Renaming identifiers & debugging

[Ethan Furman]

Luca wrote:

[snippety]

> Maybe you are right, but being italian myself i can remember when i was 
> a middle schooler (no computer before that) and the hours spent on my 
> MSX figuring out how the thing worked. I learned all the commands as 
> "brandnames" without really understanding them. I had _no_ idea that 
> "if" meant... if, or that "print" meant to print. I had zero knowledge 
> of english and for this reason most of these commands were meaningless 
> to me, i didn't even suspect they had a meaning in an existing language, 
> i just thought that was the way computers talked.

[more snippety]

Perhaps the lesson to learn from this is that as *you* teach programming 
to non-english speakers you take the time to say "'if' means 'se', 
'print' means 'stampa'", etc.  I suspect your early years would have 
been much easier with those bits of knowledge.  :)

~Ethan~