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The developers are not the problem.
The customers are. It's hard enough to get them to specify their domain without using 20 different names for the same thing while each name they use has at least 20 different meanings. Getting them to do that in some obscure language, like English, is near impossible.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: The customers are. It's hard enough to get them to specify their domain without using 20 different names for the same thing while each name they use has at least 20 different meanings. Getting them to do that in some obscure language, like English, is near impossible.
Sorry, but that is part of design and is not a problem; it is the devs' responsibility to make sure that he understands the domain of the user. The user cannot be tasked to model his data-structure, so the dev has to make those decisisons, and has to communicate that to the user in a way he/she can verify the idea.
Writing code is the easy part of programming 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: it is the devs' responsibility to make sure that he understands the domain of the user
Good to know. How far can I go to accomplish that?
"Find out what he knows, and then take care of him!"
Eddy Vluggen wrote: so the dev has to make those decisisons, and has to communicate that to the user in a way he/she can verify the idea
Yes, based on what what we got out of him in the first place. I have a customer who has some problems overlooking the consequences of the things he demanded to get. What do you think would happen if I took the liberty to invent new names whereever I could?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: What do you think would happen if I took the liberty to invent new names whereever I could?
I'm not talking about inventing new names
CodeWraith wrote: I have a customer who has some problems overlooking the consequences of the things he demanded to get.
That's your job; you can't expect the user to be knowledgable about development; similar we can't be expected to know everything about the niche we work for.
So, you're expected to explain those things in terms that the user understands. That's why I keep saying that development is more than simply writing code; a lot of problems in IT projects can be traced back to insufficient communication
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: The user cannot be tasked to model his data-structure, so the dev has to make those decisisons, and has to communicate that to the user in a way he/she can verify the idea.
That, right there, is the most difficult part of my job. I've come up with a rule about it: people don't know what they want until they see what they don't want.
The only way to get technical direction out of non-techies is to do iterations of what they are asking for and show them, until they get an idea of how their ideas work out in reality and get a sense of what they really want. Sitting around a meeting table talking about what's needed is just the first step to showing them what they don't want.
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StatementTerminator wrote: That, right there, is the most difficult part of my job. I've come up with a rule about it: people don't know what they want until they see what they don't want.
Yes, modelling and analyzing is not something that is very common anymore; most build agile and change their ideas along the way, guessing their way to a design.
I prefer to plan ahead, and waterfall my way to a list of definitions. It takes longer to get started with the actual coding, but I cannot imagine to work without.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Except for the fact that there are more dyslectic people in English speaking countries than anywhere else....
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Sounds like a weird fact; would imply that English causes dyslexia more often?
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I did not say causing...
However, there are striking examples of people being dyslectic in English, whereas they are fluent in another language; I read about such a person, born in a mixed marriage, who moved from England to Japan for this reason...
Think about the many many words looking/sounding the same or similar/very different in English, like hart, hard, heart, heard, herd... plough, tough, though, thought, thaw... led, lead, lead, read, read, red... (there are a lot more of these...)
Hard for spelling, but also for dyslectic people te read back...
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By the way,
I am not a native speaker, but I always prefer English for "communicating" with my computer:
be it the Default language of my operating system, the names of variables and/or objects and comments
in my source code...
But I still wonder how that would all work if I were to use Esperanto in stead 
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JSOP, feeling empathy for foreigners?
WTF is wrong with my browser this morning?
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I didn't mean to imply that I was feeling empathy. In point of fact, I was going to add "It sucks to be a foreigner" to the original message, but I didn't feel like pushing buttons today. I can see now, that decision is coming back to bite me in my redneck ass.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
modified 12-Mar-18 8:39am.
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That's more like it, you are back again 
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consider that a large number of the virii etc [supposedly] come from China, Iran etc where not only are the words different but their style of scripting, and word order, syntax even direction is not based on 26 distinct letters left to right...
... yet they manage ok.
The language may differ, but business functions and logic still all work the same, 1 + 1 = 2 no matter what you call it or how it's written.
And even many "English" programming languages have some odd names/terms, word order and syntax as compared to natural English.
Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote: so picking the correct class/method must be someone difficult.
I'd have probably used the word "somewhat" in that sentence.
However, given that I was born and raised in a "non-English-speaking country", I could be wrong. Oh wait, I did learn everything in English from Kindergarten all the way up to my Masters.
I still think that I could be wrong, because your English must clearly be superior as you're from 'Murica and all.
Hope it's nice and warm in Texas. It's been a beautiful day here down under.
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I blame the time change. I'll go back and fix it.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Rajesh R Subramanian wrote: I still think that I could be wrong, because your English must clearly be superior as you're from 'Murica and all.
Texas was a "foreign" country, and it still shows
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The language knife cuts both ways. As a native English speaking, I have not experienced problems with coding due to language, however, when reviewing a vendor supplied database schema or data tree, the entities may be in a foreign language.
For example, we were tasked with getting data from a vendor supplied database. The tables and columns were all in French, but the words largely had vowels removed - a method I've seen English speaking analysts use as well.
Or, getting data from a DCS written by a Spanish firm; all of the items in the data tree are in shortened Spanish and no translation table was provided with both Spanish and English descriptions.
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That's nothing, long ago I had to deal with VB6 software in Japanese !
We usually referred to those characters as 'flattened mosquitoes'
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RickZeeland wrote: 'flattened mosquitoes'
Awesome. 
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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RickZeeland wrote: That's nothing, long ago I had to deal with VB6 software in Japanese !
That's awful! How did you manage with understanding VB6?
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Same as when you get poorly documented source code, just trial and error, takes a bit longer but eventually I always figure it out
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One of the great things about C is that it uses symbols more than words.
(If you can trust Bing translate...)
# define wenn if
# define während while
# define fort do
# define anderes else
# define brechen break
# define weiterhin continue
# define schalter switch
# define fall case
modified 11-Mar-18 13:17pm.
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Nah, English is a piece of cake, compared with C++ intricacy.
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