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I made the same experience. The 'language' of a programming language is a red herring in any case. More of a burden is the relevant documentation and on-line

I made the same experience. The 'language' of a programming language is a red herring in any case. More of a burden is the relevant documentation and on-line resources, which overwhelmingly are in English. I also find it frustrating, when comments or variable/function names are in anything but English. KDE, I look at you (even though I can read German just fine)! Allowing anything but ASCII in a programming language is just inviting disaster. I'm not looking forward to find Chinese characters in source code ... Perhaps we'll have some day an automated translation tool for source code, much like we have today for code-beutifiers.

oaiey 6y ago
Hmm .. while I agree there is a case for emojis :)
leephillips 6y ago
The ability to use Greek letters and Unicode symbols in Julia is delightful, because it helps the math in the code to look more like math, and makes the code in general more succinct. It’s optional, but seems to be popular. And Julia is not alone here, but the culture around it has embraced it.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  On this note, Perl 6 (or Raku nowadays, I guess) takes IMO the best approach here (and if Julia doesn't already take this approach, it probably should): allowing both fancy Unicode symbols for those who prefer them and equivalent representations in ASCII (a.k.a. "Texas") for those who don't want to have to switch keyboard encodings or look up symbols to copy/paste or setup editor macros just to write code.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    TeX commands are built in to the Julia REPL. Just type \alpha<TAB> and an α appears.
  - lizmat 6y ago
    Re "(a.k.a. "Texas")", that meme has been removed from the documentation. It's now just ASCII vs Unicode: https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      Lame. Ah well.
  - bradrn 6y ago
    Haskell allows this as well. ASCII symbols are the default, while you can use the -XUnicodeSyntax language extension to get Unicode symbols. (My understanding is that Unicode characters are always allowed in identifiers.)
wodenokoto 6y ago
ASCII only source files should be considered legacy in my opinion. I too prefer having function, variable and keywords in ascii as there is generally little to no ambiguity about what the character is or how it’s typed, but not being able to assign strings meaningful values in source code or add comments with meaningful and readable text for the domain of your program is an unnecessary burden.
btheshoe 6y ago
you can already find plenty of chinese in code for ml papers.

oaiey 6y ago

Hmm .. while I agree there is a case for emojis :)

leephillips 6y ago

The ability to use Greek letters and Unicode symbols in Julia is delightful, because it helps the math in the code to look more like math, and makes the code in general more succinct. It’s optional, but seems to be popular. And Julia is not alone here, but the culture around it has embraced it.

yellowapple 6y ago
On this note, Perl 6 (or Raku nowadays, I guess) takes IMO the best approach here (and if Julia doesn't already take this approach, it probably should): allowing both fancy Unicode symbols for those who prefer them and equivalent representations in ASCII (a.k.a. "Texas") for those who don't want to have to switch keyboard encodings or look up symbols to copy/paste or setup editor macros just to write code.
- leephillips 6y ago
  TeX commands are built in to the Julia REPL. Just type \alpha<TAB> and an α appears.
- lizmat 6y ago
  Re "(a.k.a. "Texas")", that meme has been removed from the documentation. It's now just ASCII vs Unicode: https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    Lame. Ah well.
- bradrn 6y ago
  Haskell allows this as well. ASCII symbols are the default, while you can use the -XUnicodeSyntax language extension to get Unicode symbols. (My understanding is that Unicode characters are always allowed in identifiers.)

wodenokoto 6y ago

ASCII only source files should be considered legacy in my opinion. I too prefer having function, variable and keywords in ascii as there is generally little to no ambiguity about what the character is or how it’s typed, but not being able to assign strings meaningful values in source code or add comments with meaningful and readable text for the domain of your program is an unnecessary burden.

btheshoe 6y ago

you can already find plenty of chinese in code for ml papers.