- From: Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:38:44 +0000
- To: "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- CC: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>, Adam Twardoch <list.adam@twardoch.com>, Philip TAYLOR <Philip-and-LeKhanh@royal-tunbridge-wells.org>, www-style@w3.org
Tab Atkins Jr. wrote: [...] > As much as humanly/technically possible, we of course want to support > the diversity of languages on our planet. But in some cases it is > advantageous *to the speakers of non-English languages* to purposely > ignore their language, and use the dominant one (English, currently). > Programming language tokens are one such area. All of your points are well made (as were those of David Singer), but I would want to comment on your last paragraph (above) : it may be advantageous to non-native speakers of English to [...] use English /at this time/, but unless we seriously discuss (without resort to sarcasm) how this Anglo-centric bias can be eliminated, all we are doing is continuing to perpetuate what I regard as a highly undesirable state of affairs. This is the 21st Century, and we are moving towards an even-more inclusive society, but computer programming (in its most general sense) continues to favour those who are able to express themselves in English, to the detriment of all those to whom it is truly an alien tongue. Philip TAYLOR
Received on Thursday, 19 February 2009 17:39:30 UTC