Comment by fbcpck
8 hours ago
I think this is conflating opensource-corporate and english-non-english.
If you ask american/european/english-speaking developers about coding, it will mostly be about/in the context of corporate environments rather than open source too! The majority do not actively or primarily contribute to open source projects, but instead corporate environments as well.
In an alternative timeline where the lingua franca isn't english, I can still see open source culture exist; I don't think the desire to publish and cooperate in public is an inherently "western" culture. It will also run into the same conflict of interest between Open-Source and Corporate: one prefers transparency and full-disclosure, the other prefers control in the interest of minimizing risk.
You're right. Ultimately, the absolute number of developers matters a lot. But when it comes to coding style and paradigms, it's overwhelmingly dominated by the English-speaking world.
For example, object-oriented programming or conditional statements generally follow a What -> Action -> Target order. But my native grammar follows a What -> Target -> Action order. So I have to translate SOV logic into SVO code syntax.
The reality is that English speakers are numerous, Japanese and Korean speakers are relatively few, and while Chinese speakers are quite numerous, there's still some cognitive load due to differences in thought patterns. It's almost like a difference in the sheer volume of accessible knowledge.
Due to the cumulative cost of translation, this feels like a bigger hurdle than people realize.
So sometimes language gives a sense of identity tied to 'ethnicity' and 'nation,' but when it comes to the competition for knowledge, I feel that the number of native speakers matters more. There are points where I agree with you, and points where I don't. It's complicated