Is coding ethnocentric? Shower thought-turned-conversation with my husband

I’m about as techie as you can get without being a techie. My dad is (and has been forever) a CIO and habitual early adopter of any cool tech gadget (no, seriously. We had 3 computers in our house in 1989). You can’t escape a house like that without picking up a few things here and there. I once impressed a boss by suggesting he use an RF Modulator, and by calling other cables and parts by their proper names.

But I chose the creative path that led me back to tech. I love the non-technical and “soft” development that guides a tech product to production. I’ve learned just enough to talk the talk (and even crawl the walk, with some web dev experience I can use to fake my way through a website). Further bridging these two worlds, I married a developer.

And he’s not just a developer — he’s a poet and a great philosophical thinker (he’d blush reading that, but it’s true). With that context, we get into some incredibly profound discussions about technology and implications beyond just the tech.

Last night he was walking me through a logic problem he solved in Rails (and as his devoted wife I did my best to follow). But I got distracted in my own rabbit hole and blurted out “does everybody code in english?”

You can imagine he had a very long answer, but gist of it was “yeah, pretty much.”

If this were Sex in the City, this is the part where the camera would zoom in on me typing this: I couldn’t help but wonder…if code is written in english, do you have to know english to code? I think about the pictures I’ve seen of code camps and click farms — the sweatshops of the developing developing world (doubling & pun fully intended). I theorized that there must be a fairly limitless set of variables or methods (am I using these words right?) one can input into commands (?), and the trial-and-error nature of coding would mean testing different logic types until you found the right fit. Would that mean, then, that to use that logic you’d need a broad english vocabulary?

Here’s the breakdown after some research, and a better understanding of how programming logic works.

Essentially, there are a somewhat limited set of inputs — and once you really have a handle on programming, you have a go-to set that broadens with particular projects. So it’s entirely possible that these inputs, written in english, could be the only english you know and not require an understanding of the language itself; just the programming language. At that point, the english words become symbols to a non english speaker. They are meaningless in that form; just like all those science words that sound vaguely latin and totally made up to me. It’s terminology, but you can still make logical decisions and adjustments without knowing the language (the programming language, not the english language. This may get confusing.)

So how many developers speak english? This chart shows quite a serious saturation in the US and Asia. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most other countries do a much better job in raising bilingual children than we do (sorry, everybody). Personal experience suggests most Chinese people in urban and suburban areas speak way better english than we speak Chinese. I have also only worked with people who have office jobs similar to mine in India, but it seems like those around my age were raised speaking only english. While my american ear can sometimes struggle in understanding through an accent, it would suggest that those not living in rural areas would have a strong command of the english language and therefore probably be fine in an english-based programming language.

But why are the programming languages in english, anyway? Is it like how most medical terms come from latin or greek and are fairly universally translated with those roots? Did most programming languages originate in an english-speaking country? Are english characters just better suited to code? The cedilla (ç) isn’t super complicated to type, but maybe that kind of thing would crash a program? Does it have something to do with clearly defined numeral sets, which seem fairly universal unless your language uses non-arabic characters?

I actually don’t know. But if someone does, please tell me.