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Comment by pgcj_poster | Hacker News Reader

This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does.

This is the same reason that everyone uses FORTRAN. Can you imagine if people went off and created their own "programming languages" instead? You wouldn't be able to contribute to an open source project unless it happened to be written in a language that you knew. There would be so much duplication of effort: someone would write a library for Foo Language, and someone else would do the same thing for Bar language. Job postings would ask for "Foo Developers," and you wouldn't be able to just work anywhere. Fortunately, programmers collectively decided to all use the same language. Let's not go back on that decision.

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So glad this turned out to be a joke in the second paragraf. The first is very believable. I've definitely encountered people who would write something like it unironically.

TBH, I didn't get the joke until I read your comment. A small "/s" at the end wouldn't hurt.

Pointing out it was indeed a joke, was part of the reason I wrote the comment in the first place.

Just to be clear - I think your parent should have put '/s' at the end, not you. :)

To be frank, "/s" would have totally ruined it for everyone else.

I'm assuming that you simply didn't read past the first paragraph? (That's fine, I bet we all do that way too often here) I mean, I have a hard time believing that you really can't tell that a post that states that everybody uses FORTRAN isn't serious.

I care because HN has a way of ruining satire and sarcasm this way. These are only the delightful stylistic devices that they are when you don't say that it's satire (resp sarcasm). I truly wish we'd all "/s" a little less, not more :-)

I'm sad to admit I downvoted after the first paragraph. I was glad HN let me undo that after I read the second :)

(also, hey skrebbel! :)

small world!

No, not really, I read the whole post. And the FORTRAN reference was weird, but there are weirder things people post (and believe), and when writing, people do make mistakes. Thinking back, it should have been the clue, but it wasn't. And judging by the other answers, I am not the only one who was fooled by the tone.

That said, if you feel like `/s` is ruining the sarcasm for you, the solution is pretty simple. GreaseMonkey [0] should be able to remove it very easily, while adding it would be _a bit_ more challenging.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/

> No, not really, I read the whole post. And the FORTRAN reference was weird, but there are weirder things people post (and believe)

True. I'm sometimes a source for similarly controversial statements. However, the following line should suffice to indicate the facetiousness of the post:

> This is the same reason that everyone uses FORTRAN.

Everyone does not use FORTRAN, and in fact it is so uncommonly used that it is ridiculous anyone would think otherwise. There are probably quite a lot of people in this industry who've never even heard of FORTRAN.

This is a common form of sarcasm in English, to counter an argument (programming languages should be English-only because there'd be too much fragmentation otherwise) by presenting the same argument in the context of something obviously untrue (that's why everyone uses FORTRAN).

Did you read my comment? I also said:

> ...and when writing, people do make mistakes.

Maybe he meant Python, who knows? If only there was a way to signal you are being sarcastic to avoid misunderstandings. Oh wait... /s

> To be frank, "/s" would have totally ruined it for everyone else.

Yes and no. Here on HN I see it everyday: good on-topic jokes get downvoted.

I suspect this happens because when people are in "HN mode" there comes a sort of earnestness into their state that makes it hard to detect other tonalities.

P.S. I needed the FORTRAN bit until it dawned on me…

We need a committee to form standards for sarcasm indicator use in various contexts.

I have run into this a few times when I've posted a link (where it seemed amusing and relevant to a discussion) to this classic video of Australian Senator Bob Collins discussing an environmental mishap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Invariably, someone replies with a comment like "People should be aware that this is not actually an Australian senator, it is the comedian John Clarke impersonating one."

Every. Single. Time.

As if it wouldn't be obvious after watching the first few minutes of the video!

What ever happened to the fun of not realizing something is satire until you're partway into it?

"Fortunately, programmers collectively decided to all use the same language."

That zinger didn't tip it off to you?

That's one of the biggest problems with sarcasm/irony in casual writing. There's always someone who misunderstands and treats it as serious. This problem is amplified by the number of eyes a typical internet comment receives. It's a major way people are radicalized by internet communities. There's always a proportion of members who are being "ironically" sexist/racist/discriminatory but eventually people take it seriously, the ironic commenters are pushed out of the community and presto, you have 4chan and worse.

