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  • Axel Rauschmayerrauschma@fosstodon.org
    Oct 12, 2026, 3:35 PM

    What language do you speak best? (Hypothesis: There are many French & German speakers in the Fediverse.)

    :fediverse: Boosts appreciated!

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Replies

  • Axel Rauschmayerrauschma@fosstodon.org
    Oct 12, 2026, 3:44 PM

    It’s also remarkable how many people speak “Other”! 🙈

    EDIT: I was trying to make a joke by pretending “Other” was a language. But that clearly didn’t work. 😬

    I expected the Fediverse to have many English & German speakers and had read that it was popular in France. I wanted to check these assumptions via a survey and my instance only lets me create four options. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect but the replies to my initial post show just how linguistically diverse the Fediverse is!

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  • Axel Rauschmayerrauschma@fosstodon.org
    Oct 12, 2026, 9:30 PM

    It’d be very interesting to do a proper survey with a representative sample and an open set of languages!

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  • Dana Friedtess@mastodon.social
    Oct 12, 2026, 4:56 PM

    @rauschma to be fair, je parle français und ich hab' auch ein bisschen Deutsch.

    (I'm apparently the perfect Mastodon user lol.)

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  • Axel Rauschmayerrauschma@fosstodon.org
    Oct 12, 2026, 9:28 PM

    @farah Nice! I recently came across that language when reading about Mamdani’s campaign in New York City: There seems to be a sizable Bengali community there.

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  • Thomas Fuchs 🫯thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
    Oct 12, 2026, 7:18 PM

    @rauschma My native language is German but honestly my English is better now than my German (which I almost never use anymore)

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  • Axel Rauschmayerrauschma@fosstodon.org
    Oct 12, 2026, 11:01 PM

    @brouhaha Such a great language! I used it a lot in the 1980s. Also, Wirth’s “Compiler construction” book is a great introduction to grammars and parsing.

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  • Axel Rauschmayerrauschma@fosstodon.org
    Oct 12, 2026, 11:55 PM

    @brouhaha Same here! I used Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon/F in the past (among other non-Algol languages). Now almost exclusively TypeScript.

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  • TomAokiTomAoki@bsd.cafe
    Oct 14, 2026, 12:02 PM

    @brouhaha @rauschma
    When I was a college student, students of Electronic and IT course were "allowed" to learn Pascal, but students of all other course including me (I was of Material Engineering course) were "forced" to learn FORTRAN77. Ah... over 30 years has passed...

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  • Axel Rauschmayerrauschma@fosstodon.org
    Oct 14, 2026, 12:33 PM

    @TomAoki Wow FORTRAN! I learned Pascal in the 1980s and back then, FORTRAN already seemed like a mythical language of the past to me (I never learned it).

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  • TomAokiTomAoki@bsd.cafe
    Oct 14, 2026, 1:16 PM

    @rauschma
    Yea, even NOT Ratfor!

    Maybe the background of the thoughts was "How students other than IT course use computer in the future should be scientific computing, especially number crunchers. So no languages other than FORTRAN should NOT be needed FOREVER!". I believe learning "structured languages" before FORTRAN is worth enough to write "a bit readable" and less "wait, where am I at?!" programs even in FORTRAN77 and/or BASIC. (Features for structured programming on FORTRAN77 was still limited, early phase.) For scientific computing that require a plenty of "complex numbers" may fit FORTRAN.

    At the era, there were no python ecosystem (I dislike, though) for scienticfic computings and even C++ was not popular (too heavy runtime!) for personal users in Japan.
    Turbo Pascal was available via 2 small companies "Japanized", but for Turbo C, we need to wait for 1.5 (available via the same 2 companies).

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  • Axel Rauschmayerrauschma@fosstodon.org
    Oct 13, 2026, 12:55 PM

    @mirabilos My understanding: Editing the text of a post does not change the votes. That’s what I did. Editing the survey options resets the votes to zero. But I don’t know why you would see vote fluctuations! Maybe that’s about Mastodon versus other Fediverse servers.

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  • mirabilos🐈‍⬛mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
    Oct 13, 2026, 1:18 PM

    @rauschma editig a post can change the votes (I’ve not yet seen rhyme to when it resets to 0), and it arguably should because the edit can make the options mean something else entirely (which your second edit did, so…).

    I know I had to re-vote twice.

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  • Axel Rauschmayerrauschma@fosstodon.org
    Oct 14, 2026, 8:40 PM

    @d10c Sadly, my poll is deeply flawed anyway. Interesting that you don’t speak your native language best anymore! Mine certainly has declined but not yet to the degree that it eclipses languages I learned later.

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