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Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

thesage21.github.io

11–20 of 62 posts

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#11
Nice, just one suggestion:

The languages are just dictionnaries: You should store them in an human-readable language instead of pickle. So it's easier for people to correct errors (json, yaml,..). For example, `FR_example.py` have "else" instead of "sinon" but to correct it I would have to open the pickle file and modify it in my terminal.

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#12

I'm not native English speaker, but I wish people would just accept that English is Latin of computers. I still have to come to servers installed in German or French and guess by memory where stuff are.

Teaching programming to my 8 year old is a burden, because everything is in English. Teaching two things at a time is more difficult than it has to be.

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#13

English will always be a barrier to non-speakers when it comes to computing. This is great. On a side note: is there any idiom-agnostic programming language? I only know that APL is.

I coded in a Brazilian Portuguese version of Logo at school. I remember there was also a Portuguese Portuguese version of the same toolkit. Both were called Megalogo.

On a related note, "idiom" in English does not mean the same as "idioma" in Portuguese ;-)

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#14
post #13

English will always be a barrier to non-speakers when it comes to computing. This is great. On a side note: is there any idiom-agnostic programming language? I only know that APL is.

I coded in a Brazilian Portuguese version of Logo at school. I remember there was also a Portuguese Portuguese version of the same toolkit. Both were called Megalogo. On a related note, "idiom" in English does not mean the same as "idioma" in Portuguese ;-)

The same for Hindi. For some reason Google decides to translate the same word differently when I go through an API and when I do it in browser.

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#15

I'm not native English speaker, but I wish people would just accept that English is Latin of computers. I still have to come to servers installed in German or French and guess by memory where stuff are.

Teaching programming to my 8 year old is a burden, because everything is in English. Teaching two things at a time is more difficult than it has to be.

Kids learn languages a lot better when they have a use case, so I'd argue that teaching them english at the same time as teaching them programming, is actually beneficial.

And let's face it, the vocabulary of programming languages is tiny.

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#16

I'm not native English speaker, but I wish people would just accept that English is Latin of computers. I still have to come to servers installed in German or French and guess by memory where stuff are.

If you were curious about learning the guitar, would you first purchase the best 10,000$ guitar you could find at your local shop? No; you'd find some cheap guitar to play on initially to see if you could actually make a habit out of practising the guitar. Now if it turned out that you didn't like it, you have minimized your financial losses.

Similarly, some people don't know English. Maybe they're curious about programming. Should they have to learn a whole new language first? Or be distracted by the fact that the foreign programming language they have to write is also written in a foreign natural language?

I'm not sure I even agree with your premise. It's a bit premature to worry about having to interact with code written by people that are just learning programming, isn't it? Like anything, when you empower people to learn things like this you have to trust them to have the decency to write programs in English in settings where there might be other people who don't speak their language that have to deal with their programs. Or trust that they wouldn't be hired for such jobs in the first place.

> I'm not native English speaker,

And? Does that give your argument more weight?

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#18
Fundamentally I think that the effort is flawed. Languages don't really map to each other on a word to word basis.

At school in France they introduced algorithms with a form of french pseudo-C which was very frustrating, because it felt stilted and unnatural.

Expressing the same algorithms in natural french would already be a much better exercise, because you don't have to force yourself through a fake translated language. Ultimately I think this would be a much better first approach to programming, (with more focus on design than implementation).

In the end if you really have to implement code, you will have to learn the english version anyway if you want access to documentation and outside help.

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#20
post #17

I don't really see the point of adapting the programming language to the learner, which seems to be the smallest language hurdle, when they'll have to ask for help in english on forums, in IRC, or on SO, anyways.

Think third world. The kids in my village have a single computer without Internet. Sure they will need to learn English since almost the entire literature is in English, but they may yet taste the joy of programming first. It makes little sense for them to think in one language and write in another. But, I do see your point.
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