[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2012-09-18

[Kevin Mark]

--- On Sun, 9/23/12, S. Daniel Francis <francis at sugarlabs.org> wrote:

> From: S. Daniel Francis <francis at sugarlabs.org>
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP]  Sugar Digest 2012-09-18
> To: "Agustin Zubiaga Sanchez" <aguz at sugarlabs.org>
> Cc: "iaep" <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>, "Sugar-dev Devel" <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>, community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org
> Date: Sunday, September 23, 2012, 3:53 PM
> 2012/9/23 Agustin Zubiaga Sanchez
> <aguz at sugarlabs.org>:
> > Hi, everybody.
> > Like Daniel, I'm from Uruguay and I feel identified
> with the Walter message.
> Hi Agustin!
> 
> > I'm fourteen years old, and I started using sugar when
> I was ten, when I
> > receive my XO was the first time that I used linux and
> it liked me a lot.
> >
> > About the young programmers:
> > I was a student of Flavio Danesse, and he taught me a
> lot but for obvious
> > reasons I had to appeal the internet to found more
> information, where the
> > most are in english, for me it wasn't a problem,
> because I have learned
> > english..
> >
> > But the most of the children in Latin America hasn't
> this luck, and they
> > find it difficult to program.
> 
> I'd say now there's a lot of documentation in Spanish, but I
> agree
> with you in the language can be a barrier sometimes,
> specially for
> write e-mails and similar things.
> When Flavio said he doesn't understand why Spanish speakers
> write
> source code in English, I replied I don't write code in
> English, I
> write in Python, in C (not for Sugar) or in any programming
> language.

There is a subtle thing that I experienced when I was working at a multilingual website where it was common to speak, write and program in English, Spanish and Italian.

The program language might have been C, python or vb script but it was written not like you'd expect.
---------------------------------
In the US, this is the norm:
#!/usr/bin/python
# this is how you compute the total
total = sum1+sum2+sum3
print "This is the total" total
-----------------------------
but where I worked, it was like this:
#!/usr/bin/python
# questo è il modo in cui il punteggio di corrispondenza viene calcolato
partida = calcio101+calcio02
---------------------------------
They are both 'python' but most programmers are not going to be able to debug the 2nd example easily.
------------------------------
Making all the comments and the variable names in Spanish is not what I expect for sugarlabs but maybe for the 'python joven' or similar.