Re: [devel] runglish

["Dmitry V. Levin" <ldv@altlinux.org>]

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On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 01:41:52PM +0300, Sergei Epiphanov wrote:
> В сообщении от 29 октября 2009 13:14:23 автор Dmitry V. Levin написал:
> > > Наиболее оптимальным языком для
> > > разработчика всегда был есть и будет тот
> > > язык, которым является для него родным.
> > 
> > Try to contact upstream using your native language, and you won't be
> > heard.  Or try to write documentation using only your native language,
> > and you'll be left without most of your potential users.
> > 
> > If you want to keep your business going, you have to familiarize yourself
> > with English.
> 
> YOU ask upstream, not upstream asks you. And they NEVER must understand 
> language they don't speak or use. But you can ask them if they know other 
> languages in order to understand the problem or give interesting info in less 
> time and then use ONE language in discussion.

This is pretty useless, and I've never (or almost never) seen such attempts
in public mailing lists for developers.

> Second, look at our native 
> projects. They speak with each other using language most known to all in 
> subject.

What "our native projects" are you talking about? All projects I'm
involved in except Sisyphus don't speak Russian.  The vast majority of
free software projects doesn't speak Russian.  If you want to be a good
free software contributor, diff(1) is not enough, because your task is not
usually limited to posting a patch, you also have to explain it and defend
it.

> I see you know Russian but nevertheless answer in English. You see, 
> pepole not known with Russian will not understand the question and discussion 
> at all even you will answer in English because of unkown question. You have to 
> send them full translation of such discussion in all situations (with English 
> or Russian answer). Add citations here and you will get more work to mantain 
> speaking for foreign people.

If these people fail to understand my _primitive_ English, then they surely
fail to read NEWS and ChangeLog files, they certainly cannot talk to upstream,
and therefore don't qualify as good package maintainers.  They haven't
read good books and papers because these books (and especially papers) are
mostly written in English, so they probably do not understand code well enough.
If they want to be good package maintainers, then they have to learn this
"ugly language".  And if they won't learn, why should I help them?


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ldv

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