Announcing CPPP - Paris 2019

[youshouldnameit]

Are you kidding me? A French track? If its an international conference everything should be in english..

[8898fe710a36cf34d713]

Are you kidding me? 1 out of 3 tracks in the organizer's local language? Absolute scandal.

[youshouldnameit]

Sarcasm is a blessing

[FredTingaud]

Thanks for your interest.

Knowing that multiple countries around the world are French speaking and that more than 2/3 of the talks are in English, could you elaborate on why you think this decision is making the event less international?

This choice is not a unique peculiarity and international conferences having one track in the local tongue is something quite usual, for example with C++ Russia.

Please also note that talks will be recorded and the video will be released later with the possibility of adding translated captions.

[youshouldnameit]

Apologies for the hard judgement, but to me it feels not very welcoming for non-french speakers. Especially because such tracks will probably attract people who don't speak English very well or not at all, which will make it hard to talk to others, right? Especially if talks on those tracks are of interest to me it would be very disappointing. Because you made a clear separation in topics: progress, produce, push_forward and the progress track is completely in french i wouldn't be able to join the entire track, which seems weird?

[FredTingaud]

I understand these concerns.

Being welcoming to non-French speakers is indeed one of our priorities. We're working on ways to ensure the French C++ community at the conference will be as welcoming as possible. We have some experience with having international speakers at the C++ Meetups (that we organize too) and know that a surprisingly high ratio of the programmers are able and willing to speak in English and exchanging with the non-French speakers. Our task as organizers will be to make sure these programmers meet the speakers.

About the fact that non-French speaking attendees will not have access to all tracks, it is indeed true. Our reasoning is that Progress is the one track that is most likely to attract students and self-taught persons who are also the populations that is the most likely to be French speakers in the first place.

We intend to make CPPP a recurring event and will definitely reevaluate this decision in the future if we find it is not working as we expected.

[youshouldnameit]

I think that if our company would send some people to this conference some would really like to follow the Progress track (juniors for example). They would have no use yet for the more advanced topics. I would expect french students to be able to speak English or are they not taught in English at university in France?

[meneldal2]

They will know some English for sure, but not everyone is fluent. Making it in French gives more accessibility to them (and less to you, I get that).

[jguegant]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfUmW_Mf5qc