Re: Must programming languages be English ?

[William Ahern <william@...>]

On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 02:02:35PM +1000, Vaughan McAlley wrote:
> On 13 April 2013 11:17, Oliver Schneider <lua@windirstat.info> wrote:
> 
> > Certainly one doesn't have to know the language in order to learn a
> > handful of keywords.
> 
> Indeed, I have a thorough knowledge of Italian musical terms, and
> though they have occasionally been helpful when in Italy, it doesn’t
> mean my Italian language skills are beyond the very basic.
> 
> Computer language grammar is so rigid compared to natural English that
> I would say that there is not much of an advantage for English
> speakers, at least as far as grammar is concerned. Programming
> concepts are foreign to all non-programmers (and ‘metatable’ is as
> meaningless to a native English-speaking non-programmer as it would be
> to a Tibetan monk non-programmer).

I suspect the real problem is orthography, not spelling. I suck at foreign
languages, but I've read German and Spanish code no problem. I'd be
completely lost trying to read code using descriptive Hanzi or Kanji
identifiers.

Which is why I now appreciate short identifiers. For complex code no amount
of descriptive identifers or comments can substitute for modeling the
program in your mind. At that point what matters most is dense and concise
code.