Weighing In On EIPL

EIPL, or English as the International Programmer Language, seems to have been brought up again around the blogosphere. It seems to have started on Scott Hanselman’s blog with a comment stating “If you don’t know English, you’re not a programmer!” Of course it does not end there: Bjoern writes about it in a blog post saying “In regard to translated documentation: I wouldn’t use it. Maybe it is because I learned programming during the dark ages when everything development related was English – it is even possible to claim I learned English through such documentation – or maybe the early days of localizations spoiled my conception of its quality.” And finally it appears here with generally the same attitude: that English is quickly becoming or should become the official language of programmers.

I believe that English should not be the official language. It is nice to know that variable names will generally be in a language I can understand, however I believe that this can be fixed in the future with language independent coding taking the place of what we do not. Visual Studio is already an incredibly powerful tool and it wouldn’t surprise me if within a decade or two it would begin to support the dynamic localization of variable names. It would be ignorant of me to demand or expect all source code to be in English.

However, the one caveat here is that non-English speaking programmers or wannabes should most likely learn English simply because features like the one mentioned above will take many years to come about and perfect. Furthermore, it can be said that English is somewhat of an international language. In Western cultures it is very easy to find someone who speaks English and it is quickly spreading throughout the tiny corners of the world. For evidence of this, look no further than the Olympics which was conducted in (I believe) three languages. If memory serves me correctly it was English, French and Chinese. This was due to the host country (China) and the IOC (Official Languages: English, French).

While on the subject of languages there is another potential problem. While languages based on Latin or in similar style (left to right) can be well understood by an immense amount of people in the community, vertical and right to left languages that feature non-alphanumeric characters can cause more problems than just being able to understand the meaning. I can’t imagine what source code written in Chinese or Japanese would look like.