this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
829 points (99.2% liked)
Programmer Humor
20703 readers
2465 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A key reason English became the preeminent language of scientific and technical communication, and thus the source of keywords in programming languages, is because German (the other candidate) fell out of favour due to the two world wars. So, were it not for Prussian militarism, our programming languages may have instead been based on German (along with most scientific literature being in German).
Also because, as a person who has studied multiple languages, German is hard and English is Easy with capital E.
No genders for nouns (German has three), no declinations, no conjugations other than "add an s for third person singular", somewhat permissive grammar...
It has its quirks, and pronunciation is the biggest one, but nowhere near German (or Russian!) declinations, Japanese kanjis, etc.
Out of the wannabe-esperanto languages, English is in my opinion the easiest one, so I'm thankful it's become the technical Lingua Franca.
Had the world settled on German, someone might be making a similar argument that the world dodged a bullet by choosing a language with phonetic orthography and words composed of logical building blocks rather than a mess like English
Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you're only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don't give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).
OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.
So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.
Making fun of people has more "stank" in English (not a hard fact, just my opinion).
* Yiddish has entered the conversation