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

[David MacQuigg]

I like the principle that computer languages should be as free as possible
from the ambiguities and confusions in a human language.  I remember seeing
an article in Datamation, in the late 70's I think it was, mocking the
unfriendliness of Unix with a cover story showing birds, monkeys, and other
creatures saying words like "awk", "grep", and "cat", instead of "search"
and "print".  It struck me that the author had completely missed the point
of picking non-English keywords.  Had the developers of Unix chosen more
common English words, there would now be dozens of variations on all the
basic functions, all with slightly different meanings, just like real
English.

I like Python, not because it is styled like my native language English,
but because it is simple.

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 6:54 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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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