Attaining a level of proficiency in "English" required for programming (keywors, mostly) is incredibly simple, if required at all. Just accept the fact that 'for' loops in some way. In mathematics, you will also have to learn what the uppercase sigma means, hell, they even use the greek alphabet!
Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
#32I 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.
There are local programming forums in most countries.
Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
#33Pfft - Hasn't PHP had error messages in languages other than English for years?
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Seriously though, I'm a bit surprised that people are so dismissive here of the need for having programming languages that use function/method/statement names that aren't in English.
Learning a foreign language and a programming language is something that's pretty incredible as far as I'm concerned. I'm pretty lucky that English is my first language and that function, method and statement names are pretty descriptive given they are almost always written in my native language. If I had to spend a lot of time trying to memorise another language whilst also learning a programing language, I highly doubt I would have been able to do even 20% of what I can do today.
I mean, nobody speaks any language remotely like assembly - higher level languages exist because they're easier to understand and use, at least in part because they use a lot of English word to describe what's going on. I can't see any problem with more work being done on making more tools (transpilers perhaps?) for people who speak languages other than English. Heck, we've done some pretty awesome things transpiling to/from JavaScript lately, why not start transpiling from a variant of JavaScript that uses Arabic or Mandarin to the English variant of JavaScript?
Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> if(something){loop = while} else {loop=if} loop{print("hi")}
The only reason that wouldn't work is bad language design. In e.g. Smalltalk or TCL it's fine.
Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
#35I'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.
A lot of the best programmers I know are foreigners, and they learned English and their respective programming languages side by side. It is a lot more useful to know English to search and ask for programming help in, than to seek help from natives of your language whose skill set may be very minimal and may not be of any use, or worse, they may suggest poor programming practice.
Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
#36Earlier 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.
This feels like a case of, if we all got hit on the heads with baseball bats every week, people will start to extoll the benefits of getting hit on the head with baseball bats. It builds character! And it's not that painful!
Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
#37I'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…
A non-English programming language is more like buying a Keytar so you can get the feel of playing guitar without having to learn something different from the piano. It's not terribly useful, and if you decide you actually want to pick up the guitar you'll just have to forget everything you've learnt and learn it all again.
Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
#38I'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.
I agree. Localization is nice for end users, but I really don't get localized servers, localized .Net errors etc..
People argue that newcomers need to learn 'two things at a time', English and programming. I think that's absurd. No programming language (cue the COBOL people complaining?) is remotely similar to English, the language. Keywords are limited and it's a very foreign way to talk to a machine. Not a language in which you're going to ask where the next loo is.
You might recognize some of the things you had to type to make your name show up in an endless stream on the screen as words when you learn English as a foreign language. Fun moment. But until then, this is really just painting buttons in green instead of red.
I think the idea of that project is neat, interesting. But I don't believe that this is a good way to do things and I cannot imagine that I'd use something similar when my kids are old enough to start exploring this field.
Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
#39I'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.
It is really horrible when local civil servants start to invent translations for English words, which did not mean anything computer-related to begin with. Like Spool and Cache and Cookie. Why cant browser's Cookie be just Cookie, it is easy to vocalize in any languiage. Why they want to translate Cookie into local bakery term? It does not raise level of comprehension any.
Partly because 'cookie' requires the latin alphabet, and the ability to pronounce those sounds (it's not as easy as you think). If you're trying to avoid dilution of your language, you may want to come up with your own localised words.
Re: Show HN: Programming in non-English languages
#40Hey, that looks awesome!
The implementation approach is really simple and that's cool for a prototype, however in order to work well for libraries and the standard library, we need to use the ast. If you want, I can make a pull request with an ast-based translation(I have a lot of experience playing with python's ast) ?