I watched this happen in /r/TumblrInAction. Over the years it got more mean spirited and fell for more obvious trolls/satire as people less committed to the cause of disrespecting self-identity moved on. Now it's all "lol attack helicopters" and cruelty, and half the former regulars are now queer leftist furries.

I loath the cheap humor aspect to forum commentary. It is hurtful as noise or incidentally inflammatory, as you mentioned. There is no way to eliminate it, but that isnt the point. I dont promote pure misdirection.

Yeah, thanks for saying that in English, I wouldn't have been able to understand you in any other language.

da nicht für

syntax error

python --lang=german main.py

shivers

Think it would be --lang=deutsch. Gotta internationalize the command-line flags too!

I think you mean, --sprache=deutsch

Imagine the CLI...

It's already there, I've often seen console output with translated error messages. Helpful for the users but not of much use to developers, unless using error codes as well

Absolutely. If we do localization of UI texts, the command line options should be included :)

You are all being silly.

Obviously we would translate the name of the command itself, and the language would be implied

  riesenschlange main.py

Frankfurt-am-Main.py

Basic would be fun though...

10 drucken 'Hallo, Welt!" 20 gehe zu 10

10 drucken 'Hallo, Welt!" 20 gehe zu 10 aber schnell

-o3

Haut.py

More like 'Haupt.py'. ('Haut' is 'skin') But in German that alone would translate back to 'head.py', so you might want to give some more context to it like 'Hauptdatei.py' ('main file.py').

Scala has a german version: https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2017/04/01/announcing-skala....

Release date is 1st of april though

Excel and other spreadsheet software products localize their function names.

So people learn to use those in their native language which is great.

But if they need to use the same software with a different language setting, because they move or work abroad, they have to relearn all those function names, which sucks...

It's not great even in the learning scenario. First I have to Google how to solve the problem and then I have to Google how to translate the function names to Swedish.

> Excel and other spreadsheet software products localize their function names.

And, most annoyingly, their thousands and decimal separators. That has tripped me up countless times.

100,991 vs 100.991.

I once worked with a person in an ecommerce department who was annoyed that a German website used German instead of English.

Wow I stopped reading after the first paragraph and almost missed the joke. I have other things to do...

While it’s a good joke, in reality it does not compute.

“Learning a new language” as in programming language, sits in the days-to-months range, while “learning a new language” as in Arabic takes months-to-years, so you’re building a much, much deeper chasm for others to cross and contribute, even though the source code remains English-based.

You can already see this happening with some open source libraries coming from China, where the documentation and all discussion being in ZH already completely blocks foreign contribution.

As you say it's already happening for project where all the documentation is not in English.

So what's wrong if the language also is not in English? Can you not imagine that some projects don't care whether you specifically can contribute or not?

It's not the first language not in English actually, WLanguage for example from WinDev can be written in English, French or Chinese.

Not only that, you can see people trying to escape the divisions on the programming language landscape, for example on the data-science field Python is miles ahead of any other language (and such homogeneity is widely seen as a good thing).

Given that one in five person on the planet speaks Chinese as their first language, lack of “foreign” contribution will probably work out okay for them. Global contribution is nice but certainly not necessary. Whoever started the communities have the right to set the rules, using Chinese for (primary) documentation and discussion being one of them. If you don’t like it you can start your own.

Pure numbers mean nothing. Neither a farmer with no internet nor an urban Chinese citizen with a mobile internet but no actual computer is liable to contribute much.

There are 800 million Chinese internet users almost all are mobile only. Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much time for public works after 9 to 9 6 days a week.

> There are 800 million Chinese internet users almost all are mobile only.

What's that supposed to imply? Just Googled "number of software developers in China" and "number of software developers in the world". Got 5.79 mil (2017) and 23 mil (2018) as answers. Not sure how accurate but can't be that far off.

> Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much time for public works after 9 to 9 6 days a week.

I didn't pay too much attention to that story, but having talked to a few software developer friends in China myself, I'm inclined to say it may be a widespread problem but probably not universal. Whether that's true or not, I certainly see a fair share of popular open source projects coming from China these days, not one in five of course, but given their relative isolation and my inherent U.S./Western bias the number that caught my eyes are still quite impressive.

