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I grew up French. Never had any issue remembering English keywords. It's not like "for" really flows naturally as an indication of a looping construct. Edit: I

by keyle 2y ago

I grew up French. Never had any issue remembering English keywords. It's not like "for" really flows naturally as an indication of a looping construct. Edit: I sounded overall negative about this, but I didn't meant to be. I really like the tutorial, and the `ask` and `echo` constructs. I will show it to my son.

swiftcoder 2y ago
Still, it's nice to engage with folks on their own terms, and not just blindly assume they'll want to work in English all their life. I kind of miss the early 2000's, where a bunch of pretty well-known French and Belgian academics were publishing source code in their own languages (#define to remap keywords and all)
- keyle 2y ago
  Nice, I was unaware of this. Take OCaml for example, it was primarily developed by the French if I recall OCaml was written in 1996 by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, and Didier Rémy at INRIA in France Yeah, but they didn't write keywords in French, they went straight to `let`, `rec`, `if`, `then`, `else`... Because they're just keywords, they could just be punctuations; so as long as you don't go full brainfck.
  - Athas 2y ago
    The comments were quite often in French, however! Until relatively recently, the OCaml compiler would also sometimes emit error messages in French in some obscure cases.
    - octachron 2y ago
      How long ago was this "relatively recently"? When I translated all the remaining French comments in the OCaml compiler nearly 10 years ago, there were already no warnings nor error messages in French.
      - Athas 2y ago
        Most recent I remember was in 2011: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues/5419 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues/5419
        octachron 2y ago
        Note that this is an error message from the ocamldoc tool, and not an error message from the OCaml compiler itself. Funnily enough, looking that the repository history, this French error message was introduced in the very first version of ocamldoc in 2002 and went undetected (or unreported) for 9 years. Thanks for the historical tidbit!
  - Yoric 2y ago
    I'm sure there is, somewhere in the deep recesses of the Internet, a camlp4 or camlp5 syntax extension to replace `let`, `rec`, `if`, `then`, `else` with `soit`, `réc`, `si`, `alors`, `sinon` :)
- boxed 2y ago
  A programmer not working in English is kinda useless imo. EVERYTHING is written in English source code. If you don't know English you are going to have a very bad time. I am a native Swedish speaker and I have had a hard policy since I was a teenager to have all electronics set to English and not Swedish. Why? Because the translations are lossy at best. Often you need to understand both English and Swedish AND have a creative mind for word games to understand what the hell something means. Example: My daughter had an Android smart watch. One menu option in settings was "omkring". This makes no sense. But if you translate it to English it can become "around" hmm, still nonsense.. oh, but it can mean "about" as in "around and about". Translation is a fools game. It builds Babels Tower all over again. It's bad enough that we have multiple programming languages that only sometimes interop.
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    > EVERYTHING is written in English source code That's not some immutable law of the universe - it's really a pretty recent state of affairs. A quarter century at most
    - incrudible 2y ago
      Okay, but are you speculating that we will all switch to many native languages instead? That seems unlikely. The lingua franca may change, but nothing suggests it will not be English within the educational timeframe of any child born today.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > it's really a pretty recent state of affairs. A quarter century at most And? Powered flight is barely 100 years old. For most of the world, ubiquitous sanitation, access to running hot water, electricity, medicine beyond voodoo and superstition - are all barely 100 years old, give or take quarter century. For most of the world - the rest of the world got it much later, or in some places, not at all. Very little in human affairs is an immutable laws of the universe. Most of it is arbitrary, path dependent, frozen in place as we built more things and made more choices on top of past ones, instead of endlessly bickering about which random result would've been most fairest. It so happened that English became lingua franca, and we've built the last 70+ years of technology on top of it. Do you want to tear it all back down, and call for a World War II rematch, all for the sake of a dice re-roll on which language we name our "for loops" in? Why the hell does it matter?! English won. Time to move on. Build up, instead of tearing down. EDIT: also, FWIW, languages evolve. English of 2025 isn't all the same as English of 1945, much less that of 1865. That evolution accelerates with globalization, as every culture contributes their bit to the global whole. See the "Internet slang" or various pidgins that popped up in the high-throughput port areas around the planet; this is the sign of things to come.
- wink 2y ago
  There's a difference where you use this. Learning language - fine, use whatever language you want Excel - spreadsheet logic breaking when you open it with a different locale - horrible
anentropic 2y ago
I'm opposite: I thought the multi-lingual aspect seemed nice but the echo command immediately bothered me
poulpy123 2y ago
For the anecdote, my first introduction to programming (and to computers in general) was in french schools with Thomson TO7, and the language used was Logo, with french keywords. But I agree, english keyword are not really the difficult point when learning to program (for countries with latin alphabet)
danielvaughn 2y ago
I’m a native English speaker, but I have several dev friends from Latin America. I remember asking them whether it would be useful if they could use Spanish words in their syntax, and they all pretty much said the same as you.
rom1v 2y ago
I'm French too, and when I was young, I learnt the Basic language before learning English (by reading Basic programs already available on our computer). So I was able to write FOR … THEN … ELSE blocks without even knowing what the keywords meant (I just know what they did to the program). One day, I explained to my father what I was writing, and I read out loud FOR … "TEN" … "ELCE" (with a strong French accent), and he corrected me by pronouncing the words correctly ("FOR … THEN … ELSE"). I was shocked: "how do you know?" (he knew nothing about Basic or even programming). I learnt that day that "for", "then" and "else" were not just keywords in the Basic language, but they were actually real words in English.
- rom1v 2y ago
  Precision: Of course, I meant "FOR" and "IF THEN ELSE" separately (the way I wrote it might wrongly suggest there is something like for-then-else).

