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I've tried not to bring up "English-Likeness" aspect because that's a whole other can of worms. But since it's out there now... I don't believe this is einhver

by Cyranix 14y ago

I've tried not to bring up "English-Likeness" aspect because that's a whole other can of worms. But since it's out there now... I don't believe this is einhverfr's intent in the least, but the promotion of English is often an ethnocentric activity. Why not a dialect of Chinese (so many native speakers, high information density per character)? Why not a dialect of Spanish (multi-continental reach of native speakers, high incidence of cognates to Romance languages, highly predictable orthography and phonetics)? Why not any language spoken in the Middle East or India or former Soviet states? If human accessibility were truly the issue, why should we focus our efforts on English speakers -- the people already the most aided by existing language-like tokens! -- instead of promoting efforts to "translate" programming keywords and constructs to other languages? I'll grant that one does not necessarily preclude the other, but I would argue that the former is chasing after diminishing returns at this point in time, whereas the latter represents a significant opportunity to increase ease of access to programming globally.

einhverfr 14y ago
I did mention features of English which make it more condusive to being such an archetype (i.e. that computer languages immitate English). I don't think it is the only choice. I think in general that creole languages and their descendants (that includes English btw) have significant syntactic advantages in this regard. The issue is morphological simplicity. This doesn't mean I am a fan of such languages from a natural language perspective, btw... I am just saying if I was choosing a language to build a computer language based on, I would not choose a language where imperative tenses of verbs might vary depending on number of addressees, for example.... As I think of it, it might be very interesting to look at computer language design based on other natural languages and see what other problems or opportunities come up. For example, I wonder about slot-based polysynthetic languages (like Algonquin). A computer language based on that would have to be fundamentally different from what we have now.

by Cyranix 14y ago

einhverfr 14y ago

I did mention features of English which make it more condusive to being such an archetype (i.e. that computer languages immitate English). I don't think it is the only choice. I think in general that creole languages and their descendants (that includes English btw) have significant syntactic advantages in this regard. The issue is morphological simplicity. This doesn't mean I am a fan of such languages from a natural language perspective, btw... I am just saying if I was choosing a language to build a computer language based on, I would not choose a language where imperative tenses of verbs might vary depending on number of addressees, for example.... As I think of it, it might be very interesting to look at computer language design based on other natural languages and see what other problems or opportunities come up. For example, I wonder about slot-based polysynthetic languages (like Algonquin). A computer language based on that would have to be fundamentally different from what we have now.