Recently, the discussion on the new project deno Chinese Issue by Ryan Dahl, the father of Node.js, has been widely publicized. The occurrence of such things naturally makes the majority of Chinese developers feel sorry and sad, but behind closed doors, when we reflect on this matter internally, In addition to spreading the etiquette and norms of the open source community to the wider community of programmers, we should also consider what the fact that English is the default language of software development means to all Chinese programmers.
Being able to use Only English as the default language for software development means a huge additional learning cost for all Chinese developers. I say huge because learning English itself is not an easy task for Chinese, and I say extra because there is no need for native English speakers to learn another language. The good news is that most Chinese developers have a positive and open mind about this fact, rather than feeling sorry for themselves or running away from it. This makes the open source community full of excellent Chinese developers, and also allows us to quickly catch up with the international advanced level of software development and grow together.
Such open learning mentality is that we, as Chinese programmers have advantages, not only does it mean that we can walk in a shorter period of time the western in the software development path, the more important is it to China became the world’s most receptive programmers, a developer community to learn new technology. In this case, compared with the Chinese issue itself, what we should worry about more is the mentality of “Please don’t update, I can’t learn”. In other words, if we see an issue like “Please stop developing this project, I don’t want to learn anymore.” in an open source project, If you click on your profile picture and find a programmer from China, we should also feel sad.
On the other hand, using Chinese to communicate in the open source community is not an original sin. If foreign developers look at Chinese any time and think it’s “ghost characters”, it just shows that they are not as open to the idea of technical exchange as we are.
In a discussion and foreign developers, I mentioned a few very good open source project developed by Chinese developers, these open source projects have standard and elegant English website and the README, surprisingly, more than one foreign developers say with me, because the source of these open source projects have Chinese annotation, so they don’t want to see. This leaves me speechless, because there is no barrier for English developers to absorb the best of the documentation and source code based on these open source projects, but blind cultural confidence or a false understanding of the absolute correctness of English has made many developers lose the most valuable learning mentality.
Admittedly, compared with the West, our accumulation in software engineering and even the Internet industry is still far from enough, but we are actually enjoying the bonus brought by this late-comer advantage, that is, we do not think it is not worth doing to learn from the achievements and experience of others. In fact, chasing and overtaking are the same thing, when you catch up with the first fastest speed, what determines whether you can overtake him is who is faster next.
Never lose your open mind to learning, because it determines how fast you grow. We don’t know if one day we will replace anyone as the new Number one, but we should never forget that humility and hard work together have brought us to where we are today.
I hope that one day we can write the code we want in the way we feel most comfortable, and be respected around the world.