Non-English-based programming languages

Post by pasabagi » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 7:27 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #136

furyofantares wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lower-case words have a wider variety of shape, as so many letters have markings extending above and below the horizontal lines that bound the letter o. UPPER-CASE WORDS ARE BASICALLY ALL RECTANGLES OF VARYING WIDTH AND FIXED HEIGHT. BUT THEY USE MUCH LESS WHITESPACE, WHICH IS WHAT LOWER-CASE WORDS USE TO CARVE OUT SHAPE. I believe the result is that lower-case words are easier to read at sufficiently close distance…

Word shape is not a well-supported theory of reading. Very skilled and practiced readers are still going letter by letter. "The result" is that if you pull people off the street and ask them to read capitalized or lower-case text, they're slower at reading the capitalized text. People like pasabagi want to leap to the conclusion that that means reading capitalized text is harder. That conclusion is unjustified; the r…

Post by majewsky » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 7:31 AM UTC

falcor84 wrote: post #103

majewsky wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming uses the same words as regular English, but it is a completely different linguistic register, so there is never any conflict. Moreover, when you cross over those jargon terms into their regular meaning, hilarity ensues. For example, you can easily prove that oaks are infinitely tall in winter. Start by observing that in winter, oaks don't have leaves. Then consider the graph-theory definition of "tree"…

Alternatively, oaks do not have any nodes at all in winter

Post by inopinatus » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 7:53 AM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #159

Falling3 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When camping, I enjoy pegging the guys" can also have a wildly different (sexual) meaning.

Our friend @inopinatus was certainly making that joke.

Post by stesch » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 8:10 AM UTC

Iv wrote: post #143

aasasd wrote: post #24

Seeing a programming language in your native language after working with English ones, you discover that it looks and sounds pretty ridiculous. My belief is that the native language is ingrained on a low level in the brain, so it's decoded ‘in the hardware’ and directly invokes meanings and associations, whereas a second language goes through at least some level of conscious processing. The very same way, I'm physica…

French here, that's my experience as well. I want to emphasize that the huge majority of the non-english native programmers I know are pretty opposed to translating programming languages. However, my experience teaching Japaneses has been that what is crucial if you want to make a programming language accessible to different nationalities is to translate error messages correctly. Learning IF, FOR, RETURN is not hard.…

Post by buybackoff » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 8:23 AM UTC

ginko wrote: post #168

buybackoff wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cannot agree on error messages, had opposite experience with them. I always require all team members to install English versions of runtimes because it is easy to search non-trivial errors on the internet. Many translations are automatic or done by not very technical people and they sound weird in local language, e.g. many terms in Russian, even such simple as "heap allocation", are really weird. An English error tha…

I guess this is where error codes come in handy.