Talk:English in computing

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[edit] Early discussion

I was hoping there would be something about the quality of English used on the Internet. For example: http://www.somethingawful.com/flash/shmorky/babby.swf —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.173.186.157 (talk) 09:15, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

for me this article does not provide enough backing for the figures quoted

nobody gives a shit

[edit] VFD notification

This article was nominated at Articles for deletion on Aug. 26, 2005. The ultimate result of the discussion was basically "no consensus". For a non-admin, this is a tough call, so I hope I don't get reprimanded too harshly for making it. I closed the VFD, calling the result of the discussion "no consensus, therefore send it back to the drawing board". I feel fairly confident in doing so, since even the nominator noted that the version at the time of closing was significantly different from the version at the time of nomination. I'm going to close the VFD, because I don't see that the later discussion was even mildly contentious, but I've also added a {{cleanup}} request to the article, and let those editors working on the article itself decide when to remove it. A record of the VFD discussion can be found here. Tomer TALK 08:02, September 1, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, if you look at it after the changes were made it was basically a keep, 5-2 or something, so no worries. It does need to be rounded out which I'll try to get to. Marskell 08:44, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Inaccurate 80% figure

It has been years since the Web was 80% English - and this "fact" is actually contradicted by the earlier part of the article. Of the citations listed in support of the Web being 50% or more English, only one seems to be reliable, and it dates from 2001. Most sources I've seen estimate around 35% of the Internet is in English. Tyronen 23:22, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_internet_usage there is currently about 35.20% for English, so if other sources repeat a similiar figure then this may be more reliable. 80% seems a tad high. Rai 09:39, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

WRONG. 35 percent of the USERS are english. The 80 percent figure refers to content.

[edit] English in computing

It seems to me that what's lacking from both this discussion and the English language article is general English in computing. I'd say this page needs that sort of discussion, and should be renamed to the more general "English in computing". I'm referring to the fact that English is ubiquitous in:

  • Programming languages. They are full of English keywords like "if" and "main" and "return".
  • Communications protocols - for example HTTP is made up entirely of English words such as "GET", "POST" and "Content-Type".
  • Simple character encodings - before Unicode (and even now, in many applications), character encodings like ASCII supported only the basic Roman characters, obviously designed for English, making it very difficult to represent text in other languages, especially those that use different characters.

I think it's very closely related to the "English on the Internet" article since it's mainly for the same reasons as cited here. —EatMyShortz 10:31, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Richest technical vocabulary?

Someone needs to substantiate the statement that English has the richest technical vocabulary. It is possible that this is true in some spheres but general it is utter rubbish. There is a technical term for every technical term in English in another language say for instance French or German. This is also true for other languages used for technical communication.