[erlang-questions] A proposal for Unicode variable and atom names in Erlang.

[Loïc Hoguin]

On 10/22/2012 05:40 PM, Siraaj Khandkar wrote:
> English doesn't seem to hurt OCaml's popularity in France. Am I mistaken? Yes,
> there's French documentation, as there're books on Erlang in different
> languages. But code is a different matter.

Ocaml isn't a popular commercial programming language in France. I'm 
sure it has its userbase, but most of the people who do learn it at 
University/School end up not using it in the end. I'm in that group.

> It seems most papers published by INRIA are in English as well. What gives?
>
> http://hal.inria.fr/index.php?langue=fr&action_todo=browse&b_type=browse_domain

A quick glance shows papers both in English and French. But they're 
*papers*, something most programmers never did. Most programmers never 
even read a paper.

Many programmers only have 2 years of post-graduate education. They 
learnt how to do things in Java. They learnt the basic building blocks 
of computers. And they don't need research papers or English to do their 
jobs.

You'll probably wonder why we would want "inferior" developers to learn 
Erlang? Because there's a lot of tasks that are too boring for you to 
write and that they'd gladly do, as long as they're going home at 5 o clock.

But here even the 5 years people have trouble with English, the talented 
less than the others I suppose, but the talented people are the minority.

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
Erlang Cowboy
Nine Nines
http://ninenines.eu