Not to mention there are a lot of corporate open source in China as well. In fact, just like in the U.S., a good chunk of high profile open source projects are corporate-developed or corporate-backed.

Moreover, whether one in five is accurate wasn't even the point of my post.

Parent poster

>You can already see this happening with some open source libraries coming from China, where the documentation and all discussion being in ZH already completely blocks foreign contribution.

You

>Given that one in five person on the planet speaks Chinese as their first language, lack of “foreign” contribution will probably work out okay for them.

The point is you are using number of native speakers as a proxy for the population of developers being sufficient to support development.

First thing is the single most popular l1 language in China manderin is more like 1 in 8 humans, next the distribution of talent is nothing like distribution of speakers. It looks a lot more like the distribution of wealth because access to computers during formative years or indeed at all is of substantial importance.

There are of course still many Chinese developers of substance. But because highly educated developers in China are both a smaller portion of the population and likely to speak English starting a manderin only software project would mean choosing between only Chinese developers and Chinese devs and the rest of the planet as well.

> First thing is the single most popular l1 language in China manderin is more like 1 in 8 humans

Wrong in this context.

1. People who speak other dialects like Cantonese overwhelmingly use the same written language, so there's no barrier in written communication;

2. AFAIK Mandarin is the mandatory teaching language in Mainland Chinese schools, so even if you want to be pedantic I'd say 1 in 5 has native or bilingual proficiency in Mandarin.

> starting a manderin only software project would mean choosing between only Chinese developers and Chinese devs and the rest of the planet as well.

First, there's no such thing as a "mandarin-only software project", you use Chinese the written language as explained above.

Secondly, it's still a reasonable choice if the author finds the alternative mentally draining, or the primary audience does. No point in global-proofing your project if the primary audience need to spend extra time and energy to communicate worse. I don't necessarily advocate for it, but I don't pretend that every project on earth has the obligation to make it convenient for me to contribute.

> lack of “foreign” contribution will probably work out okay for them.

That’s not how it works. Programming proficiency isn’t randomly distributed across the population.

If it's completely impossible to work on something that uses a foreign language, then it must be pretty important for people to be able to program with the language they already know.

There is an obvious difference; English is still the lingua franca. If you're dealing with anything international, you use it because everyone has a decent shot of knowing it; assuming most oss isn't confined to a single nation, english is still the best choice. Plus, for this reason, other nations are usually much better than America about teaching a foreign language.

Sure, if you want to start an international project, then English is a pretty good language to use.

However, I have heard people say that all software everywhere should be written in English, including things like personal projects and internal tools for companies in non-anglophone countries. I think that's kind of ridiculous.

I guess it depends how you define, "Written in english." Standard keywords in, say, C++ are derived from english, though they have a symbolic meaning everyone has to learn. I'd understand variable names and docs being in a foreign language.

Best-case is still engligh, though; working in another language is like doing science in American units. It works fine as long as you stay localized, but if you need to hire foreign devs to supplement your team, good luck (see the infamous Mars rover crash.)

No customer ever objected to my code with English variable / method / function names. Some don't care, others explicitly ask for English because maybe "one day we want to sell the company to somebody outside the country".

> English is still the lingua franca

Ironic that in order to say this, you used a latin phrase that translates to "language of the Frankish people".

Ironic? I think one of the main reasons English has become such an international language is how bastardized it is and how easily words & phrases are borrowed from other languages.

The fact that the Latin translation doesn't make any sense means that it was an English phrase the whole time, despite its etymology.

Except that it doesn't mean what you imply.

> The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca, the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from late medieval times, especially during the Renaissance era, to the 18th century. At that time, Italian-speakers dominated seaborne commerce in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire and a simplified version of Italian, including many loan words from Greek, Old French, Portuguese, Occitan, and Spanish as well as Arabic and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" (in the generic sense) of the region.

> In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua means a language, as in Portuguese and Italian, and franca is related to phrankoi in Greek and faranji in Arabic as well as the equivalent Italian. In all three cases, the literal sense is "Frankish", leading to the direct translation: "language of the Franks". During the late Byzantine Empire, "Franks" was a term that applied to all Western Europeans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

For centuries in the sciences, it was essential to know more than one language in order to be able to keep up with developments worldwide. As recently as our parents' generation, it was a graduation requirement for doctorates.

