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As a non-English speaker, I don't really conceptualize code as English. Tokens being 'if', 'while', 'else' is completely trivial, like using '{' instead of 'beg
by qsort 6y ago
As a non-English speaker, I don't really conceptualize code as English. Tokens being 'if', 'while', 'else' is completely trivial, like using '{' instead of 'begin' or '[]<class T>(T i) {return i;};' instead of '(lambda (x) x)' or 'y => y'.
I wrote my first line of code before I wrote my first word in English, the status-quo doesn't really require you to learn English beyond a couple trivial tokens.
I agree choices are good and I hope the project succeeds, but it must be stressed that learning English isn't really optional anyway, it's a hard requirement for any IT-related job worldwide.
- bombcar 6y agoI think it might affect some languages more than others - perl is just line noise in any language, but I could see SQL "dialects" in various languages. But even then I feel that in that case non-english speakers might have a bit of an advantage as they don't assume things about SQL because it doesn't look like their native language.
- qsort 6y ago> but I could see SQL "dialects" in various languages. IIRC AppleScript used to support French, but it's an unpopular variant of an unpopular language, so I'm not really sure how many people actually used it. > But even then I feel that in that case non-english speakers might have a bit of an advantage as they don't assume things about SQL because it doesn't look like their native language. Yeah, the sooner you realize it's the abstract and not the concrete syntax you're actually manipulating, the better. IME (natural) language is just not a barrier at all.
- tsimionescu 6y agoThat's true for keywords, but a much bigger problem are standard libraries. I don't think you could realistically understand the Swing API to pick an example without understanding English, even if you had access to docs in another language.
- brudgers 6y agoDocumentation too.