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Bjorn

Race, language and cultural barriers to game development

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Not directly to do with game development but if you don't speak English well you can't really get into tech, IT, fantasy/scifi books, etc.

 

The name filtering sounds like some nightmarish bureaucracy.

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The name-filtering liability part was interesting. I would think that companies wouldn't be liable for matches that are so general that the assumption of an actual match would be so unreasonable. I tried some names out on that U.S. Treasury Dept. website and it matches "John Arnold" and "Stephen Law".

I also thought the part about computer languages being in English was surprising. I just assumed that you could program in Chinese characters or Japanese or whatever. Is that not a thing?

Edit:

So I found this list, but I don't know much about low-level computer language, so I don't know what it means when it says that there is a Chinese C++

Does that mean that the results can work on a machine that can run English C++?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages

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Programming languages, for practical reasons, almost always (can't think of a counter example off the top of my head) have restrictions on how you can define a name for your variables or whatever. In many languages it is possible to use a limited set of unicode characters (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Unicode_variable_names) but that may not necessarily include foreign language characters. Regardless the most common languages use english reserved words and standard libraries are usually programmed with english (based) names for functions and modules. Almost all libraries, apis, sdks, etc... across all languages are designed like that and as a result if you wrote a compiler that allowed you to write code for c++ or whatever in different characters you would still mostly be working with english words with whatever libraries you are working in.

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Besides, programs written using words from languages with grammatical cases can read very weirdly. Even if the language keywords were translated and there wasn't any mix of say English/Estonian, the Estonian "sentences" would all be grammatically incorrect, unless the compiler had understanding of the grammar of the natural language as well as the programming language - making an already complex task exponentially harder. English just works surprisingly well with programming languages.

And then there's interoperability of libraries - if each human language would have to have translations of libraries in each programming language, further complicating the ecosystem.

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I should ask around to see how that works with Korean cause obviously that place has pretty booming digital economy but it also has hard on for learning English (for this kind of reasons) but the English teaching system is also kinda all over the place.

 

Similar wondering with Japanese but don't know anyone from Japan personally.

 

Chinese is such an oddity cause language is just sooo different and complex that I read even getting new font is an incredible task.

 

But yeah, from my experience growing up in Korea this is a thing there and so far the most practical solution (at least there is one there cause the culture places high value on education) seems to be pretty much 'learn it and deal with it' which... sucks but that's how it is :/

 

Making English 'cleaner' grammatically would help though.  Fuck all those weird exceptions.

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What I find especially is frustrating is that on sites like Stack Overflow, which is a very valuable resource for learning, poor english becomes a signal to people that a post is poor quality. So people draw assumptions about lack of intelligence and laziness, when really they're trying hard to write a post in their non native tongue. That's even aside from the genuine problem of communicating complicated problems in a language you're not well versed in.

 

Thankfully, the site is trying to set up sister sites in other languages. Off the top of my head I know they have Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Russian, and I think they're going well and planning more.

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 So people draw assumptions about lack of intelligence and laziness, when really they're trying hard to write a post in their non native tongue. 

 

I do that a lot of forums. I have infinite time for people who are clearly not native English speakers in person (I've worked with a lot of Romanians and Czechs when I was a waiter), but thanks to txt spk I just immediately jump to "this person is an idiot" when their writing is bad.

Terrible habit.

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I keep going back to thinking about the list to filter who can and can't download the Unreal kit, and am flabbergasted by its use for game development software.  The only reason I can think of is that there is fear that someone could use it to develop either simulators or propaganda.  Someone probably could.  But that someone, who would do that, could just as easily pirate the kit, or use a "safe" name to download it.  The barrier to acquire it, if you don't care about support or a legal license, is no barrier at all.  So, the implementation of that list can functionally only have a single outcome: alienating people with certain names from access to a common tool for a big and popular industry. 

 

I can't think of a defensible reason that anyone would ever implement that list for this specific case. 

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That one also tripped me up completely. I mean, even if one of America's most wanted were to download this, I'm pretty sure that cursing their way through tutorials and engine documentation would be a better use of their time than whatever else they might get up to, or why exactly does this specific thing have to be guarded in such an alienating, half-assed fashion.

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My entirely unfounded on fact assumption was that the list isn't about barring the listed people from particularly dangerous products/companies, so much as saying "These people are on a list, don't do business with them" to businesses. So UE4 wasn't singled out as someone who should follow the list, they were just implicated in the list's general usage.

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I'm having problems finding what the criteria and requirements of use for the SDN list even is, although that could just be my google foo failing me. 

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I know that export of encryption tools used to be protected by the US government. Perhaps it still is - I haven't looked into it lately.

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The part about programming languages being converted to english is a fascinating thing to me, mainly in that the structure of high level programming languages follows the structure of english.  I don't think it would be enough to simply write a compiler for the language in question, as the structure of the programming language would probably need to still follow the general structure of english but with the other language's words swapped in.  This is probably exacerbated in game engines, where speed and memory footprint is at an incredible premium, but it seems like in general applications there has been a (still somewhat small) push to create more non english based languages.  Interestingly enough, the goal of the .Net program that spawned C# and Java was meant to combat this problem, though as I understand it the idea of ILs has fallen out of favor due to rapidly changing hardware.  I wonder if this point specifically will get addressed as computers get faster and the performance difference between native and CLRs becomes negligible.  On the high level side, I wonder if this kind of concern will push for the development of better visual scripting systems, which could even eliminate the need for words to be used at all.  This is such an interesting phenomenon to me, because the world I assume Rami is imagining requires either a massive overhaul of the very idea of programming, at virtually all levels, or for the creation of some unified system that will probably still be written in english on the base level but can be interfaced with abstractly.

 

I personally don't know enough about networking and machine level systems to comment further, but I imagine if those things don't get addressed then the most that can be hoped for is a high level integration of different languages, with the base level components (and higher paying jobs) remaining in english only.

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