That English has become the lingua franca [1] of the world is a recent development. If we would like people to read our documentation, it is reasonable to expect that we should do our best to learn how to read theirs, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

Universities have only recently (past few decades) started dropping the foreign language requirement for the PhD.

Latin used to be the language of science & religion in europe too, it's not unprecedented that an industry standardizes on one language in a region.

There are 6000 languages. Even the top 5 would take a decade of your life. It would make more sense to have a miniscule fraction of people make machine translation better.

In the early days of nginx non-russian doc was a link to Google translate, and that was good enough, it worked fine for everybody.

How do you think non-english speakers read documentation in english?

We don't have to globalize everything. Yes, it's wonderful that we have the potential for people around the globe to work on and benefit from a particular project, but it is not necessary for every project to work that way.

How large is the chasm for a new programmer whose native language is Arabic?

It's pretty high. We could make it lower by helping people learn English but tools to program in their existing language so they don't have to learn English first make sense too.

You might be surprised how much Arabic you can pick up if you spend a few weeks in a place like Cairo. It helps if you make an effort to completely immerse yourself and not spend too much time in western style shopping malls.

Moving to a different continent is a bigger chasm yet.

Think about all the bad variable and function names from your ESL coworkers. This stuff matters to me enough that I know I would hate being on a project knowing I'm That Guy.

It does bring to mind that Mathematics isn't really done in 'english', it's a pidgin of latin and arabic symbols (and like most or all pidgins, has some whole-cloth inventions).

Instead of making most people learn a new language, should everyone have to learn a new language? Like they used to teach college in Latin in Europe?

The problem is that the only programming language I know of that tried to be its own language-language was APL and thoughts of coding in that give me nightmares.

UML tried to remove some of the english and fared better than APL but that's a wide chasm to cross and they too ended up at the bottom of it.

We are very, very slowly replacing some text in programming languages with more symbols, and with more parsers accepting Unicode characters for string literals we also should have access to the entire panoply of mathematical and scientific symbols (I'd really love proper multiply, not, and exponents to start, then maybe we can talk about sigma for some reduce operations) but the tipping point into "let's go ahead and remove the rest of the english" seems so far off that I'll probably never see it.

> The problem is that the only programming language I know of that tried to be its own language-language was APL and thoughts of coding in that give me nightmares.

Have you ever actually tried learning APL, or are you just trolling?

This is valid python3, try it out.

  數字 = 23
  運行 = True
  假 = False
  整數=int
  輸入=input
  印出=print
  while 運行:
    猜測 = 整數(輸入('輸入一個數字: '))

    if 猜測 == 數字:
        印出('恭喜, 你猜對了.')
        運行 = 假 # 這會讓循環語句結束
    elif 猜測 < 數字:
        印出('錯了, 數字再大一點.')
    else:
        印出('錯了, 數字再小一點.')
  else:
    印出('循環語句結束')
  印出('結束')

See:

http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/11/21/chinese-python-translat...

I don't know any Lisp, but I wonder about doing something like this in one, since if I understand correctly, even things like conditionals are functions. I'm sure it would be possible with macros, but I wonder if you make a Chinese Lisp just by redefining functions.

Indeed!

https://elangocheran.com/2014/10/30/exploring-programming-in...

https://youtu.be/MqjMZNwnYCY

Although I started the above project around the same time as Ramsey started his project in the original link (CLisp in Arabic), they were two entirely independent things. Ramsey's project is a 100% translation, whereas my project scales to other natural languages but is not a 100% translation.

Tim and I worked on trying to make programming in other languages easier as a means to help more kids learn programming, and learn FP the Lisp way, which we explain as more natural.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-53JoGPE4

https://power-turtle.com/#freestyle

Conditionals are not functions in Lisp. They are 'special forms' since they have to control the evaluation of their arguments and functions always evaluate all their arguments.

So, if you want to translate a lisp into another language you have to resort to macros.

None and none, as what you need is to alias the symbols for most lisps.

