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To all native English speakers, before talking about standards and lingua franca, try to implement some basic algorithms in Latino and take a minute to imagine

by crvdgc 6y ago

To all native English speakers, before talking about standards and lingua franca, try to implement some basic algorithms in Latino and take a minute to imagine a world where it is the standard (programming & documentation). Then you'll understand the meaning of "entry barrier" and "language advantage", if you remember that's the reality for billions of people in the world including me.

rigoleto 6y ago
Thank you. Too many commenters here, years removed from being a beginner, aren't getting it.
hervature 6y ago
As someone who doesn't care about the language, my question is if the goal is to reduce the entry barrier, what is the benefit of this language versus investing the same amount of time in Spanish documentation and a Spanish transpiler for Python? Multi language documentation is definitely lacking, but making a new language adds to the complexity of the space, it doesn't reduce it.
- brudgers 6y ago
  Multi-lingual documentation is premised on the idea that languages derived from English are better or at least good enough. The premise of this language is that they are not. The Python community is not committed to multi-language documentation. And it has the ideology of "unpythonic" as an excuse for denigrating anyone who might be.
  - hervature 6y ago
    I hardly call the use of a few keywords as "derived from English". There are 36 keywords in Python, one of them being __peg_parser__, what the hell does that mean for an English speaker? Maybe the Python community is not the best example, I did not know they actively subverted any attempts at multi-language. But still, forking the project and simply renaming and translating the documentation would serve much better at lowering the barrier of entry, if that's the goal. The cynic in me thinks that the creators of the language simply used that excuse as a way to justify scratching their itch to create a new language given that there are so many better ways to remove the English barrier to programming.
    - brudgers 6y ago
      Python was mentioned in the parent comment. “List comprehension” is English. “Object” is English. “Keywords” too. As well as “benevolent dictator for life.” Python doesn’t embrace non-English efforts. That’s the nature of it as a community...not encouraging second ways of doing things is its dogma.
      - hervature 6y ago
        > Python was mentioned in the parent comment. Yes, you're still talking to the same person. But your comment is even more confusing. Are you arguing that "list comprehensions" are part of the language because we have a nice pairing of English words for that thing and that core programming concepts are missing because we don't have English words for them? It seems like an absurd stance, especially because we're talking about Spanish where it's basically a meme to add "a" or "o" to the end of the English word. Almost all programming concepts are words that I'd never use in daily conversation. Again, my root argument is that if you want to serve the Spanish community, forking the <any established language> project and translating everything seems like more payoff for less effort than creating a brand new language. It doesn't really matter what the original community thinks. As an educator, specifically to South Americans learning programming and data science, the biggest hurdle I encounter is understanding concepts not that the words are in English. Logistic regression, L1 regularization, OLS, for loop, Simpson's paradox, none of the hard parts in teaching those are the fact they contain English words.
        brudgers 6y ago
        If people want to make their voices heard, more power to them. I am not going to tell them they should do something else instead. Python has had three decades to care. It only got around to thinking about women a handful of years ago. And telling people how they should do things is at the core of its culture. Given that the Dutch were a enthusiastic colonialists, that’s unsurprising.
        hervature 6y ago

by crvdgc 6y ago

rigoleto 6y ago

Thank you. Too many commenters here, years removed from being a beginner, aren't getting it.

hervature 6y ago

As someone who doesn't care about the language, my question is if the goal is to reduce the entry barrier, what is the benefit of this language versus investing the same amount of time in Spanish documentation and a Spanish transpiler for Python? Multi language documentation is definitely lacking, but making a new language adds to the complexity of the space, it doesn't reduce it.

brudgers 6y ago
Multi-lingual documentation is premised on the idea that languages derived from English are better or at least good enough. The premise of this language is that they are not. The Python community is not committed to multi-language documentation. And it has the ideology of "unpythonic" as an excuse for denigrating anyone who might be.
- hervature 6y ago
  I hardly call the use of a few keywords as "derived from English". There are 36 keywords in Python, one of them being __peg_parser__, what the hell does that mean for an English speaker? Maybe the Python community is not the best example, I did not know they actively subverted any attempts at multi-language. But still, forking the project and simply renaming and translating the documentation would serve much better at lowering the barrier of entry, if that's the goal. The cynic in me thinks that the creators of the language simply used that excuse as a way to justify scratching their itch to create a new language given that there are so many better ways to remove the English barrier to programming.
  - brudgers 6y ago
    Python was mentioned in the parent comment. “List comprehension” is English. “Object” is English. “Keywords” too. As well as “benevolent dictator for life.” Python doesn’t embrace non-English efforts. That’s the nature of it as a community...not encouraging second ways of doing things is its dogma.
    - hervature 6y ago
      > Python was mentioned in the parent comment. Yes, you're still talking to the same person. But your comment is even more confusing. Are you arguing that "list comprehensions" are part of the language because we have a nice pairing of English words for that thing and that core programming concepts are missing because we don't have English words for them? It seems like an absurd stance, especially because we're talking about Spanish where it's basically a meme to add "a" or "o" to the end of the English word. Almost all programming concepts are words that I'd never use in daily conversation. Again, my root argument is that if you want to serve the Spanish community, forking the <any established language> project and translating everything seems like more payoff for less effort than creating a brand new language. It doesn't really matter what the original community thinks. As an educator, specifically to South Americans learning programming and data science, the biggest hurdle I encounter is understanding concepts not that the words are in English. Logistic regression, L1 regularization, OLS, for loop, Simpson's paradox, none of the hard parts in teaching those are the fact they contain English words.
      - brudgers 6y ago
        If people want to make their voices heard, more power to them. I am not going to tell them they should do something else instead. Python has had three decades to care. It only got around to thinking about women a handful of years ago. And telling people how they should do things is at the core of its culture. Given that the Dutch were a enthusiastic colonialists, that’s unsurprising.
        hervature 6y ago