Re: Trying number 2

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2000 at 14:12:32 +0000, Lex Spoon wrote:

> > The industry is changing so rapidly that it's just impossible to
> > keep up with the pace without fluent English (read-only at
> > least).
> 
> Well, it's awefully arrogant to say that only English stuff is important
> -- some of the seminal work in computer science is in foreign languages.

I'm not saying *only* English stuff is important, but English, pardon
the oxymoron, is the Lingua Franca of CS/IT today.


> It's also overstated that anyone *must* have things be as convenient
> as possible.  Certainly the right answer is in the middle ground,
> and if someone is voluntering to do translations, sheesh, let them.

Sure.


> By the way, "the industry is changing rapidly" depends entirely on
> your perspective.

Agreed.


> It's taken decades for garbage collection to catch on with Joe Idiot
> Programmer.

I seriously doubt that availability of good translated documentation
would change that ;-)


> I could go on, but it should be clear that computer science
> is crawling, not racing.  For a software developper (as opposed
> to a researcher), a translation delay hardly matters.  

Every now and then I see requests in Russian newsgroups "where I can
find documentation about FOO in Russian" for *so* many different
values of FOO, that it's obvious that the lack of English skills is a
serious barier to *entry* the field.  So translation delay projects to
a delay in a guy's carier.

All in all, I think we agree that translation work is important, but
that he that waits upon fortune is not sure of a dinner.

Anyway, my point was: this sort of stuff does NOT belongs to "main"
distribution for technical release engineering reasons.

SY, Uwe
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