Been a while since I've done Lisp seriously, but I don't believe that's possible, at least in Common Lisp (SBCL). While if responds to symbol function:

  * (symbol-function 'if)
  #<CLOSURE (:SPECIAL IF) {1000C5084B}>

SBCL refuses to set that value to an alias:

  * (setf (symbol-function 'foo) (symbol-function 'if))
  #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {10005205B3}>:
    #<CLOSURE (:SPECIAL IF) {1000C5084B}> is not acceptable to (SETF SYMBOL-FUNCTION)

Trying this with regular functions works as intended:

  * (setf (symbol-function 'bar) (symbol-function 'mapcar))
  #<FUNCTION MAPCAR>
  * (bar #'1+ '(1 2 3))
  (2 3 4)

Special forms are, well, special and a lot of the regular parts of lisp doesn't work with them.

hmm, I think worst case symbol-macro should work there :/

I expected specials to work in this case, but apparently not.

Yes; alias the symbols that are macro operators or special operators via macros, and alias other kinds of symbols in their respective namespaces.

Variables may also have to be done with macros, because you want an assignment to a translated variable name to appear in the original variable. Some Lisp dialects perhaps allow a variable cell to have a binding to two or more symbols which could do the same thing.

You can write Perl in Latin or Klingon:

Latin from https://metacpan.org/pod/release/DCONWAY/Lingua-Romana-Perli... :

  use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
 
  adnota Illud Cribrum Eratothenis
 
  maximum tum val inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe.
  da meo maximo vestibulo perlegementum.
 
  maximum comementum tum novumversum egresso scribe.
  meis listis conscribementa II tum maximum da.
  dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac
      sic
          lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa listis da.
          dictum sic deinde cis tum biguttam tum stadium tum cum nextum
          comementum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
      cis

Klington from https://metacpan.org/pod/Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun :

  use Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun;
   
  <<'u' nuqneH!\n>> tIghItlh!
    
  {
          wa' yIQong!
          Dotlh 'oH yIHoH yInob 
                  qoj <mIw Sambe'> 'oH yIHegh jay'!
          <Qapla'!\n> yIghItlh!
  } jaghmey tIqel!

Congratulations! You have discovered the absolute nerdiest activity on the planet. Writing Perl in Klingon.

Qapla!

I had completely forgotten about this and honestly laughed out loud. Learn some more at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auqS6FR_RDE

Writing Perl is enough.

We must inform the Klingons immediately.

I don't understand Latin at all but I picture a centurion dictating this to a scribe, chiseling into stone, soon to deposit it in a Flintstone-ian rockputer.

I love the Latin one, looks like a magical incantation :)

It's too sad the latin one is not updated since 2001, I would love to use it to write random personal pieces of code!

Uses English grammar, though.

"I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does"

You cannot read tons of code written in the 1C language [0] unless you know Russian, but I don't think it's a loss for you or for Russians because it's a scripting language used by a suit of enterprise software dealing mostly with ever changing Russian accounting standards and tax code [1].

At the same time it's economically effective to use Russian language because it lowers the entry barrier into 1C programming and allows domain experts to understand some of the code.

P.S. Yes, I didn't bother to read the second paragraph :)

[0] https://govnokod.ru/1c

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1C_Company

My Russian is shitty, but not so shitty to not understand what "govnokod" means :-)

I hoped that someone would notice :)

Anyone with experience in 1C/tales of 1C? I've been curious about it since discovering it existed.

Not me :) If you are interested in something specific I could try to google (or should I say 'to yandex' in this case?) that for you and hopefully you'll be able to read it with the help of Google Translate.

This comment is a good way to see all the HN users who go off of a comment without reading it fully.

Doesn't everyone do that?

I fail to see how this is good way to see all the HN users. Why would I even want that? There must be thousands of HN users.

Hundreds even!

Please take this seriously.

I honestly don't understand how people can reply without even reading what they're replying to. And when they do, why aren't they downvoted to oblivion?

It's not always easy to get these jokes in the internet, even more so for non-English speakers which are, precisely, the ones who may be more harmed for not getting this particular joke.

I only downvote when I see some comment that goes against the rules, I do not think that it is my task to punish those who do not read a comment or do not get a joke.

Our comments, however, clearly go against the guidelines:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Time is limited. I'd be lying if I said that I read all comments in full when their first paragraph appear to be nonsense.

I'd rather move on to the next comment.

