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I don’t speak Russian, but I do speak code
Here is a snippet from a blog post describing a lecture I gave yesterday in the Ural University:
Imagine him [Ayende] giving a public lecture at the Ural State University and demonstrating one of the numerous code snippets he prepared. Suddenly a guy (I think his name is Alex) interrupts him and tries to point out an error in the code. Unfortunately, Alex fails to express himself in English, and instead just mumbles incomprehensibly. After two more attempts, he gives up and explains the bug to the audience — in Russian. But before anyone has a chance to translate it, Oren smiles and says: “Oh right! You are absolutely correct, I have to insert a break statement here!”. Now, granted, Oren is a great talker and has no problem understanding people; but that was unbelievable even for him, because I can swear that: 1) he doesn't know a single word of Russian, 2) the guy who spotted the problem didn't use a single word of English (like break or foreach). Truth to be told, the whole situation was even scary a bit.
There was a roar of laugher in the audience when I did that, and it took me a while to understand why.
Comments
How did you do that?
lol, that was funny. It seems you started a legend ;)
We'll see how you do in Poland at TechFest.
See you there.
It's the side effect of 'Polyglot' vodka.
During that lecture you told, you very like to talk about flowers :)
Why there is not a sigle word about flowers in you blog????
Ayende, you should be taught in schools.
In russian IT community we have one joke about that.
Some one "big" IT specialist wrote in an article: Why we should use English word Firewall instead of _native_ Russian word Brandmauer?
That's a little too awesome.
I wonder how can you speak code. How did you do that?
That's pretty much awesone. LOL
I imagine that you didn't understand what he was saying, but figured out that he was pointing out an error in the sample code. While he was explaining it in Russian, you were looking at the code and realized the error, making it look like you understood his Russian explanation.
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