Les CastCodeurs == Java Posse in French

[Moandji Ezana]

For French-speaking Java Posse listeners:

I just listened to the first episode of a new podcast: http://lescastcodeurs.com/

It's Emmanuel Bernard (Hibernate), Guillaume Laforge (Groovy), Vincent Massol (XWiki, Maven) and Antonio Goncalves (Paris JUG, JEE 6 EG member) discussing the news and technologies of the moment, in French. The first episode was quite good, I hope they can keep it going.

Mwanji

[Joe Nuxoll (Java Posse)]

I tried to listen to it, but it was all jibberish to me. :-)

- Joe

[Chris Adamson]

Bien-sur, ils pouvait parlez avec Romain Guy... et pronouncez son nom
correctment!

--Chris

[Vince O'Sullivan]

On Apr 17, 11:39 am, Chris Adamson <invalidn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Bien-sur, ils pouvait parlez avec Romain Guy... et pronouncez son nom
> correctment!

Mais are ils able to prononcer les names de les Java Posse membres
correctemently?

[Todd Costella]

If I heard correctly, one of the main reasons they fellows are doing the podcast is that they work all day in English and wanted to have some outlet to discuss technical topics in French. I have a ton of respect for folks that speak multiple languages.

It's something we (English) North Americans just take for granted that we'll do a Google search and find an answer in English. I do wish the fellows the best of luck with their Podcast. I'll be following along as best I can keeping up with Java news.

Todd

[Marcelo Morales]

Shouldn't it be like this?
Les CastCodeurs = Java Posse in French

Otherwise it is a question :)

Me pregunto cúando habrá uno en español
Pergunto-me se vai haver um em a língua portuguesa
--
Marcelo Morales

[Mwanji Ezana]

On Apr 17, 4:27 pm, "Todd Costella" <Todd.Coste...@Entero.com> wrote:
> If I heard correctly, one of the main reasons they fellows are doing the podcast is that they work all day in English and wanted to have some outlet to discuss technical topics in French. I have a ton of respect for folks that speak multiple languages.
>
> It's something we (English) North Americans just take for granted that we'll do a Google search and find an answer in English. I do wish the fellows the best of luck with their Podcast. I'll be following along as best I can keeping up with Java news.

That reminds me of Jeff Atwood's recent statements on his blog and the
Stack Overflow podcast about English as the only language that counts
for programmers. For someone who's created such a successful piece of
social software, I'm surprised he didn't see why people would want to
talk about programming in their own language.

Mwanji

[a.efremov]

Hi there,

Personally, the idea is okay. I wish them all kind of luck. Especially
in France it seems to be not so easy.

Honestly, I tried to listen and failed to reach the end. Too verbose!
Shrink all stuff to 20 min. guys! and try to speak more faster.
Don't copy Dick's javaposse.

dont crash.
alexandre efremov

[Peter Becker]

My own opinion is probably somewhere in the middle.

I remember that back in school times we had a localized version of
Pascal (80s in Germany), but at home I would use a standard Turbo Pascal
and a US keyboard layout despite the fact that the physical keyboard was
German*. One of the main reasons is the obvious one of the matching
documentation, but you also experience a lot of inconsistencies since
hardly any localization is complete. If you consider the environment we
work in you'd need not only a localized language, a localized JDK and a
localized IDE, you'd also need localized libraries for everything. It
just doesn't seem feasible.

The other aspect is that Germans tend to use a lot of English terms in
IT. Having lived in an English-speaking country for a few years I find
it hard to talk the resulting mix of German and English words -- it
requires pronouncing the English words somehow a bit more German as to
not break the flow, which feels rather awkward to me. For me it is much
easier to talk English and I have had conversations with German
colleagues where we would fall into English because the terms are
somehow more readily available.

Things are even worse in Internet times. My virtual host in Germany
started with a localized configuration, which I found really annoying.
Apart from having English commands producing (partly) German output,
which is inconsistent, it also means that I couldn't just copy and paste
error messages into Google, which is my usual first reaction to anything
I don't understand directly. Yes, you could do that if there would be a
suitable community, but since those errors are sometimes too specific
even for the larger corpus of English forums I wouldn't really want to
fork into language-specific communities.

The only nagging question is "why did it have to be English?". It is
such a bad language for doing anything vaguely resembling specification
and in my experience native English speakers are not trained well in
being accurate (I still hate the fact that everyone here refers to our
daughter's trike as "bike" as if they can't count to three). No wonder
considering the irregular mashup of different languages that makes the
language historically and the lack of any reforms. Mix in all the people
who speak English as second or third language after a broad range of
first languages and you get something that is a Real Mess (tm). But it
has happened and maybe there is something about this mess that is
actually good. Who knows?

