Languages (was Re: To all cocoa developers...)
Languages (was Re: To all cocoa developers...)
- Subject: Languages (was Re: To all cocoa developers...)
- From: Chilton Webb <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2002 13:51:38 -0600
The topic of languages was brought up in this thread, and while this is
somewhat off topic, I promise to offend only the offensive...
Language is an interesting topic. I only speak two well enough to dare
use them, Spanish and English. And I usually don't speak Spanish out of
respect for anyone who does, who might be listening. In my programming
experience, at least in C, English is what I'm used to seeing. But
then, I'm also used to using miniscule variable names for everything,
and trying to 'read' the structure of a piece of C code before I read
the comment telling me what it should do (though this is a more recent
habit). Recently I was handed a very large amount of code written in
'another language' that I am porting to the Mac. The other language is
Pascal. What they didn't tell me was, it's all in French. And after a
number of conversations with the original author on this (and from my
experience with Spanish), I'm convinced that knowing more than one
spoken language provides you with more ways to think about a problem.
Because some of the ways he's doing things were completely alien to me
until I wrapped my head around the implications of his way of thinking
about the problems. For example, if I wear a beret and chain smoke, I
find that his code makes much more sense.
English is the standard by default, in the US. I'm sure it is similar
in parts of the world that speak English. But what about China? Japan?
Are they forced to use English as well? I'm just curious. It would be a
shame for all programming to be limited by the concepts that English
imposes. I'm sure it imposes some limitations, but since I don't speak
any other languages, I can only guess on that part. Much of my work in
C relies on very few function calls and string manipulation routines.
So I'm sure I could #define away those problems if I really wanted to
use another language. But Obj-C has so many parts of the frameworks
already named (NSTask, for example). Are there 'internationalized'
headers for other countries?
It seems like this would be a great opportunity for Obj-C expansion if
the rest of the computing world doesn't already do it.
-Chilton
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