Is this what it means for communities to be too large? Like, you'd never do this to a coworker or a friend, but here there's enough content and users that you can say "fuck it" and assume you know better than what you didn't actually read.

In fairness, lots of people talk over their friends.

I'd prefer to not have to discuss problems in Ali's code I can't read, yet his algorithm doesn't work, but I can fix typos in our resident elderly COBOL programmer's output, even though he's from SE Asia and his English is rather basic. It seems like a personal preference, yet I think it's more complicated than that.

This reminds me of projects I did specifically for the Dutch market, but were coded in English because we needed to facilitate non-Dutch developers. Each new feature started with finding translations for Dutch words to be used as variables in code. Then when we created the UI, we'd have everything but the field labels in Dutch, making bug reports confusing, especially for the non-Dutch developers.

Good times!

* https://wordsandbuttons.online/fortran_is_still_a_thing.html

"Fortran is not, of course, outdated, and it’s not at all complex. In fact, it has grown into these myths exactly because it is that good at what it does."

Just wanted to share some positive FORTRAN vibes...

Yes, of course, in my opinion modern Fortran is awesome.

http://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/HomePage is worth a check!

> Its users are scientists and engineers; not computer scientists and software engineers, but the real ones

That's an unnecessary slight

Yes, but it made me laugh.

But well-deserved :)

that's certainly funny up to the day where you have to debug a codebase where all the function names and comments are in japanese. Also, I lost so much time searching for issues in badly-localized error messages that I nowadays just set my computers in english even though it's not my main language. It's just more efficient.

Yeah I have seen that. It highlights the one weakness of text based code formats - still prevaling for a good reason.

Multiple languages for developers is kind of a fringe case for functionality seen more in importers and fantranslaters.

> It highlights the one weakness of text based code formats

This is why I program exclusively in Piet

Eh, I had to support a codebase where the comments where in inproperly encoded cryllic. But happily the code was a php app that had lots of large hand crafted if soups for handling dates, so I'm pretty sure the comments were useless anyway.

In the current status quo your nightmare scenario (having to debug a codebase with comments in a diffeeent language) is precisely the everyday reality for non-English speaking devs. A Japanese dev could easily make the same comment as you, the difference being he actually has to deal with situation in question on a daily basis.

You could make the argument that English is the "lingua franca" but the phrase itself demonstrates just how ephemeral that is. I've lived in places before where a generation ago Russian was taught as a "lingua franca". Nowadays you would be hard-pressed to find anybody with a good understanding of Russian (good enough to understand technical documentation) there, even amongst ethnic Russians.

The internet has changed what it means to be the Lingua Franca. The ubiquity of English language in the largest internet communities and high quality media content would have to have a very strange reason to change. Before, it was simply a function of your colonizer or trading partners.

Im not sure your analogy holds ground.

Different programming languages are created try to solve limitations in existing programming langs.

Writing it in a different ascii character set isn't solving any technical issue - it's solving an accessibility issue, but compounding the problem of compatibility tremendously.

Obviously there is a efficient middle ground between accessibility and compatibility.

It's great for more people to be able to code. It's also great to be able to read code written by someone else across the world.

There is both pain and wisdom in standardization.

I'm not sure that I accept the distinction between technical issues and accessibility issues in the case of programming languages. Any Turing-complete language, given the right tooling, can be used to solve any software problem. Ultimately, we only use languages other than FORTRAN (or even assembly, for that matter) because it's easier.

A grid of rocks in a desert is turing complete. It's not a useful concept for discussing the differences between programming languages, precisely because it's such a low bar.

"Any software problem" includes these two extremely common problems, neither of which has anything to do with Turing completeness:

* It needs to do something fast

* It needs to be written quickly

I wasn't suggesting that Turing completeness means that all languages are somehow the same. To the contrary, I was arguing that languages are differentiated primarily by how easy they are to use for a particular task—in other words, their accessibility.

Execution speed is clearly not the reason why multiple programming languages exist, because assembly is as fast or faster than high-level languages. Rather we use programming languages because they are easy to understand and reason about, allowing us to work quickly, among other things. The usability of a language is impacted by things like whether it has automatic memory management, or whether it uses functions instead of gotos, but also by the vocabulary it uses. Consequently, I see the vocabulary of a language as not particularly different from those other attributes.

