Abstract

Stack Overflow (SO) is the reference for asking and answering programming-related questions. In early 2014 Stack Overflow em Português (SO-PT) was announced with the goal to reach developers that are not sufficiently proficient in the English language to fully participate in SO. Almost four years later we study how the simultaneous availability of SO and SO-PT impacted Brazilian software developers. A priori, the impact could have been either empowering or impeding. To address this question, we combine interviews, analysis of trace data from SO and SO-PT and a survey of 229 Brazilian software developers. Our results indicate that the developers recognize availability of the information, response speed and accessibility as strong points of SO, and lower barrier to entry and presence of Brazilian-specific information as strong points of SO-PT. In large, SO remains more popular than SO-PT, and SO-PT is not perceived as a viable alternative to SO. of barriers to SO participation Ford et al. [12] identified through interviews and survey such barriers as “Nothing Left to Answer' and “Fear of Negative Feedback'. Importance of English as a foreign language when training future software developers has been stressed by Bakanova [5]. She argued that English has influenced modern programming languages far beyond the choice of specific words as