[Edu-sig] teaching computer science: what language?

[kirby urner]

People will read my subject heading and
think I'm asking "what computer language?"
but I'm actually asking what world human
languages should be used to share computer
science -- or should they need to be in world
languages at all?  What's wrong with comp
sci in Visayan, spoken by millions in the
Philippines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visayan_languages

Some people are of the opinion that since
English has come so far as a world language,
that computer science should simply be taught
in English.

That's fine for English speakers, but isn't going
to fly with Chinese, so we need some better
ideas than that.  I'd say any human language
is up to embracing STEM, starting from where
it is.  Obviously extending a human language
means inventing namespaces, just like we
do in Python.  We've been doing it for many
thousands of years, to keep up with our own
tools just for starters.

The devil is in the details.  How should we teach
Python in multiple languages.  Maybe we should
expect more multi-lingual texts and examples
e.g. regular expressions with Cyrillic should be
as common as rain even in a book mostly in
English.  The point is:  if all you use in Latin-1
in your examples, you're hardly showing much
Unicode fluency.  Python teaching meets
LEX Institute I guess (an old theme here on
edu-sig).

Here's some more on that topic:
http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=9769308
(about the overhead in memorization incurred
by having to learn a whole other vocabulary).

As I posted earlier this month, I think hospitals
are under the gun to at least get patient names
in their native script on computer monitors.

That brings up issues of collation / alphabetization
across languages.

I ask basic questions about that here:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/i18n-sig/2015-May/002131.html

Insights / feedback / comments welcome.

Kirby
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