 |
lua-l archive |
|
|
||
|
On 12 Apr 2013 11:06, "Dirk Laurie" <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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).
>
There is an interesting discussion of this in the Coding Places book http://codingplaces.net/ in the context of Lua.
Justin