But personally I'm not fighting it since it just seems too hard to
change. I'd rather put my energy somewhere else and restrict myself to
the occasional whinge as this one :-)

Peter

* all characters in "{}[]\" are combinations of upper-row right-hand
keys with the right Alt key -- I have no idea who came up with that
idea, but it is a pain too type. Probably literally if done often enough.

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

If anyone wants the sources to tempo posse, let me know :P

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

Well, what other language should be used? The internet grew up in
english speaking countries, and soon expanded to places where english
was the most commonly known non-native language (not neccessarily
universally second, but, of all languages, the odds that a random Joe
Q. European is at least passable capable of understanding one, is
highest for english).

The only other option I can think of is to officialize the
jargonization process and run with something like interlingua, latin,
or esperanto, and make up words with abandon. That's a little too
geeky in my book.

So, if not english, then what?

NB: In regards to programming symbols: Seriously, now you're just
whining. What else did you want? A localization for compilation so you
can use a ß instead of a open brace? That would look crazy ugly, and
is fantastically inpractical. We have 3 matched bracing symbols that
are somewhat easy to type (on ANY keyboard, not just US 101), and we
generally need all of them when designing programming languages,
unless you're a badass like McCarthy and decide you can make it work
with just 1 pair. You're ostensibly a nerd with some technical prowess
if you're into programming, so fix your keyboard layout, or just do
what everyone else (and yourself do), and just roll with us 101.
Incidentally, I can type german and french very very well on apple's
layout system, which has an extra meta-key which is pretty much 100%
reserved for typing special symbols. ringel-S (ß) is alt+s, umlauts
(ë) is alt+u, vowel, The euro € is alt+shift+2, the pound £ is alt+3
(inconsistent, but, nobody's perfect, unfortunately), the inverse
exclamation mark ¡ is alt+1 (note how sensical that is), and something
like the c-cedille is alt+c (ç). There you have it, an international
(at least, for western languages) keyboard layout that works well for
everybody, in any locale, and even for programmers. Just use that.

An alternative way of looking at it: Programmers need symbols. English
is 'lucky', in that writers only need 26+26+10 symbols to take care of
their needs, which leaves ample space for dedicated keys for symbols,
so one keyboard can suffice for BOTH purposes. Other languages aren't
so lucky, and the default keyboards there ship geared towards writers.
i18n programmers are generally responsible for localizing the software
experience, and note how NONE OF THEM decided to design an alternative
localized keyboard layout that was geared more towards programming
symbols. Instead, they adopted US 101 and where needed designed sane
keyboard shortcuts to type commonly used symbols in their language
that aren't common in english. I can't find any fault whatsoever in
this choice. If you do, I'd be interested to hear how it could have
been done better.

-- Reinier "English is certainly not my native language" Zwitserloot

[Mwanji Ezana]

On Apr 19, 12:11 am, Peter Becker <peter.becker...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I remember that back in school times we had a localized version of
> Pascal (80s in Germany), but at home I would use a standard Turbo Pascal
> and a US keyboard layout despite the fact that the physical keyboard was
> German*.

I think there are two different issues here. I don't think there's
much need for non-English programming languages, but certainly lots of
people want to *talk about* programming in languages other than
English.

Kind of reminds me of the mixed-language variable and methods names I
saw when working on a project in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of
Belgium). DDD-style Ubiquitous Language is great, but a little
problematic with stuff like getFamilieNaam() (to take a simple
example).

Mwanji

[Mwanji Ezana]

On Apr 18, 6:53 pm, "a.efremov" <a.efre...@javasmith.org> wrote:

> Honestly, I tried to listen and failed to reach the end. Too verbose!
> Shrink all stuff to 20 min. guys! and try to speak more faster.
> Don't copy Dick's javaposse.

Shrinking everything down to 20 minutes means you're doing a straight
newscast, like the Rails Envy podcast, for example. I think that the
somewhat rambling discussions and digressions are a big part of what
make the Java Posse great and fun. Admittedly, I do have a lot of
commute time to fill up.

Mwanji

[Vince O'Sullivan]

On Apr 19, 1:45 pm, Reinier Zwitserloot <reini...@gmail.com> wrote:
> officialize the jargonization.... ....make up words with abandon.
Sound like you're already there. :)

[Todd Costella]

Jeff just posted this on his twitter feed:
http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1564775356


<quote>
c'mon. What serious language has characters wearing little tiny hats? àèìòù áéíóúý âêîôû ãñõ äëïöüŸ Åå? or beards? çÇ -- I REST MY CASE!

about 4 hours ago from web

codinghorror
Jeff Atwood
</quote>

sigh. welcome to diversity.

