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Comment by gbkn | Hacker News Reader

As an original non-native English speaker, I respectfully disagree.

People say my name is spelled funny or is too long...but it's not my problem, it's English's problem. Its only 6 characters in my native tongue.

In the same vein, what other ideas or concepts from non-natives are we missing because we are forcing them to learn a new language AND then to program? Furthermore, when we in the West talk about open-source, diversity and equity, we're still speaking in English. We're leaving a huge population out because the barrier to entry is learning English. If non-native speakers are now able to solve their own local problems in their local language, this is a boon for humanity and why we should encourage efforts to break down barriers like this.

I for one, welcome this endeavour and thank elangoc for his work on this.

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I learned programming before I knew anything about English and I don't remember it being a problem. Even before that I was using commands like "LOAD" without knowing what do they mean. It was just a keyword to use when I needed to load something from a cassette. The same with "IF", "PRINT" and all the other English keywords I encountered while learning programming. I was learning using local books, but the fact that programming language used English keywords did not bother me at all.

We force people to learn a new language to program, but it's certainly not English.

It's a stretch to even call some of the keywords in some languages words (car, cdr, con?). They're just tokens to feed to the compiler or interpreter, like parenthesis.

Even when full English words are used, it's rarely in the conventional meaning. English speaker or not, you'll have to learn what the word actually means in the given programming language.

> If non-native speakers are now able to solve their own local problems in their local language

But they won't be able to. Having a few keywords in your own language is vastly different from 'being able to solve problems in your local language'. It sounds like you don't understand programming.

I was referring to the fact that you don't have to learn English to code. A barrier that you don't seem to acknowledge.

For languages that roughly share the same alphabet as English, it seems more like learning a few new words, rather than actually learning English.

If you take a look at the actual project you'll see that translating the language features to another language (and alphabet!) is cool, but not actually enough once you want to start interacting with libraries.

Which essentially means that without learning english, you will be stuck in a technical ghetto with the only way out being to learn english, or reimplement the world.

I still think this is highly interesting as a teaching tool; showing kids what is possible without requiring them to learn english may be a good motivator to actually learning english, but this doesn't seem to have many applications beyond as an introductory teaching tool.

Are there any (programming) languages who's important libraries have solid documentation/tutorial coverage in non-english languages? Honest question. Those are a big part of programming for me.

Yep. Ruby springs to mind. The creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"), is Japanese. He co-wrote the first Ruby book, which was in Japanese. And a year later, he co-wrote the first book for Ruby that was in English.

Yeah, just a few: http://www.amazon.co.jp/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?__mk_ja_JP=%E3%82...

Can you explain that more? I see plenty of programming books in foreign languages.

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