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Seeing anything in computers using my native language feels wrong. I think it’s because I learned how to use computers before I learned English well. For examp
by Swizec 7y ago
Seeing anything in computers using my native language feels wrong. I think it’s because I learned how to use computers before I learned English well.
For example I learned that to print a line in Pascal you use writeln() at 12 or so. It didn’t occur to me until 10+ years later that writeln is shorthand for “write line”. To me it’s just a symbol with no meaning outside that particular context.
- olalonde 7y agoSame here. I still remember feeling pretty dumb the day I realized that "if" and "else" were also English words.
- umanwizard 7y agoI'm a native English speaker, and so the reason for names like "if", "while", etc. were clear to me when learning. On the other hand, your experience learning programming was similar to mine learning to use a Unix-like OS. Although I do know their etymology as a bit of useless trivia, for the most part "cat", "grep", "vi", "diff", "sed", "dd", "df", "tar", and so on are just arbitrary symbols to me.