(Yes I realize this is said tounge in cheek. Maybe.)

-----Original Message-----
From: java...@googlegroups.com [mailto:java...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mwanji Ezana
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2009 4:24 AM
To: The Java Posse
Subject: [The Java Posse] Re: Les CastCodeurs == Java Posse in French

[BoD]

I'm French, and I agree with him :) Accents are ridiculous and should
be @deprecated!

BoD

[Dominic Mitchell]

On 20 Apr 2009, at 16:39, Todd Costella wrote:
> Jeff just posted this on his twitter feed:
> http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1564775356
>
>
> <quote>
> c'mon. What serious language has characters wearing little tiny
> hats? àèìòù áéíóúý âêîôû ãñõ äëïöüŸ Åå? or beards? çÇ -- I REST MY
> CASE!
>
> about 4 hours ago from web
>
> codinghorror
> Jeff Atwood
> </quote>
>
> sigh. welcome to diversity.
>
> (Yes I realize this is said tounge in cheek. Maybe.)

Hell, wait until you get the combining accents — then you get hats
*and* beards!

-Dom (give me UTF-8 or else)

[Peter Becker]

Reinier Zwitserloot wrote:
> Well, what other language should be used? The internet grew up in
> english speaking countries, and soon expanded to places where english
> was the most commonly known non-native language (not neccessarily
> universally second, but, of all languages, the odds that a random Joe
> Q. European is at least passable capable of understanding one, is
> highest for english).
>
> The only other option I can think of is to officialize the
> jargonization process and run with something like interlingua, latin,
> or esperanto, and make up words with abandon. That's a little too
> geeky in my book.
>
> So, if not english, then what?
>

That's the problem, isn't it? It somehow reminds me of why I use Java :-)

I certainly wouldn't want German to be the language of choice -- if
English is too Perlish for my taste, German would be putting the
Architecture Astronauts in charge :-)

> NB: In regards to programming symbols: Seriously, now you're just
> whining. What else did you want? A localization for compilation so you
> can use a ß instead of a open brace? That would look crazy ugly, and
> is fantastically inpractical. We have 3 matched bracing symbols that
> are somewhat easy to type (on ANY keyboard, not just US 101), and we
> generally need all of them when designing programming languages,
> unless you're a badass like McCarthy and decide you can make it work
> with just 1 pair. You're ostensibly a nerd with some technical prowess
> if you're into programming, so fix your keyboard layout, or just do
> what everyone else (and yourself do), and just roll with us 101.
> Incidentally, I can type german and french very very well on apple's
> layout system, which has an extra meta-key which is pretty much 100%
> reserved for typing special symbols. ringel-S (ß) is alt+s, umlauts
> (ë) is alt+u, vowel, The euro € is alt+shift+2, the pound £ is alt+3
> (inconsistent, but, nobody's perfect, unfortunately), the inverse
> exclamation mark ¡ is alt+1 (note how sensical that is), and something
> like the c-cedille is alt+c (ç). There you have it, an international
> (at least, for western languages) keyboard layout that works well for
> everybody, in any locale, and even for programmers. Just use that.
>

As I said: I changed to US layout early in my life and I am not really
complaining about the use of the brackets in programming, more about the
fact that whoever created the German layout bothered to put them on, but
not to think about how to do it -- putting both the modifier and the
main key on one side of the keyboard while leaving the other unused is
plain stupid. Bad design by someone who probably was paid to think about
the problem.

There was a time where I could actually remember the ASCII codes for the
seven special German characters, using the Alt+number keypad trick to
type them everywhere. But nowadays most of my keyboards don't have the
numeric part, so I lost that skill and reverted to transcriptions :-)

Peter

[Peter Becker]

Let's not forget that the alternative is a language with half a dozen
and more pronunciations for the same sequence of characters. I still
haven't found a definite answer on the number of pronunciations for
"ough". Seven seems quite plausible, I found claims of 12 that seemed a
bit stretched since they included lots of Scottish and other place
names. And you won't know how to pronounce "bass" until I tell you if it
is a fish or an instrument. Sorry, but when it comes to words I'm a bit
homophobic. :-)

Peter

[Mwanji Ezana]

> I still
> haven't found a definite answer on the number of pronunciations for
> "ough". Seven seems quite plausible

I can think of 3:
cough
hiccough
Middlesborough

What are the others?

