111–120 of 657 posts
It's actually never come to my mind that there are only English programming languages So programmers in China and Russia also using only English programming language?
Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.
I don't know... is it even meaningful to call a Programming language as being in some other language ? The "language" in the CS sense remains essentially the same, and all you end up doing is substituting the alphabet.
This situates the problem in an entirely modest light, and makes it obvious as to why any new "nativist" programming language is not worth the trouble - the alphabet, in this case the terms, is rarely ever the hardest part of learning a language. Indeed, if you're a lisper, the triviality of the change would become instantly obvious to you.
so, like APL
I've always wondered why this is not more common. Is there a reason you can't just have localized keywords in each language that map to the same thing? Chinese JavaScript, etc?
Excel seems to be localized and I absolutely hate it. A german version of excel expected me to write WENN instead of IF, or SUMME instead of SUM. It's dumb. Especially since if you're trying to look up code snippets or how to do something in excel, you'll find one in english and then have to find the corresponding german commands.
It turns out that according to the locale Sheets will change the separator for params, so in en-US it'll be:
=sumif(A1:A10, "Something", B1:B10)
=sumif(A1:A10; "Something"; B1:B10)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems. Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.
I would guess it comes from calling the universal quantifier ”for all” in logic
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it never caught on, even in Francophone countries I started programming at least 4 years before I started learning English. In my experience, not knowing what "if" means doesn't change anything because I never thought of code as prose. Whether it's called "if", "si", or "wenn", all that changes in my head is "what's the magic word that I have to insert before I can branch my code?". This, I believe, it's why locali…
Yes, it's only like 20 keywords to learn. I wish people who come up with all these inscrutable icons would realize that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems. Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.
Originally it was a Anglicization of "für" in German first used in a programming language called Superplan which was then picked up upon by FORTRAN and then it just stuck
It's actually never come to my mind that there are only English programming languages So programmers in China and Russia also using only English programming language?
Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.
Now, if the natural language has some influence on the semantics of the programming language, it might be useful enough. Doubt it, as most natural languages' grammar is way harder than either English or your average programming language. The only attempt that comes to mind right now would be Lingua::Romana::Perligata[1] and that's just an esolang layer.
Now, for political or philosophical reasons an artificial language might be considered. Like Esperanto or Lojban, but I haven't seen something like this, either (I'm not counting Klingon).
[1]: http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.
Back in the 1980s, I thought it would be great to add German, French, and Japanese error messages to the compiler. I hired native speakers to do the translations. But nobody cared. Programmers program in English. I once traveled to Finland to visit a customer. Everyone in the office spoke in English. I asked if they were just being polite because I was there. They said nope, their staff was from all over Europe and t…
There are, to this day, people who get in trouble when their computers reply to them in English, including coding folks. I bet they were (and are) thankful for initiatives like yours, but they won't have the vocabulary to tell you.