I think that the root issue here isn't as scary as it sounds (yes I know the OP is being ironic, but this is still a real concern that people have). One could easily write a tool that translates a foreign languages codebase into something english-readable. The plus here is that the bad google translations would probably yield descriptive names that are no worse than what we are already accustomed to.

I have a feeling a lot of art projects in history have been described as “at best useless, and at worst harmful“. For example leonardo da vinci’s bicycle.

Even if that is true, here or in the other art projects, the purpose is to evoke some aort of response, to capture attention and to provoke discussion.

And by this measure and judging firom the comments here this has been a resounding success :)

> This is the same reason that everyone uses FORTRAN.

The person you are responding to is not being serious. it is a joke.

> I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does.

I can't read the code written at my desk a week ago and understand what it does.

A lot of people don't speak English and I think it's main barrier to become a programmer or QA engineer.

it's much much easier to learn coding than to learn English. i have coworkers that don't speak English but have no problems coding.

Well, for people like us, obviously. I have many friends who are multilingual, and who can easily learn a 4th or 5th language if they want, but who have/would struggle with the logical and mathematical facilities required to code.

Good! We need less shitty software, the fewer people that write it the better.

I don't get why you have to be a certified engineer to build a bridge, but you can be some bloke with a 2 weekend course in python to program medical computers, avionics, train scheduling systems and other stuff that kills people when it breaks.

Non native speaker btw.

gatekeeper much

Good point. There's just one problem: any moron can still be able to become a programmer if they come from an anglophone country. Therefore, I propose that all companies in English-speaking countries switch to using Linotte[1], which is based on French.

I'm also going to submit a patch to GCC that will require the user to solve a differential equation before their code will compile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte

On the fact that the atlantic has two sides: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...

> 1. good programming is probably beyond the intellectual abilities of today's "average programmer"

2. to do, hic et nunc, the job well with today's army of practitioners, many of whom have been lured into a profession beyond their intellectual abilities, is an insoluble problem

3. our only hope is that, by revealing the intellectual contents of programming, we will make the subject attracting the type of students it deserves, so that a next generation of better qualified programmers may gradually replace the current one.

> any moron can still be able to

Whoops, proved my own point.

Because man-hours is the limiting factor in software that is made. Additional software simply gives you more options to choose from. Yes, it contributes to noise, but it's nothing like building two bridges.

And thats why Apple and Microsoft have the best software?/s A monkey with a typewriter will produce garbage no matter how many monkey hours it puts in.

The only way to have as little bugs as possible is to have as little software as possible.

You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).

Or at least just a few words I guess - if, for, while etc.

You don't really need to know what these words mean in English. You just have to know what they do in the code.

It's a headstart for sure, but English speakers do have to learn those reserved words and control structures in each language. The difference is we have the benefit of grounding them in their similar, but not identical, ordinary meanings

The bigger deal is standard lib classes and functions. An English speaker can guess for the names of things they want whereas a nonspeaker would have to remember them explicitly

I'm really curious now. If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn the meanings of the keywords when they were in a language you didn't understand? Did you have to learn to translate "for", "while", etc into Russian equivalents?

I knew meaning of "if then else", "function", "go", "return", other keywords were just keywords for me - I knew what they do and it was enough.

Same way you learn to use the ternary operator in c-ish languages? All the binary operators that have no equivalent in daily life?

How do you learn to read music when all the keywords are in Italian? Do you have to learn to translate “fortissimo” etc into English equivalents?

Context. I don't know what lingua franka means, but I also know what it means. I could bother and find literal translation, but why would I? The same applies to obscure English words, weird programming language keywords or math symbols. Integral and differential symbols don't really translate into anything and we use the word "integral" only because we can't type this symbol on an average keyboard.

It's also a barrier to becoming a scientific researcher, an airline pilot, or working at an international company. If you're going to communicate with people from other cultures, you need a shared language, and many international contexts have centered on varieties of English for that shared language.

Interesting thing: Airline pilots use imperial units instead of metric. They're an odd outlier where the argument used for metric works for imperial. Airlines in all but a few countries use it.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2566/what-is-th...

All that said I think there are benefits to confining languages principally to Latin script or making some kind of direct transliteration utility to Latin script since it's the language for ~70% of the worlds population [0]. It's very hard to learn to read and even more importantly hard to type in a different script.

