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As a non-Japanese speaker I can’t make much sense of this, but this looks super cool! At the same time I can’t stop wondering if this is how English-dominant p

As a non-Japanese speaker I can’t make much sense of this, but this looks super cool! At the same time I can’t stop wondering if this is how English-dominant programming is perceived by “non-roman-alphabet” speakers. Imagine if the Japanese dominated the invention of programming languages, and we all had to learn Japanese to be productive at our jobs.. we’re lucky that ruby was written in English

Grustaf 5y ago
> At the same time I can’t stop wondering if this is how English-dominant programming is perceived by “non-roman-alphabet” speakers. It isn't. Few people in the world are unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet, definitely not the Japanese or any other wealthy nation. And since most really poor countries use the Latin alphabet, often for colonial reasons, I don't really think there is any large group of people that aren't familiar with it.
- retrac 5y ago
  There are varying degrees of familiarity. I can technically read Japanese kana, for example. Only a few dozen to memorize, after all. But using a programming language with all its keywords in Japanese is a rather daunting prospect. I still tend to mix up some of the kana visually, for example. And I don't know much Japanese vocabulary so most or all of the terms would be opaque to me. It seems it would be a lot more mental heavy lifting than programming in my native English, especially at the start.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    Sure, my point was that this is not the case for Japanese, probably not for anyone. They are vastly more familiar with Latin characters and English words than you are with Japanese. But yeah, programming will be slightly harder for them than for you or me.
bntyhntr 5y ago
An old Japanese programmer told me that when he started out, they attempted to translate everything into Japanese. My memory is fuzzy (this conversation was 8 years ago) so take this as more of an example then exactly what he said. For example, "string" was translated by its rope-like meaning, you used that kanji to write it in comments/docs, and when talking to other programmers you'd use the Japanese word. Anyway they gave up on that for the most part.

Grustaf 5y ago

> At the same time I can’t stop wondering if this is how English-dominant programming is perceived by “non-roman-alphabet” speakers. It isn't. Few people in the world are unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet, definitely not the Japanese or any other wealthy nation. And since most really poor countries use the Latin alphabet, often for colonial reasons, I don't really think there is any large group of people that aren't familiar with it.

retrac 5y ago
There are varying degrees of familiarity. I can technically read Japanese kana, for example. Only a few dozen to memorize, after all. But using a programming language with all its keywords in Japanese is a rather daunting prospect. I still tend to mix up some of the kana visually, for example. And I don't know much Japanese vocabulary so most or all of the terms would be opaque to me. It seems it would be a lot more mental heavy lifting than programming in my native English, especially at the start.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  Sure, my point was that this is not the case for Japanese, probably not for anyone. They are vastly more familiar with Latin characters and English words than you are with Japanese. But yeah, programming will be slightly harder for them than for you or me.

bntyhntr 5y ago

An old Japanese programmer told me that when he started out, they attempted to translate everything into Japanese. My memory is fuzzy (this conversation was 8 years ago) so take this as more of an example then exactly what he said. For example, "string" was translated by its rope-like meaning, you used that kanji to write it in comments/docs, and when talking to other programmers you'd use the Japanese word. Anyway they gave up on that for the most part.