“they felt it disorienting to express in their own native language programming constructs that they'd learned in English” Trust me, going from natural-language

“they felt it disorienting to express in their own native language programming constructs that they'd learned in English” Trust me, going from natural-language English to programming-language English is just as discombobulating. (Been there, done that; made a deliberate point of remembering that experience.) If you’re only testing it with existing programmers, you’re bound to skew your results because anything new and different to what they’re already used to is a disruption to their established flow. As in any scientific research, designing the right control for your trial is critical to avoiding GIGO. A better test would be taking groups of English and non-English non-programmers, and teaching both of them entirely from scratch. (This assumes, of course, that each group’s teaching materials have been human-localized to the same standard, and all trainers follow the same script.) That way you avoid polluting your results with preconceptions and existing biases. Out of interest, is there any more public information of your work here? iris-script[1], my own end-user-friendly language project and obvious anagram, has a way to go before I can begin to explore localizability, but it’s on the TODO list so I am collecting links to relevant material. Ta. -- [1] https://github.com/hhas/iris-script https://github.com/hhas/iris-script