EU is not a single country and starting a business varies from one member state to another. I currently own a business in both Finland and Portugal, and I can start a new business in Finland, online, without even stepping into the country in about half an hour and by the end of the day company is fully operational. Portugal however works in a traditional way with lawyers and actual physical paperwork and signatures and takes forever.
Of course completely different thing is that while starting a company in Finland takes half an hour getting a bank account to your company might take 3-6 months if you even manage to get one. I had a good relationship with my Finnish bank and I had been a customer for over 40 years and when I asked about a business account they just said "no we are not going to give you an account and this is final" without even asking for any paperwork. This is not just because of banks, it's mostly because of KYC. Luckily there are new banks which really want customers and I assume that if I wanted to start a new company in Finland _today_ I could get both the government side and a bank account done in half a day and start billing the next day.
Client company of mine likes to document server rack layouts with Excel sheets (not a bad idea really). I used LibreOffice for years to _read_ those Excels, but any time I would write the smallest change the whole Excel sheet broke... In the end I just bought Office (one-time payment still exists) and while that company is using Macs and I'm using Windows we never have any problems sharing and modifying those xls files.
Oh, you meant easy to learn programming languages based on a real language? Yeah, English just happens to be one of the easier languages to learn and if you need to learn a programming language you can just as well learn English on the side. I did.
I’m curious—do you think learning English is equally easy for everyone? Many programmers come from regions where English education is either poor or expensive. If someone is highly logical but struggles with English, should that be a barrier to learning how to code? Also what was your level/accessibility to education of English before you learned it? Did you start from scratch? Did you know a language that shared a root language with English?
I literally learned English reading the only computer books that were available at the time, mid 80s. That was before I had a single English class in school - in fact I already knew English pretty well by the time I started studying English on 7th grade. I come from Finland and the Finnish language has absolutely nothing to do with any other language (except Estonian), no words are even remotely similar to English.
Also I totally suck at learning languages. I've tried to learn Swedish, nope, German, nope, Spanish/Portuguese, also nope.
Ja jos mielestäsi suomenkieli liittyy johonkin muuhun kieleen niin ihan vapaasti voit ajatella niin. Viime viikonloppua yritin opettaa muutamia suomenkielen sanoja ja taivutusmuotoja kielenopettajalle joka jaksoi kuunnella noi puoli tuntia ja totesi etta "mahdotonta oppia koska mitään referenssiä muihin kieliin ei ole".
That’s impressive. But do you think your experience is typical or more of an exception?
What if coding was built from the ground up to be script-agnostic—where people didn’t need to 'learn English on the side' at all?
If a Finnish speaker could code in Finnish while collaborating with a Japanese speaker coding in Japanese — and the system translated everything seamlessly — do you think that would increase access to programming without fragmenting the codebase?
The Finnish version of Excel used to have all of the functions translated to Finnish (in late 90s when I was doing Excel for living). It was literally impossible to do anything with it as none of the documentation knew about the translated functions and it was very hard to self-translate the functions (as in there was mostly no logic in the Finnish function names thanks to the way Finnish language works).
What was supposedly done in good faith to make it easier for non-English speaking Finns to do Excel functions ended up making it impossible for everyone. If you didn't know Excel then =IF() was just as cryptic as =JOS() and if you did know Excel then you couldn't figure out why =IF() didn't work. At least .xls files were compatible because apparently functions were saved as opcodes and not as strings.
I haven't used non-English software since so no idea if Finnish Excel still has translated fuctions. Hope not.
Exactly! Even in low-level programming like Assembly, the core instructions are still based on English. Do you think there’s a way to design programming languages that don’t rely on English at all—not just in keywords, but in how concepts are structured?
APL and possibly Erlang aren’t based on English, yet they never became the global standard.
Do you think it was because of technical reasons, or was it just easier for English-based languages (C, Python, JavaScript) to spread globally? If we designed a non-English programming system today, do you think it would actually gain adoption?
I standardized on US ANSI layout (straight Return, not the L-shaped). I'm from a country where the local language has accented chars and while it's nice to be able to chat with correct accents I find it better to be able to code without dead keys (~) and AltGr.
I also solved the lack of accented chars by just mapping RALT+<char> into it's accented version. Took me about a week to learn but now it comes naturally and I'll never go back to my local keyboard layout.
Of course trying to find a laptop locally with US ANSI layout is a pain...
Don't take this the wrong way... but I control my lights with mechanical switches that are installed to walls of my home. They don't need logins to any cloud services, in fact they don't even have internet.
There are a handful of solutions to the problem of the lights being on while in bed, but wanting them to be off. One way is to turn off the lights before entering the bed. Another way is to get out of the bed and turn off the lights and then return to the bed.
Another popular solution is to place a lamp near the bed, such that the light controlled by the wall switch can be turned off before entering the bed and the lamp nearer the bed can be turned off while in bed.
Of course completely different thing is that while starting a company in Finland takes half an hour getting a bank account to your company might take 3-6 months if you even manage to get one. I had a good relationship with my Finnish bank and I had been a customer for over 40 years and when I asked about a business account they just said "no we are not going to give you an account and this is final" without even asking for any paperwork. This is not just because of banks, it's mostly because of KYC. Luckily there are new banks which really want customers and I assume that if I wanted to start a new company in Finland _today_ I could get both the government side and a bank account done in half a day and start billing the next day.