Must programming languages be English ?

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2013/4/12 Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>:

> Tim Hill <drtimhill@gmail.com> writes:
>> Anyway, to my mind for non-native speakers it's not the keywords,
>> they can easily pick that up, it's the use of English words and
>> phrases as variable names.
...
> I've always found this kind of interesting, and I suppose perhaps it's
> because much programming literature is in English, or translated from
> English, and the English terms used for many abstractions and concepts
> are familiar even for non-English speakers.  Japanese terms for
> various concepts seem more common in conversation than in code, but
> even there, it's very common to hear both English and Japanese terms
> for the same thing used almost interchangeably.

2013/4/12 Laurent Faillie <l_faillie@yahoo.com>:

> Based on this experience, I'm writing now my own
> open-source code in english (even if I'm sure it's plenty of misspelling
> and mistake) because it's much easier if I have to share.

I was told by an APL enthusiast that back in the early days when IBM
was everything, a group of bright young students from francophone Africa
was sent to Yorktown Heights to learn computer programming.  Fortran
was deemed too hard for a first language, so they were taught COBOL. They
progressed much more slowly than the mostly white American students, and
all the racists around wore I-told-you-so expressions. Someone had the
bright idea of moving them to the APL group, then in its infancy. With
their French-style abstract mathematical training, they outstripped the
other students easily.

At least Lua programmers of whatever nationality can spell one eight-letter
English word correctly ("coroutine" and "metatable" seem not to be words
elsewhere).