From: Keith McCloghrie <kzm(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 21:34:38 -0800 (PST)
> Let's see, how many RFC's are not in English? How many WG meetings
> or mailinglists?
>
> That the IETF is de facto an U.S. outfit is not by itself a bad thing.
You seem to be making the assumption that the English language is the
property of the USA. Perhaps, you have forgotten that the English
language was spoken in a quite a lot of the world before the USA existed.
For better or worse (and I'm sure I'm going to piss off some number of
Frenchmen and Quebecois by saying this), English has become the Lingua
Franca of the Internet.
I was amazed when I first found out about the attitudes of a number of
non-native-English-speaking programmers who consider it bad programming
style to write use non-English variables, comments, or function names in
their programs. This was for maintainability reasons. Even if a German
were maintaining a program today, a year from now perhaps someone from
the Netherlands or Belgium might need to pick and understand the
software project. While this is attitude is most prevalent in the Open
Source community, it even applies to some (many?) large commercial
programming shops. (I first heard about this from a friend of mine who
works for SAP AG, who pointed out that they had programmers from all
over Europe.)
This phenomenon is of course not unique to programming. I recall
reading about some E.C. meetings where the committee members waived
translation services and elected to conduct their exclusively in some
common language, often English, simply to save money and because it's
much less awkward than having to edit a document in three different
languages simultaneously. (Presumably they would edit it once in
English, and once the master document was agreed to, they would then
translate it to other languages.)
Perhaps it's not fair that English has won this privileged place, and
not some other language, like French, or Esparanto. Speaking selfishly,
it means that I never have a chance to practice my (by now very rusty)
six years of Spanish that I took in high school and college. But if I
had access to the source code of the universe and could give it a quick
edit and recompile, I'd make many other changes, including outlawing
software patents and #ifdef'ing out the MPAA. But fortunately or
unfortunately, this is not one of our options for making changes in the
world. :-)
- Ted