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Proposal: Stack Overflow (in French)

I find this proposal interesting but like many people I'm wondering if it's viable or not. I feel like to be viable, we need people looking for information in French and people willing to provide information in French. Personally, I don't. Or hardly. I'm almost always using English.

I don't want this question to become like a poll, but according to your own experience or experience from fellow developers you know, are developers having French as their native language really looking for information in French when it comes to software development? There are many development blogs or forums in French everywhere and the original SO site is one of the biggest developers community around, so what would concretely be the value added?

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    Bien que les forum ne soient pas aussi bien surveillés que ceux de Stakoverflow il existe developpez.com qui vaut surtout pr ses tutoriels et autres articles.
    – cl-r
    May 31, 2012 at 15:12
  • I'm thinking of the same in Hungarian, could we get together and build native language knowledge base sites in whatever languages? Who expects a 10 year old kid with great IT skills to know perfect English? And who expects their schools to teach English at that age on that level? Impossible. Even if you are above 20 your English isn't strong enough to follow a 'simple' tutorial video. That's a huge drawback. If you agree please vote my discussion. area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/31156/…
    – Dgloria
    May 12, 2020 at 6:56

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I'm a French developer. I think a majority of my colleagues prefer it when they find information in French, and have their browser configured to search for pages in French if possible. Most of them can understand written English, and even write English if pressed, but would prefer a site in French. There is an audience for a Q&A site about programming in French.

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I know a few developers who really are not at ease with reading French.

But mostly the problem is with writing. Writing a simple question is easy, but be reactive, witty, expressive in English is hard for most French, which make them kind of 2nd class citizens in the developers society. Practically letting English always be the only language of programming gives the leading role to the natives. It's particularly problematic when the consequence is that developers don't really know programs made in France.

That's the main reason why I try to write most articles in French in my blog (no link because it's not interesting and this post isn't for self promotion) and I try to launch in reddit /r/programmation. The poor results make it evident that today most developers don't look for information in French. But I think the reason is that this information isn't yet available. The day we get the critical mass, like it happened in some other domains (most French people read online general news in French), developers will look for information in French.

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No developer I know ever searches questions in languages other than English.

Localised development sites such as this one have almost 0% chance of having any degree of success, and will surely make the Internet a slightly worse place. Only "slightly" because they would be obviously ignored by most, as they deserve.

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