The point that they list as "key", that it's possible for programmers to learn with just Hindi, but not just Romanian or Hungarian, I suspect is wrong. Using number of language-specific Wikipedia articles as a proxy for content on the web, there are:
- 158,215 Hungarian articles
- 141,637 Romanian articles
- 54,058 Hindi articles
Also note that universities use English almost exclusively in India and that only about 20% of Indians are native Hindi speakers.
I'm not saying that the observation about level of English is wrong, but the assumptions about the reasons for such are suspect.
Your post reads like you've never actually been to India. I won't comment on the quality of Indian programmers, but I would say it's nearly universally accepted that the Indian flavor of English* rates at about the middle school level in the US. I have never seen so much poor grammar and misspellings in public places anywhere I've been. My guess is that they are taught English phonetically and that as long as the spelling looks like it would be pronounced correctly, the fact that it's way off doesn't matter at all. Most Indians, provided they're from the same region, speak to each other in their native tongue rather than English (whether it's Kannada, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, etc). English is the fall-back when people don't share the same Indian language.
* I'm commenting on popular English, not scholarly works.
I've spent about two weeks in India. Most Indians don't speak English. The college educated – a tiny minority – do.
The mangling is somewhat typical of a lingua franca in less-than-cultured contexts. That a shop owner can't write properly in their third language doesn't say much about the intellectual class's abilities.
Real Indian-English – the stuff you hear on the news – is a proper dialect (akin to, say, Scots), not simply bad English.
Romanians are doing great when speaking of communication skills.
There are 2 reasons for that ...
* English is learned in school from the second grade, and we don't have a local dialect
* TV stations / cinemas are airing movies in English (we are used to subtitles) :))
* we are a latin country and our culture isn't so different from the one in US
Of course, I'm not speaking for a majority of the population, but all the educated professionals I know have proper English skills, especially programmers ... since the literature here lacks, and the only valid way to learn real-world programming is to read books/articles in English. Of course, there are always exceptions.
Speaking the language doesn't automatically give you good communication skills. That being said, I agree that most Romanian programmers have good English skills. I studied computer science in Romania with English curricula - all my colleagues spoke outstanding English, making English classes somewhat superfluous.
I find that good command of the English language is a conditio sine qua non from a Romanian programmer - how else would he go about to continuously educate himself ?
I recall an informal survey on the Wikipedia mailing list at some point, and their (admittedly not very scientific) conclusion was that most of the Hindi speakers who edit Wikipedia are also fluent enough English speakers (at least in written English) that they can also edit the English Wikipedia, and for various reasons they often prefer to.
Some of the reasons cited, going by memory, were: 1. English Wikipedia already has more existing content for scaffolding so you're not writing from scratch; 2. English is seen as more official/academic, so an encyclopedia article in Hindi feels wrong, like writing a journal article in Hindi; 3. for India-specific topics in particular, writing in English is seen as a way to disseminate information about India and Indian culture to a worldwide audience; 4. English is more neutral in a within-India political context, without the north-south issues Hindi sometimes has.
Wow. That's pretty amazing, given that Hindi is probably the fourth most widely-spoken language in the world. I would never have imagined it to be used so little online.
I'm not saying that the observation about level of English is wrong, but the assumptions about the reasons for such are suspect.