211–220 of 657 posts
Scala supports Unicode characters in identifiers. It would be interesting to know your take on that.
That's way internationalization is a lot harder than just applying a dictionary.
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So glad this turned out to be a joke in the second paragraf. The first is very believable. I've definitely encountered people who would write something like it unironically.
TBH, I didn't get the joke until I read your comment. A small "/s" at the end wouldn't hurt.
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…
(Europe is only a special case "to some extent" because English also competes for lingua franca status with Hindi in India; in Japan it's taught (badly) as a result of connections with the US; and in countries as varied as Israel and Singapore it has a foothold.)
If you're starting from first principles, and are willing to go with that common-second-language threshold instead of insisting on people's first languages, English is still definitely a clear first choice - it barely edges out Chinese for total L1 + L2 speakers, and those speakers are concentrated in the centers of software development.
After that you have Chinese and Hindi (both fairly restricted in geographical reach, but involving lots of people), then Spanish (most of Latin America) and French (spoken in a dizzying array of cultures as L2, because of colonial history in Africa and the Middle East).
And then you finally get to Arabic :-P
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That’s good if you write language-agnostic software and live in cool english low level or web bubble. If you take any local business-logic heavy software that uses a big set of terminology, you may regret that it wasn’t written at least by transliteration (better in native). This may be less of a problem for Latin-derived languages. I met this a lot, and it is a reverse problem of what jansan described about VB. You…
Non native speakers would'nt be able to take those jobs anyways if names were untranslated and in local script.
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A lot of people don't speak English and I think it's main barrier to become a programmer or QA engineer.
You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).
This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does. This is the same reason…
This comment is a good way to see all the HN users who go off of a comment without reading it fully.
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And your point is?
Yeah, you seem to be just trolling at this point if you pretend to not understand the huge irony in saying homogeneity is bad in plain English in order from someone from Colombia to understand what your are saying.
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For science and technology yes - not that long ago you had to learn German in some scientific fields as that was where a lot of the useful work was being done.
Imagine the horror of having to learn another language to access valuable intellectual ressources. I just can't relate.
I think the interesting question would be if you could build an IDE replacing keywords, interpunctation, writing order etc on the fly while emitting in the end "standardized" output (aka. English).
If we do not like English for whatever reasons (let us say: bias to the western world), I think the only real deal are Emojis. Replacing all keywords with Emojis is pretty universal (until it comes to color ... red/green has very different meaning around the world) and using some standardized/auto-translatable naming of variables and functions. Could be tons of IDE support.
Anyway. Nice inspiration.
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If this is an ironic post, hats off to you.
Dear tsanummy, help us to find the irony in my post or better the message in your post. So, what's your point? I'd love to know what you are talking about. Just to give another example: Imagine all countries in the world had the same language and people could move freely: You had massive and full competition between all nations/cities/economies for the best people and competition is good. Nobody is locked-in because…
