used to be mostly (if not solely) in french. You need a common language to share, and english was as good as any (better, in fact, since most early research [Church, Turing, Von Neumann, McCarthy] in CS was in english as were pretty much all the early implementations (Colossus, ENIAC, FORTRAN, ALGOL, BASIC, …)