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Do You Have to Know English to be a Programmer?

Painted on the wall at a temple in India: "Please remove your shoes before being entered."

In a comment to Scott Hanselman’s blog post about how Microsoft is using “crowdsourcing” to help create localized versions of MSDN, someone wrote:

If you don’t know English, you’re not a programmer.

A provocative statement like that cries out for an article and discussion, and Scott got the ball rolling with a follow-up article titled, quite expectedly, Do You Have to Know English to be a Programmer?

While a command of the English language isn’t a prerequisite for the actual act of programming, programming languages typically use English keywords, as do many development libraries. Even some popular languages written by people whose native tongue is not English, such as Ruby (Japanese) and Lua (Brazilian Portuguese) use English keywords.

I think that English is the lingua franca of business and technology today: a language often used to communicate between people not sharing a mother tongue. Just as you could have the knack for diplomacy in the 18th century and not speak a word of French, you can have the knack for programming and not know a word of English. But it’s really, really helpful if you do.

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I’m Bringing Hexy Back (or: Programming Articles Will Return to Global Nerdy)

Disruption

A wrench jamming a machine Soon – probably in December – in addition to pointing you to interesting tech news articles and bits of geek culture, I will also be returning to writing development articles. And yes, that includes the long-on-hiatus Enumerating Enumerable series of articles cataloguing the methods in Ruby’s Enumerable module.

The past couple of months have been disruptive as all Hell, what with:

And now,

  • Working like mad to acclimate myself with a new employer — my first Fortune 500 company, and my first with over 200 employees!)
  • Readjusting to a new work style: working largely from home, with runs out into “the field” and the Mississauga and downtown Toronto offices
  • Re-acclimating myself with Microsoft development tools, which I haven’t used since early 2002

It’s been exciting and fun, but there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy one can muster to do things, which meant that the programming articles, which take a lot of work, testing and verifying, had to fall by the wayside. But they’re coming back soon.

Country First

Joey deVilla poses with a Mountie outside the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC
Me and a Mountie at the Canadian Embassy
in Washington, DC in 2000,
a.k.a. the “experimenting with nutty hair colour” year.

“We hired you first and foremost for Canada,” said my boss, John Oxley, Director – Audience Marketing at Microsoft Canada, “and for Microsoft second.”

That means that while I’ll be writing a lot about Microsoft developer tools and technologies, my primary goal as Microsoft Developer Evangelist is to use my tech evangelism powers to encourage, assist, grow and cast a spotlight on the Canadian software industry. I get it; a healthy Canadian software ecosystem is good for all players, including “The Empire”.

If you’re a software developer in Canada, whether you’re writing enterprise software for a big corporation or a one-person shop operating out of your den, a full-time employee or a student in high school, or a Microsoft tech “true believer” or a hardcore Free Software/Open Source type, you are the person I’m trying to reach.

So if you’re a developer, watch this space – some meaty development articles are coming soon!

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Happy 10th Birthday, Half-Life!

half-life_gordon_freeman

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been ten years since the release of the original Half-Life game. In honour of this event, GameSpy has published the Half-Life 10th Anniversary Interview with Valve Software’s writer –in-residence Marc Laidlaw.

If they ever decided to make a movie based on the game – probably not a good idea, since there hasn’t been a good movie based on any videogame, but I always hold out hope – I think Hugh “House M.D.” Laurie would make a great Gordon Freeman:

half-life_hugh_laurie

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Conversational HTTP Codes

"413: Request entity too large" -- cat stuck in cat door

Over at Seldo.com, there’s a handy table of HTTP codes, their official meanings and their everyday office culture conversational equivalents. Here are some examples:

Code Status Conversational Equivalent
100 Continue Uh-huh…
101 Switching protocols Let’s take this offline
200 OK OK
201 Created I wrote you an email about that
300 Multiple choices You can get that from Bob, John or Sue
301 Moved permanently That’s Bob’s job
401 Unauthorized You’re not allowed to know that
402 Payment required Maybe a twenty would refresh my memory
404 Not found I have no idea what you’re talking about
406 Not acceptable Maybe when you’re older
500 Internal server error Drooling from side of mouth
503 Service unavailable I am way too busy to deal with your shit
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Fallout 3, as Reviewed on Zero Punctuation

Once again, it’s time for my favourite videogame reviewer, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, and his series of smartass videogame reviews, Zero Punctuation. This week, he covers Fallout 3. His verdict:

Yeah, it’s pretty good.

Its 93 rating at Metacritic — which gives it a standing equal to Gears of War 2 – comes from a number of glowing reviews from various sources:

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Your Tuesday Productivity Killer (or: The Official Monty Python YouTube Channel)

NewTeeVee reports it, and I’m repeating it here: Monty Python now has its own official YouTube channel. Cue the sound of comedy fans – especially geeks, who love the troupe so much that there’s a programming language named for them – rejoicing!

Here’s their very enlightened response to all those YouTubers uploading their videos for the past three years:

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.

We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube.

No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing – HQ videos delivered straight from our vault.

What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there!

Of course, they want something in return:

But we want something in return.

None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.

There are currently 24 videos on the Monty Python YouTube channel, and they’ve given the impression that more will be posted. Most of these videos are some of their most popular clips; a couple are interviews with the Pythons. Here’s one with Eric Idle talking about what it was like to write with other members of the troupe:

…and here’s one with John Cleese on Monty Python and music:

Enjoy! (And try to get some work done today, willya?)

I’ll close with the official YouTube editions of a couple of clicks that were favourites of both me and my Dad, proving that I am indeed my father’s son. Both are from Life of Brian.

First, there’s the “Biggus Dickus” scene:

And now, the “Stoning” scene:

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Looking Forward to Trying This Out Later Tonight…

Photo of my TV showing the 'updating' dialog box for the New XBox Experience.