International auxiliary languages should be utilized in software development (to improve international collaboration).
Given that international auxiliary languages allow for more efficient cooperation; I think more people should consider using an easily learnable IAL, like Esperanto.
IALs would reduce the English dominance that gate-keeps software development to English persons; and hence allow more potential software developers to better develop software. The English language is mostly dominant in software development because of linguistic imperialism.
Esperanto is not a particularly easily learnable language to most of the world. It's a very parochial language made by someone whose exposure to language was all European and very strongly focused on specifically East European languages both phonetically and grammatically. English, to take a horrifically terrible language at random, is not much harder to learn for, say, a Chinese speaker than Esperanto would be, but it would be a million times more useful given the rather pathetically small number of Esperanto speakers out there.
If you're going to use a constructed IAL (as opposed to de facto lingua francas like have been historically the case), make one that isn't filled with idiotic things like declension by case, by gender, by number, by tense, by ... Or you're going to have most people in the world ignoring it. Like you already have for Esperanto.
Δu vi scias Esperanton? Esperanto ne estas perfekta, sed la Angla estas pli granda malordo. Mi vere dubas ke la Angla estus tiel facila kiel Esperanto.
Esperanto is ignored for political reasons, not because its bad.
Dude, I said English was harder. Seriously, try to keep up! I just said it's not much harder and comes with the benefit of people actually speaking it so that learning it isn't a waste of effort.
Further, Esperanto is ignored because it's not much easier than natural languages to huge swathes of the world's population, but at least has the benefit of being utterly useless to learn.
Learn a few languages from places that aren't Indo-European ones. Learn how you can have grammars with little to no declension, for example: no verb tenses, aspects, voices, genders, cases ... not even declining by count. Then consider:
On top of this:
PolishEsperanto.And I'm out of steam already. There are a whole lot of hidden linguistic assumptions in Esperanto that are alien to language speakers from outside of the Indo-European milieu, or difficult for such speakers to actually perform. To someone in steeped an Indo-European linguistic environment these are invisible. They're "natural" or even "logical". But they are absolute tongue-twisters and conceptual mountains for those coming from outside of those environs. And if you're going to climb those conceptual mountains and twist your tongue in service of these phonetic horrors, where do you think it's best to expend your efforts:
If you're sane and value your time, you pick literally almost any natural language in the world for better return on investment, even though it may, in the case of some of those (coughIndo-Europeancough) languages, be a little bit more difficult than Esperanto. (Yes. A little bit.)
I used to think this, yoo, and made a similar comment on Reddit a year or so ago. I was challenged to back up my assertion, and presented with some studies involving Esperanto clubs/groups in China and Japan that suggest it's not particularly difficult for non-Euro native speakers.
I wonder, are you referring to specific studies, or quoting common knowledge?
Is there any scientific evidence Esperantano is more efficient, has significantly superior user experience/usability? What about that in the context of using it for software engineering? People seem to have developed it in the 1800s; so outdated. Also many issues https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Criticism like bias and the gender non-neutrality; I would discard it. I would suggest to come up with a better language for the 21st century. This one seems better https://www.globasa.net/eng
Also, isn't this an XY problem? The problem is that many people do not know the current dominant language that people use in science, technology, so on. So you propose Esperanto. Well, now you gatekeep it to people who know Esperanto, which is a way less demography than English. But since learning languages that are more close to one's native language is easier, that would allow people from Latin/Roamance/Germanic-based languages to possibly learn it faster? That would not be true to Asiatic languages, ...
Why another language is the correct solution? Why not improve current education systems? Why not machine translation? Why not improve translations? If the US switches its official language to Esperanto, wouldn't it be imperialist as well? Language dominance is linked to socioeconomic development. You need countries like US to actually adopt it; otherwise it would be just another language to learn besides English. You are just making it harder.
The idea behind a language like Esperanto isn't necessarily that any one country uses it as their primary language. It's that it can be rapidly learned as a second language (or in parallel with a primary language) and spoken with just about anyone.
For software development I would have thought of Lojban (the logical language). It's supposed to be syntactically unambiguous, so there are even parsers for that language.
Esperanto seems to me kinda... meh. Like, if we are going to do something as ambitious as establishing an IAL, why not shoot for the stars? Why not choose something that by some standard most of us can agree on, is the best of all for the job (not saying Lojban would be one, since it doesn't even aim to be an IAL)? Let's say ease of learning was one of the most important criteria: Then toki pona or some other derivative could be something we ought to look at. Or maybe even create and entirely new language. The one thing I see that Esperanto excels in is its popularity, which is useful to avoid the "Why would I learn that language if no one else speaks it?" situation, but I believe we should go beyond that if we have the choice of establishing an IAL.