71–80 of 657 posts
Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.
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Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems. Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.
Hmm, never thought about it either. I'd guess a contraction of "for each value..."
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I disagree. Calling English keywords in programming languages a barrier is the same as describing symbols in mathematics as a barrier. It doesn't matter which word signals an IF clause, the global uniformity is what is really important. English has become the basis for the symbols of programming. You should not think of code as prose, it is simply code .
I don't think keywords are the problem, it's library function/type names that will be much more difficult to learn / interpret.
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Native English speaker and I also don't really get what "for" was meant to mean. At this point it's probably just something that everyone has memorised and part of history.
I'm not a native speaker, but "perform this task, for i in {1,2,3}" seems to make sense as a prose. At least it does in French, when translated literally.
Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.
Never understand why non English programming language would exist except for identity politics reason, nowadays. It is not like using non English languages would change paradigm programming itself.
Scala supports Unicode characters in identifiers. It would be interesting to know your take on that.
Only known to be secure are java and cperl. rust followed my advise then for better unicode identifier security, but I haven't checked if they really promise some General Security Profile.
http://perl11.org/blog/unicode-identifiers.html
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/#Security_Levels_and_Ale... http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr31/#Table_Candidate_Charact...
I've always wondered why this is not more common. Is there a reason you can't just have localized keywords in each language that map to the same thing? Chinese JavaScript, etc?
Excel seems to be localized and I absolutely hate it. A german version of excel expected me to write WENN instead of IF, or SUMME instead of SUM. It's dumb. Especially since if you're trying to look up code snippets or how to do something in excel, you'll find one in english and then have to find the corresponding german commands.
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> it never caught on, even in Francophone countries I started programming at least 4 years before I started learning English. In my experience, not knowing what "if" means doesn't change anything because I never thought of code as prose. Whether it's called "if", "si", or "wenn", all that changes in my head is "what's the magic word that I have to insert before I can branch my code?". This, I believe, it's why locali…
Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems. Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.
In python is pretty direct: “for x in a” translates for for every x in the collection a, do this code...
In C it’s a bit more abstract: “for (i=0; iModern languages often use foreach or some other slightly more descriptive name.
Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.
> it never caught on, even in Francophone countries I started programming at least 4 years before I started learning English. In my experience, not knowing what "if" means doesn't change anything because I never thought of code as prose. Whether it's called "if", "si", or "wenn", all that changes in my head is "what's the magic word that I have to insert before I can branch my code?". This, I believe, it's why locali…
This way there might not be a need to invent a new programming language per human language.