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Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

thesage21.github.io

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Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#21

Post by patrickg »

j-pb wrote: post #15
patrickg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I agree to the use case / tiny arguments, it doesn't seem to work in practice. I am now using Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) to teach programming. Much better.

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#22

Post by j-pb »

Dewie3 wrote: post #16
czechdeveloper wrote: post #7

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 prog…

> And? Does that give your argument more weight? Yes because he is potentially one from the target audience of this.

If somebody isn't willing to put in the tiny bit of effort to learn the tiny bit of english required for programming, they're not willing to put in the huge amount of effort that is required to learn programming anyways.

We have enough horribly documented code that needs maintenance, there is no need to add horrible documentation in hundreds of languages.

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#27

Post by emersonrsantos »

elros wrote: post #13
emersonrsantos wrote: post #5

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 ;-)

I meant idiom-agnostic as format-agnostic, collective, universal: like math, music, etc...

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#28

Post by j-pb »

patrickg wrote: post #21
j-pb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I agree to the use case / tiny arguments, it doesn't seem to work in practice. I am now using Scratch ( https://scratch.mit.edu/ ) to teach programming. Much better.

Scratch has the advantage of making the limitations of the computer tangible. The block nature will show you what can be done and what can't. For example, newbies in procedural languages often try things like

if(something){loop = while} else {loop=if} loop{print("hi")}

and it's not immediately obvious why that isn't valid in text, while in scratch it is.

I don't think its the language though that makes things easier.

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#29

Post by raverbashing »

patrickg wrote: post #12
czechdeveloper wrote: post #7

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.

Really?

I just memorized things. And they'll learn a little bit of English

They don't need to know what 'if' means, they just need to learn "you use if to do this"

(Now, to be fair the docs were in my native language, that helped a lot)

Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages

#30

Post by gear54rus »

Dewie3 wrote: post #16
czechdeveloper wrote: post #7

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 prog…

> Should they have to learn a whole new language first?

No. That's the difference between this and the guitar: you can't buy a few bits of guitar. But you can learn words like 'print', 'var' or 'for'.

I'd steer this more into the land of 'manhours spent localizing are manhours wasted' rahter than

> to worry about having to interact with code written by people that are just learning programming

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