by keyle 2y ago

swiftcoder 2y ago

Still, it's nice to engage with folks on their own terms, and not just blindly assume they'll want to work in English all their life. I kind of miss the early 2000's, where a bunch of pretty well-known French and Belgian academics were publishing source code in their own languages (#define to remap keywords and all)

keyle 2y ago
Nice, I was unaware of this. Take OCaml for example, it was primarily developed by the French if I recall OCaml was written in 1996 by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, and Didier Rémy at INRIA in France Yeah, but they didn't write keywords in French, they went straight to `let`, `rec`, `if`, `then`, `else`... Because they're just keywords, they could just be punctuations; so as long as you don't go full brainfck.
- Athas 2y ago
  The comments were quite often in French, however! Until relatively recently, the OCaml compiler would also sometimes emit error messages in French in some obscure cases.
  - octachron 2y ago
    How long ago was this "relatively recently"? When I translated all the remaining French comments in the OCaml compiler nearly 10 years ago, there were already no warnings nor error messages in French.
    - Athas 2y ago
      Most recent I remember was in 2011: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues/5419 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues/5419
      - octachron 2y ago
        Note that this is an error message from the ocamldoc tool, and not an error message from the OCaml compiler itself. Funnily enough, looking that the repository history, this French error message was introduced in the very first version of ocamldoc in 2002 and went undetected (or unreported) for 9 years. Thanks for the historical tidbit!
- Yoric 2y ago
  I'm sure there is, somewhere in the deep recesses of the Internet, a camlp4 or camlp5 syntax extension to replace `let`, `rec`, `if`, `then`, `else` with `soit`, `réc`, `si`, `alors`, `sinon` :)
boxed 2y ago
A programmer not working in English is kinda useless imo. EVERYTHING is written in English source code. If you don't know English you are going to have a very bad time. I am a native Swedish speaker and I have had a hard policy since I was a teenager to have all electronics set to English and not Swedish. Why? Because the translations are lossy at best. Often you need to understand both English and Swedish AND have a creative mind for word games to understand what the hell something means. Example: My daughter had an Android smart watch. One menu option in settings was "omkring". This makes no sense. But if you translate it to English it can become "around" hmm, still nonsense.. oh, but it can mean "about" as in "around and about". Translation is a fools game. It builds Babels Tower all over again. It's bad enough that we have multiple programming languages that only sometimes interop.
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  > EVERYTHING is written in English source code That's not some immutable law of the universe - it's really a pretty recent state of affairs. A quarter century at most
  - incrudible 2y ago
    Okay, but are you speculating that we will all switch to many native languages instead? That seems unlikely. The lingua franca may change, but nothing suggests it will not be English within the educational timeframe of any child born today.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > it's really a pretty recent state of affairs. A quarter century at most And? Powered flight is barely 100 years old. For most of the world, ubiquitous sanitation, access to running hot water, electricity, medicine beyond voodoo and superstition - are all barely 100 years old, give or take quarter century. For most of the world - the rest of the world got it much later, or in some places, not at all. Very little in human affairs is an immutable laws of the universe. Most of it is arbitrary, path dependent, frozen in place as we built more things and made more choices on top of past ones, instead of endlessly bickering about which random result would've been most fairest. It so happened that English became lingua franca, and we've built the last 70+ years of technology on top of it. Do you want to tear it all back down, and call for a World War II rematch, all for the sake of a dice re-roll on which language we name our "for loops" in? Why the hell does it matter?! English won. Time to move on. Build up, instead of tearing down. EDIT: also, FWIW, languages evolve. English of 2025 isn't all the same as English of 1945, much less that of 1865. That evolution accelerates with globalization, as every culture contributes their bit to the global whole. See the "Internet slang" or various pidgins that popped up in the high-throughput port areas around the planet; this is the sign of things to come.
wink 2y ago
There's a difference where you use this. Learning language - fine, use whatever language you want Excel - spreadsheet logic breaking when you open it with a different locale - horrible

anentropic 2y ago

I'm opposite: I thought the multi-lingual aspect seemed nice but the echo command immediately bothered me

poulpy123 2y ago

For the anecdote, my first introduction to programming (and to computers in general) was in french schools with Thomson TO7, and the language used was Logo, with french keywords. But I agree, english keyword are not really the difficult point when learning to program (for countries with latin alphabet)

danielvaughn 2y ago

I’m a native English speaker, but I have several dev friends from Latin America. I remember asking them whether it would be useful if they could use Spanish words in their syntax, and they all pretty much said the same as you.

rom1v 2y ago

I'm French too, and when I was young, I learnt the Basic language before learning English (by reading Basic programs already available on our computer). So I was able to write FOR … THEN … ELSE blocks without even knowing what the keywords meant (I just know what they did to the program). One day, I explained to my father what I was writing, and I read out loud FOR … "TEN" … "ELCE" (with a strong French accent), and he corrected me by pronouncing the words correctly ("FOR … THEN … ELSE"). I was shocked: "how do you know?" (he knew nothing about Basic or even programming). I learnt that day that "for", "then" and "else" were not just keywords in the Basic language, but they were actually real words in English.

rom1v 2y ago
Precision: Of course, I meant "FOR" and "IF THEN ELSE" separately (the way I wrote it might wrongly suggest there is something like for-then-else).