If there is one thing this will achieve then it should be this: it should help to show those born in the world of English what a privileged position they have. For every other person in the world not born into English that is the first hurdle they have to cross in order to get to the next one: programming itself. Anybody that is born in an English speaking region has a huge head start in this respect.
Note that it goes much deeper than just the programming languages keywords: there are the books, the courses, the documentation, the bulk of all the open source projects out there one could use to study and so on.
FWIW, most non-English countries teach children English in their version of middle school. And most English speakers aren’t like the stereotypical French; English speakers are quite tolerant of both sentence structure mistakes and extreme dialects.
They’re not really at that great of a disadvantage.
That's a cascade of unsupported assumptions: have you really never heard someone complaining about non-native speaker's use of English, using it to say they aren't qualified for a job, etc.?
“most non-English countries teach children English in their version of middle school” in particular is really dubious unless you're cherry-picking a handful of small, affluent countries. I've known a number of people who moved to the U.S. from non-English speaking countries and the general trend is that the average is closer to, say, how well most Americans speak Spanish than fluency. It's easy to get this wrong if your experience is predominantly in high-level academic or professional contexts where there's been a strong selection bias filtering out people without strong English proficiency.
> have you really never heard someone complaining about non-native speaker's use of English, using it to say they aren't qualified for a job, etc.?
Yes, that's true, but I think it's important to make a distinction.
What you are referring to is, more often than not, just plain racism. It's sad, and unfortunately (at least in the US) more people are feeling emboldened to spout their racist views.
However, that shouldn't cloud the fact that in general English speakers are much more able to understand sentences with tons of grammatical or structural errors if the gist is right. I contrast that with French - when I was in France and would make a small error in verb conjugation or intonation people would just respond with blank stares. And they weren't looking down on me, they just really didn't understand what I was saying.
> have you really never heard someone complaining about non-native speaker's use of English
Similar to the sibling response, only in the case where someone is being racist.
> I've known a number of people who moved to the U.S. from non-English speaking countries and the general trend is that the average is closer to, say, how well most Americans speak Spanish than fluency.
The availability of classes and the fluency learned from those classes are not related metrics. For example, I was able to take German language classes in middle school, but can't speak a lick of German today. It's not because the class was unavailable, but because I didn't apply myself to learning German.
Yes, they are. There is a huge difference between having a language as you mother tongue versus having it as a secondary one. My English is reasonably good, I started young (at age 10) and yet, by the time I was 14 or so the programming books I had access to were way over my head. If English had been my first language I would have had a much easier time.
It's not about English speakers tolerance, it is all about the reader's ability to grok a complex written text.
Depends on the language, I suppose, but isn't the text of the book the bigger problem than the language? sprintf, uint64_t, #ifndef may as well be foreign languages to English speakers too. There's a benefit if the mnemonics are native to you, but your comment sounds like it's the book that's the key obstacle, and less the language.
> sprintf, uint64_t, #ifndef may as well be foreign languages to English speakers too.
Is the problem those symbols or the fact that the documentation, tutorials, and a significant fraction of the useful discussions around those are in English? That seems like the real concern to me: imagine how much harder it would be to learn something without being able to easily understand the man pages, Stack Overflow, the source code and associated issue trackers or forums, etc.
Oh I'm 100% supportive of having good translations of documentation, tutorials, better ways for people to communicate online if they speak different languages, etc. But that's not what بونج is at all. Quite the opposite - the computer language is derived from another language, but their documentation as checked into Github is still in English.
Translatable comments would also be awesome, and figuring out how to deal with identifiers that appear in both comments / docs and code would be awesome. As it is, I think this language / art project is aimed at what is literally the smallest obstacle for people who have the problem it's discussing.
For me, I learned the word from the Jargon file first where it explains it was from the book, I then read the book later on in life. http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/grok.html
Given that the average reading level of a US resident (a vast majority of whom speak English as their primary language) is around a 7th grade level, yes, you are still on par with most (US) native English speakers.
Even I, a native English speaker, have had issues getting through a number of textbooks. Mostly because it's not English that you have to be proficient with, but the industy-specific jargon and idioms.
As a foreigner you are not competing with the average US resident, you are competing worldwide with all the people that are aiming to learn something about computers.
I can't see what is so hard about recognizing that someone who had a 12 year or so head start (and in some cases more) in the lingua franca of that trade is an advantage.
Most of the world doesn't speak English as a primary language. So, I can't imagine it's that big of an advantage in the worldwide market. Instead, there's a certain bar that can be reached by someone without even a 20 year head start.
For example, if I tried to get a programming job in the Ukraine without being able to speak a lick of Russian, I'd be laughed out of the office regardless of how good my English is.
The only time I can see it really mattering is perhaps in the US and UK, due to racist assholes who judge you by your accent instead of your capability.
Note that it goes much deeper than just the programming languages keywords: there are the books, the courses, the documentation, the bulk of all the open source projects out there one could use to study and so on.