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I believe that you described lisp :)
I get the joke :) Although, taken literally, this is not the case. The existence of a variable in Lisp is not decoupled from its human-string-name, as Lisp source is textual. If you were to rename a variable, anything that referred to it (binding sites) would be broken. The human names in Lisp source code are crucial to program execution, unlike, for example, compiled native binaries without dynamic linking.
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Especially because when English is less expressive than a Romance language, we steal those words from the Romance language until we're at least as expressive.
But it`s much easier to create new words in english. Like transform a verb in a noum, or adjective, etc I`m a native portuguese speaker, and think that romantic languages can be more "emotional" than english. But its amazing how a new idea can be expressed so easilly in English.
German and Latin can create new words or ideas much easier than English can. English creates them 'easier' by wholesale importing them. Take the concept of 'karma', there is no word for this in English. In German this word is schicksal. This concept doesn't exist in English at all other than the Hindi import.
I ended up on the (Chinese-language) page for 丙正正¹, a Chinese C++ variant. There was a code example, which I ran through Google Translate to see what would happen. The result is surprisingly readable (and obviously a C-family language)²: Empty chess file :: set comments (character * s, integer n) { If (n> = maximum number of comments) For (; maximum number of annotations ¹ http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%99%E6%AD…
I have a translation of "Design of the Unix Operating System" in Chinese, and take great comfort in the fact that I can still get the gist of all the source code listings--even despite the comments in Chinese.
I admire the simplicity of the grammar in Chinese (from the year I took of it in college), but honestly I find logographic languages are kind of gross.
EDIT:
Fine, fine, I admit it: a language with millenia of cruft is totally reasonable to use as the way of persisting the cruftiest programming language in the world.
Indeed, the same years of hard study that are required to write and read Chinese literately should be added onto the same years of study required to write and read C++ reliably.
This is such a comically bad and obtuse idea I think we should propose it as the next draft standard.
EDIT2:
Look, explain your downvotes (in the language of your choice!). My opinion is simply that alphabetic languages (here exemplified by English) are superior to logographic languages--mostly because they require knowing fewer characters.
I may be grossly misunderstanding Chinese here; as claimed, my schooling in it is limited.
When I write code, it's code. I don't read it like a human readable text. Because of that, I don't really care what it reads when I try to read it as a human readable text. For example I don't even think about what it would mean in English if I write while(true){ i++; if(i>100) break; } I'm curious if native English speakers look at code as real English text sometimes? It should be funny, because when I translate my…
For things like "while", "do", "return", "public", "private" I definitely think of it as "real English text". For things like "for", "wend" (while-end), "class", "switch", "main", they're divorced enough from any real English meaning that I just think of them as arbitrary coding words. So, it's kind of both, at least for me.
My rather simplistic view: as a native Portuguese speaker, I strongly refute the idea of programming languages (and even coding) in a language other than English. Besides the obvious reasons (globalized world, outsourcing, multinational corporations, etc), English is much less expressive than the Romance languages [1], which makes it a better formal language. 1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
It seems to me like using symbols instead of words makes the most sense. It wouldn't be particularly harder to use for English speakers, and it might actually make code easier to read, since there would be less cognitive load in distinguishing keywords from identifiers.
But the summum is reached with perligata.
When I write code, it's code. I don't read it like a human readable text. Because of that, I don't really care what it reads when I try to read it as a human readable text. For example I don't even think about what it would mean in English if I write while(true){ i++; if(i>100) break; } I'm curious if native English speakers look at code as real English text sometimes? It should be funny, because when I translate my…
Every statement has a meaning, and every block is a story. If it wasn't readable we could just as well use BANCstar [1].
(Btw, I absolutely hate that Microsoft translates Excel formulas (and so on) in localized versions. I simply cannot program in my native language: I basically translate back to English mentally.)
* Alphabet has 33+ letters, so there is no space left for programmer's favorite symbols on layout: @#$^&{}[]|~`. Yep.
* In Math variables' names traditionally are Latin/Greek letters, Cyrillic is used only when teaching kids. Again: switching layout all the time? No, thanks.
* Words are simply much longer. And I mean much. In English even short words tend to become shorter (variable -> var). In Russian there is simply no such pattern exists. `var-set` -> `установить-переменную`. `var-get` - `получить-переменную`.
* Words are stable in English morphologically. e.g. `last-msg-delivered` - `last-msgS-delivered` -> `последнЕЕ-сообщениЕ-доставленО` - `последнИЕ-сообщениЯ-доставленЫ` - if you change gender or from singular to plural etc you should change few words in a row.
Seriously, it seems to me like trying to make things more complicated.
My rather simplistic view: as a native Portuguese speaker, I strongly refute the idea of programming languages (and even coding) in a language other than English. Besides the obvious reasons (globalized world, outsourcing, multinational corporations, etc), English is much less expressive than the Romance languages [1], which makes it a better formal language. 1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
As someone who is a native English speaker, but close to native level in Portuguese (lived in Brazil for 8 years), I'm curious what you mean by English being less expressive -- I've never heard that before. Both languages have their expressive poets, authors, etc. It's easier to rhyme in Portuguese (it's almost like cheating, since the verbs all end in the same syllables), it's easier to modify the grammar classes of…
An ambition of mine is a programming language where the program structure is decoupled from its visual/textual appearance (model-view separation). One nice result of this scheme is, for example, you could work on a program in English and another person could collaborate on the exact same source in French. Although I suspect that if this did get written and translated around a lot, many non-English speakers would stil…
* Formatting isn't preserved and the file is retabbed each time you save it.
* Earlier versions had French and Japanese compilers/decompilers
* Each application can add AppleScript syntax (like VBA/OLE or whatever). If a script uses commands for an application you don't have installed, you see the raw FourCC codes in the code instead.
It's actually a quite interesting language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript