> In the beginning I had unkind descriptions of these sorts of questions, but I've come to be more sympathetic to them, especially the questions that come from people abroad who may not have English as their first language. The unfortunate fact is that projects aren't necessarily well documented and their documentation probably is dauntingly hard to read for people who aren't fluent in technical English, and people have work to get done (using those projects).
I am lucky to have English be my primary language. If most of the world's documentation was in another language like Spanish, I can certainly see myself struggling to RTFM and resort to posting on a forum with my best effort at using Spanish to explain the context of my technical bug and request for help.
English isn‘t my native language, but the language I am most comfortable having technical conversations in. I struggle to express computer science topics in my first language.
I talked to many who share that sentiment. Computer science, programming languages, documentation, and discussion forums tend to be anglocentric. I learned in English, and most technical terms are English.
A loop is a loop. There is a word for it in my native language, but it sounds very weird to me to use it in a technical context. Almost nobody uses the native term. Everybody just says "loop".
There are even many words that do not really have a translation. There isn‘t a good translation for "release" in German, when used as a noun.
Example in a totally different context: There's lots of Go terms that are Japanese, and don't have an English word. They just are that word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms
I am lucky to have English be my primary language. If most of the world's documentation was in another language like Spanish, I can certainly see myself struggling to RTFM and resort to posting on a forum with my best effort at using Spanish to explain the context of my technical bug and request for help.