On 2018-07-22 10:33:23 -0700, Michael Selik wrote:
On Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 6:55 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote: On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 01:56:35AM +0200, Giampaolo Rodola' wrote: > On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 3:39 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> > wrote: > > Tens of thousands of non-English speakers have had to learn the meaning > > of what might as well be meaningless, random sets of symbols (to them) > > like "class", "import", "while" and "True". If they can do so, perhaps > > we English-speakers should stop complaining about how hard it is to > > memorise the meaning of a couple of symbols like ??. > > "class", "import", "while" and "True" are keywords, not symbols.
They are only key WORDS if you are an English speaker.
They are also words if you are not an English speaker. I don't speak Chinese, but "Pǔtonghuà" is certainly a word for me (although I wouldn't recognize 普通话 as that word).
If your language doesn't use the Latin script, they don't even look like words. They look like gibberish: ∌≇⊅∇∫
Are you familiar with how people who don't speak English code? I'm curious how they teach and use Python.
I know a few people who don't know enough English to read English documentation. But AFAIK they didn't have a problem memorizing a few dozen keywords. Learning the semantics of a programming language is a much larger task than learning a few words, and having familiar keywords probably doesn't really help much (they still don't mean what they mean in English). Of course we do use the Latin alphabet, I don't know how somebody who had to learn the Latin alphabet specifically for programming would cope. It's probably like programming in APL. I guess I could learn PerlYuYan[1] to find out ;-). hp [1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Lingua::Sinica::PerlYuYan -- _ | Peter J. Holzer | we build much bigger, better disasters now |_|_) | | because we have much more sophisticated | | | hjp@hjp.at | management tools. __/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Ross Anderson <https://www.edge.org/>