Comment by throwaway798214 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway798214 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway798214

I literally learned English reading the only computer books that were available at the time, mid 80s. That was before I had a single English class in school - in fact I already knew English pretty well by the time I started studying English on 7th grade. I come from Finland and the Finnish language has absolutely nothing to do with any other language (except Estonian), no words are even remotely similar to English.

Also I totally suck at learning languages. I've tried to learn Swedish, nope, German, nope, Spanish/Portuguese, also nope.

Ja jos mielestäsi suomenkieli liittyy johonkin muuhun kieleen niin ihan vapaasti voit ajatella niin. Viime viikonloppua yritin opettaa muutamia suomenkielen sanoja ja taivutusmuotoja kielenopettajalle joka jaksoi kuunnella noi puoli tuntia ja totesi etta "mahdotonta oppia koska mitään referenssiä muihin kieliin ei ole".

That’s impressive. But do you think your experience is typical or more of an exception?

What if coding was built from the ground up to be script-agnostic—where people didn’t need to 'learn English on the side' at all?

If a Finnish speaker could code in Finnish while collaborating with a Japanese speaker coding in Japanese — and the system translated everything seamlessly — do you think that would increase access to programming without fragmenting the codebase?

The Finnish version of Excel used to have all of the functions translated to Finnish (in late 90s when I was doing Excel for living). It was literally impossible to do anything with it as none of the documentation knew about the translated functions and it was very hard to self-translate the functions (as in there was mostly no logic in the Finnish function names thanks to the way Finnish language works).

What was supposedly done in good faith to make it easier for non-English speaking Finns to do Excel functions ended up making it impossible for everyone. If you didn't know Excel then =IF() was just as cryptic as =JOS() and if you did know Excel then you couldn't figure out why =IF() didn't work. At least .xls files were compatible because apparently functions were saved as opcodes and not as strings.

I haven't used non-English software since so no idea if Finnish Excel still has translated fuctions. Hope not.

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