On Thu, Jul 2, 2020, at 05:20, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
We're not talking about posting "your own writing", we're talking about comments (and presumably documentation) in a collective software project. There's a need for consistency, however it's specified and achieved.
Otherwise why stop at English? I could just as well write my comments in French if it's all about individual freedom. Requiring English is not inclusive, it forced people like me to painfully adapt to a language I wasn't used to. And that has nothing to do with "white supremacy".
Why indeed? Surely there are people somewhere in the world who write their comments in French, or Russian, or Japanese, and also name their variables in those languages, and I would argue there's nothing wrong with that (it certainly seems a lot of wasted effort supporting Unicode in variable names otherwise), they simply don't form a contiguous community with people whose code is in English And that's the core, I think, of the issue. If the dialect someone wishes to write their comments in is mutually intelligible with "standard" (however defined) English there's no real need to enforce a higher degree of conformity beyond that. It can be understood, and that is enough. Whereas, if it is not, then they are effectively a foreign language programming community, and there's no reason to say they shouldn't go their own way any more than for French/Russian/Japanese/etc. The desire to enforce a higher degree of conformity despite the lack of such a need is what has been described by some in this discussion as "white supremacy".