Mwanji

[DAemon]

Rough, bough, through, thought, though...

2009/4/21 Mwanji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com>

[Dominic Mitchell]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 07:32:54PM +1000, DAemon wrote:
> Rough, bough, through, thought, though...

Don't forget Slough (though I'd like to).

-Dom

[DAemon]

How could I forget? I mean, you get born there, for 15 years nobody knows where it is, and then some TV show turns it into a laughing stock!

*sigh*

- DAemon

2009/4/21 Dominic Mitchell <d...@happygiraffe.net>

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

I was hoping someone would catch that :)

[Peter Becker]

Not that I claim to really understand it, but here's a page with a sample:


http://www.fun-with-english.co.uk/2005/03/importance-of-correct-pronunciation.html

Wikipedia claims at least 6 for US English and 10+ for British English:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(combination)

Google finds much more on the topic:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=pronunciation+ough

It's up to you to consider it fun or scary :-)

Peter


PS: why is it "to pronounce something" but "pronunciation"? Is that just
some introduction to the "language fun"? ;-)
PPS: yes, maybe I am taking this too serious :-) But we care a lot about
programming languages as our tools, and in many ways the natural
language used seems a more important choice, a choice which we
unfortunately don't have at the moment.

[Ruben Reusser]

When I was a younger programmer I always wondered why we don't have a symbolic programming language free of any text - except maybe for resources. Should be easier to parse and would be fair to everybody.

--
Ruben Reusser
headwire.com, Inc
949 595 4365

[Peter Becker]

Ruben Reusser wrote:
> When I was a younger programmer I always wondered why we don't have a
> symbolic programming language free of any text - except maybe for
> resources. Should be easier to parse and would be fair to everybody.

... then he encountered APL and stopped dreaming :-)

But seriously: I think languages should be defined in terms of an AST.
It just won't buy you much, though: your libraries still need names for
all the methods and while you might still be willing to use mathematical
symbols for your collection API it probably ends there.

Peter

> headwire.com <http://headwire.com>, Inc
> 949 595 4365
>
> >

[Mark Fortner]

Having just finished listening to some free audio books where the readers played fast and loose with pronunciation, I've come to the conclusion that diacriticals in English would be a good thing!  More than just helpful with words like resume and résumé. 

Mark

--
Mark Fortner

blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jroller/ideafactory

[Steven Herod]

I've remarked that if programmers wrote literature all you'd get is a
set of unique words and a reference numbers telling you the placement
of each word in the text - on the basis that this is a more efficient
way of handling the book (no redundant words!)

Luckily for the worlds art and culture, we're not involved in the
design...

[Peter Becker]

But at least on average every 23rd word would be numberwang!

Somehow languages with far less ambiguity still spawn art and culture
and I am one of those weird people who believe that there is beauty in
good code. Some of that is due to the names used, but I think there is
more to it than just that.

I refuse to accept the argument that a language needs to be broken for
cultural reasons. And maybe there is space for more than one language,
too -- writing a specification just has different requirements to
telling a joke. And let's not forget the classic mathematicians joke:
"Let epsilon be an arbitrary large number", which is actually a pretty
formal specification, just an unexpected one. Of course only
mathematicians think that's funny :-)

Late here. Brain jumpy. Better stop.

Peter

[Mario Camou]

We used to. It was called APL. One word: Ugh (feel free to pronounce
that any way you want).
-m.

--
I want to change the world but they won't give me the source code.

[David MARTIN]

I've listened this first episode too, and I'd like to say how good I
find this initiative. As a french native speaker (mother tongue), and
even if I'm used to read/listen english stuff, it's always nice to
hear something in a language you master.
And, last but not least, these people (the french Gang of Four, a sort
of at least :)) have all the credibility because of their experience.

I'm now waiting to hear from them soon for new other episodes.

David

On Apr 16, 10:05 am, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> For French-speaking Java Posse listeners:
>
> I just listened to the first episode of a new podcast:http://lescastcodeurs.com/
>
> It's Emmanuel Bernard (Hibernate), Guillaume Laforge (Groovy), Vincent
> Massol (XWiki, Maven) and Antonio Goncalves (Paris JUG, JEE 6 EG member)
> discussing the news and technologies of the moment, in French. The first
> episode was quite good, I hope they can keep it going.
>
> Mwanji

[Frederic Simon]

+1
I really enjoyed it, and I'm happy this gang of 4 found the time to do
that. Really hope they will continue with it.