This is a "fun" idea. Being able to write Ruby code, using Italian instead of English.
Not practical. Not useful. But fun. I like that.
Italian Ruby
141–150 of 178 posts
Re: Italian Ruby
#142The thing is most Italian schools don’t do a great job at teaching English [1]. Students either pay for courses, self-study, or forget. I’m Italian and I don’t agree with the author’s premise that non-native speakers have an additional translation layer (e.g. Italian -> English -> Ruby). It depends on your knowledge of the English language. As you master the language your brain becomes better at context switching; yo…
You should see how terrible the French classes we had here in Ontario public schools. It was an additional recess for kids in the 3 different schools I went to, for all 8 mandatory years.
The french teachers were a rotating course of young women doing the class no one other teacher wanted, suffering the worst abuse from kids.
French classes should be killed off in Canadian anglo provinces IMO. I highly doubt they have any measurable positive outcome besides teaching kids to count in french (actual competent French speaking rates are really low here despite being legally bilingual). We waste so much tax money in Canada on purely-performative bi-lingual exercises outside of Quebec and some east-coast areas.
If people really want to learn a language you really need to dedicate yourself and/or be around others native speakers at a young age.
Re: Italian Ruby
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming and English a natural match, no. Programming and a global language, or the global language as a natural match, maybe. There's nothing super special within English itself that makes it particularly well suited for programming, but the fact that it's the global language of business, tourism, air travel, diplomacy, etc. makes a good case for it. English has far, far more non-native speakers than any other la…
That's not actually true tho. Chinese Mandarin has ~ the same number of speakers as all English speakers, it's just your Englo-centric bias that makes you see the world in your skewed way, where English is the center of everything, which is exactly what I'm railing against (in English no less)! It does have international currency, but that's blurrier than you might think. French and Arabic both have enormous regional…
> where English is the center of everything, which is exactly what I'm railing against (in English no less)!
Nah. English isn't the center of everything, but it's already in lots of places, and that momentum is hard to stop.
> Chinese Mandarin has ~ the same number of speakers as all English speakers
I said non-native speakers. Look at the distribution too. Outside of China/HK/Taiwan, the number of people who are proficient in Chinese is very limited, especially if you're looking at those outside of the Chinese diaspora. Whereas tons of countries have significant numbers of English speakers.
Just look at how many countries count English as an official or de facto national language: there are dozens of them.
> French and Arabic both have enormous regional currency in EMEA.
Eh, kinda, kinda not. Especially within Europe, French is a very distant second to English in terms of second language usage.
> But the point is, even if you can say it's global (which it's not if you're taking a truly global perspective and thinking you can "go anywhere and speak English and you'll be operating fine!")
By this metric, there's never been a global language, and there won't be one for decades at a minimum. You're just using a different definition of "global language" compared to everyone else worth an absurdly high bar. Great for you if you wanna play in your own playground, but back in realityland "global language" means something different.
Re: Italian Ruby
#144There's this absolutely mind bending idea that is - every single function should have a unique identifier. Which is to say: def square(x: Int): Int = x * x should get hashed (and if it has dependencies, they should get hashed in there, too), and your programming language should track the unique identity of this function, and keep a list of names separately from the hashes. This totally solves the localization problem…
localization problem? i believe that is an invented problem. why would anyone write code in his/her native language?
> why would anyone write code in his/her native language?
Well, actually, a lot of people already do.
Re: Italian Ruby
#145There's this absolutely mind bending idea that is - every single function should have a unique identifier. Which is to say: def square(x: Int): Int = x * x should get hashed (and if it has dependencies, they should get hashed in there, too), and your programming language should track the unique identity of this function, and keep a list of names separately from the hashes. This totally solves the localization problem…
I think VBA does this. E.g. the name of excel functions are localized.
Re: Italian Ruby
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am really stoked for the future of programming languages, when localization is just a matter of translating some words. My experience with localised codebases (in my native language) have been horrifying - like it or not terminology is developed in EN, you either get unnatural sounding "borrow" words and the translation is pointless or worse you get people coining new terminology nobody but them understands. Not…
> I dread every time I see Chinese in a codebase (simply because they are a large enough market to split the dev community) They aren't going to split it, the rest of us will adapt. English was arbitrary, so was French and Latin and Greek before it. Probably in the form of some Romaji-like equivalent (ideograms are too high a bar) but we will start to adopt it. The largest economy dictates the lingua franca because t…
Latin is still in use in science, medicine and law, and "the economy" behind it was destroyed some 1500 years ago...
Re: Italian Ruby
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I dread every time I see Chinese in a codebase (simply because they are a large enough market to split the dev community) They aren't going to split it, the rest of us will adapt. English was arbitrary, so was French and Latin and Greek before it. Probably in the form of some Romaji-like equivalent (ideograms are too high a bar) but we will start to adopt it. The largest economy dictates the lingua franca because t…
It's a pretty amazing coincidence how it just so happens that English is (one of) the most convenient languages to encode into bytes.
It's not a coincidence, the A in ASCII stands for American.
Re: Italian Ruby
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a pretty amazing coincidence how it just so happens that English is (one of) the most convenient languages to encode into bytes.
It's not a coincidence, the A in ASCII stands for American.
Sure, but just the fact that roman characters with no accents (or just a few), plus all of the punctuation, fits in a 7 or 8 bit key space.
Re: Italian Ruby
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a pretty amazing coincidence how it just so happens that English is (one of) the most convenient languages to encode into bytes.
How is that? I don't know about Chinese, but surely Japanese has much better entropy in bytes? As would other languages with more expressive character sets.
That's the issue. English can be represented with 7 bits. Good luck doing that for any logographic language.
And that doesn't even take into account that since English (and a lot of alphabet based languages) use spaces to mark where words begin and end. In Japanese, you can have a word that consists of a kanji plus a few hiragana characters as a grammatical marker. But there's no space between that word and the next. How do you know decide where to insert a line break?
Re: Italian Ruby
#150In itself this seems like a ton of fun. But for interoperability it seems horrible to me and is pretty much a nightmare. Working with codebases from different companies in different countries, the ones that lag behind in on way or another are often written in the local language (i.e. German or Dutch) which essentially cuts a lot of it off from the common knowledge pool on the internet.
While English isn't the biggest or the best language, it's the language with the must useful body of information regarding technology.