Quote:
Originally Posted by Angst
The original premise is false. I've worked with many programmers whose second language is English. The spelling/grammar of their internal emails is often atrocious. Despite this, the quality and clearness of their code far exceeds their ability to craft prose.
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That argument is a red herring for the simple reason you don't know how adept those individuals are at expressing ideas in their
first language. In fact, your ESL-schooled programmers might write cracking
native prose, since they can at least communicate intelligibly in more than one language.
Meisler's idea is partly that one should be able to formulate and express thoughts in words coherently in order to write not only code but attendant programming and documentation -- not because English is a special language (though it can be especially
confusing), but because of the connection between programming, communication and logical thought, as well as the need for all three in application programming interface documentation (which is perhaps why people with "atrocious" English have managed to confect readable descriptions in ways that don't belie their questionable competence with their second (or possibly twelfth, for aught we know) language.
There are all kinds of legitimate ways to attack Mr. Meisler's point (such as the one you use at the end of your post), but eliminating the larger group based on an unattributed subset which Mr. Meisler would surely except isn't one of them.
One aspect that makes English an especially good language to know is that it can't be written on a perfect grid as can French, Spanish and Italian (for starters). As Graves and Hodge point out in
The Reader over Your Shoulder, the ability to write well in English has directly to do with being able to think and argue logically in terms of meaning, associations and usage -- which is why the authors of that amusingly rude book get to have so much fun creating "fair copies" of essays by other writers (Shaw, T.S. Eliot, etc.!).