OT: Programmers whos first language is not English

Stephen Horne intentionally at blank.co.uk
Sun Mar 9 17:03:41 EST 2003


On Sun, 9 Mar 2003 22:05:50 +0100, Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz
<gradha at titanium.sabren.com> wrote:

>On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 11:21:36AM +0000, Stephen Horne wrote:
>> One thing I'm considering is the use of a non-ASCII source code.
>
>Be aware, you face a terrible death.
>
>> I'm quite curious what other people think about this kind of idea -
>> particularly people whose first language is not English.
>
>Your ideas periodically appear somewhere around me, both
>in unofficial and official proposals even from well known
>organizations. The result is that these ideas suck, and I talk from
>seing failing projects, not from personal preference:
>
>1) You may need special tools depending on your language, forcing
>people to a specific environment.
>
>2) Code written in a language looks bad mixed with another
>one. Where's the advantage of using a keyword in your native language
>when 85% of the code is calls to a library written in english you
>don't have control over?
>
>3) You prevent people not able to speak the language from
>contributing it. Certainly this happens with english too,
>but nowadays it is the lowest common denominator for computer
>programming. Esperanto might want to change that, a herculean effort,
>an even then it's not your native language.
>
>4) It doesn't matter what language you choose: soon programmers
>start using abbreviatures in function/variable names which don't
>mean anything even to other native programmers.
>
>Your idea is nice in that the source code would store the identifiers
>and the editor would show them in your preferred language. The bad
>thing is that it won't be able to do that with the function/variable
>names a programmer will write.





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