Re: Must programming languages be English ?

[petah <lua@...>]

this thread should be transferred to another forum but I can't help it...

>Musical scores use annotations (translation: keywords) typically in italian (Con Brio, Allegro etc.). Are these too to be translated? What about french terms in recipes? Saute? What about ballet terms?

Many terms get (mis-)translated when acquired by other cultures, then mutate. It's part of natural language evolution. F.ex. when US-English doesn't garble a dish's name (Bretzel vs Pretzel) it butchers the recipe itself, which is arguably worse. Unfortunately, neither can be prevented.

>In fact, imho we are drifting radially toward english being the de facto world technical language.

Not in France, it's riddled with ridiculous equivalencies established decades ago by former culture secretary Jack Lang "to fend off Anglo-Saxon imperialism". Great for deriding bilingual friends though. A German cellphone is a "handy". A Spanish geek is a "friki" (unrelated to phreak).

Anyway, "byte" was an English pun before becoming an official term.

>No-one in India or China would dream of entering into computer programming without being able to read English (been there, talked to them). Yes, they are not necessarily happy TALKING in English, but they can read it pretty well.

Some bigwig linguist, Chomsky maybe, predicted we'll end up speaking the same language but it'll be a horribly bastardized form of English, Chinese, Russian and slang ("worse than in Blade Runner").

>Don't know if this is good or bad, it's always sad when a culture becomes too homogeneous.

True but so is the reverse; many regional Spanish dialects are so indistinguishable that their main purpose seems to be populist politics. Valencia airport subway signs are only in Valenciá and Castellano ("taxi" will do).

Wrt programming languages, a Geneva university professor once told us he was sticking to the old Pascal version (invented 60km away) "until the French version was updated". He also thought the PowerPC was "too new" when it came out and before integrating it in the curriculum wanted to wait a few years "to be on the safe side".

:)

-- p

>On Apr 12, 2013, at 1:59 PM, marbux <marbux@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The "unnecessary" adjective in the "unnecessary obstacles to
>> international trade" phrase then becomes the key to unlocking the
>> legal puzzle, i.e., is the obstacle created by dependence on a
>> particular human language unavoidable , or in the language of the
>> treaty, is it the least "trade-restrictive manner" to fulfill the
>> programming language's raison d'être?
>> 
>> And that in turn boils down to the question of whether it is
>> technically possible to design the programming language such that the
>> particular human language dependency is unnecessary?
>