[0] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-world-s-most-popular...

It isn't really that hard to learn to read a different script, unless it's logographic. A solid week of study at the outside and then it is just a matter of practice to get faster.

Arabic is pretty rough because there's a lot of rules about how letters change based on the letters around them. Also it reverts me back to hunt and peck mode for a long time until I learn the new layout which will be a while if I'm just using it for programming.

> it reverts me back to hunt and peck mode for a long time

I don't see how that's a problem with Arabic specifically. The same would happen if you switched to typing English in Dvorak.

It is different... I don't have to switch to DVORAK to program in Latin script based programming languages it's a choice. I would have to switch to an Arabic layout to program in قلب.

If you can't even figure out how to switch Input Methods I don't think you're going to have good luck programming either.

I also think you're conflating ASCII with the Latin Script. ASCII is easy to type and read, but anything outside of that range probably presents just as many burdens as say Tamil or Korean. The majority of Latin script languages however, are not limited to ASCII (for example é，ü, or €, which I ironically had to switch to a CJK Input method to type) making your "~70%" closer to whatever the population of native English speakers is.

The "let's make things marginally easy for the majority at the expense robustness in a way where the benefits don't even approach the drawbacks" attitude is how we get things like NodeJS where we have people writing desktop apps in JS b/c the webdevs are more familiar with it at the expense of everyone running massive, slow, and vulnerable apps with 900 different libraries all downloaded from shady sources.

> (for example é，ü, or €, which I ironically had to switch to a CJK Input method to type) making your "~70%" closer to whatever the population of native English speakers is.

True, you got me, I should have said just ASCII. For the most part though languages use the ASCII set + additional characters rather than replacing or removing characters entirely. so it's still 70%-ish not just English.

Sí, tienes razón. Deberíamos extender eso y expresarnos cada uno en nuestro idioma. La experiencia va a ser enriquecedora y seguramente no vamos a encontrar pegas.

Jes! Kaj se oni ne povas kompreni , tiam ni cxiuj povas lerni la lingvo universala, Esperanto. Nun ni povas skribi malbone en du o plus lingvoj! Tio estas plejbona de el plejbona.

Ikr? I mean since when does having a lingua franca ever helped any kind of scientific or technical progress? All those people writing in latin and greek despite not being their native language were just sheep trying to fit in. Like that Newton guy, just your typical apple-hipster trying to be one of the "cool kids".

I think of myself as eclectic taster of the many fine cultures worldwide and since I just got python to print Hello World in the console I'm moving on to learning Swahili. It should take about a week. It's all just different languages anyway.

It seems that there are two theoretical extremes on this position:

1. All code should be written in English, and no one should ever use any other language in programming.

2. All code should be written in local languages, and no one should should ever use a common language for collaboration.

I say "theoretical" because I've never heard anyone argue anything like the latter point, which you are satirizing here. On the other hand, there are people in this thread who seem to be arguing the former, which I find nearly as ridiculous.

Since there's a lot of effort in this thread to deconstruct the joke, I just want to add that FORTRAN is probably reference to the classic "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" [1]. In fact, the whole comment would fit there nicely.

> If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.

[1] https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

Very funny, but no, it's the reason we have one hundred languages instead of a thousand

I think Lojban is the only language that could work (not just for computers but humans as well). I do not see it happening anytime soon though.

For anyone who does not know what Lojban is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban#Applications would be a great starting point. :)

>I think Lojban is the only language that could work (not just for computers but humans as well)

What about humans who like to think in a language whose idioms, history, etc match their culture?

Heck, human languages even adapt to the climate (e.g. warmer areas having more vowel sounds, cold areas optimizing for shorter/less open mouth exposed to cold air, etc).

Plus there is some naivety in the idea that humans need or want a "logical and unambiguous structure". We need it for some things (math, STEM), but we seek more freedom to be ambiguous in other things -- and in fact it can be essential to the very civilization to be able to be so (for diplomatic reasons, civility, psychological, etc).

Does https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Culturally_neutral or https://wiki.c2.com/?CulturallyNeutralLanguage answer your question?

From the second link:

> The only thing that characterizes a logical language, like LojbanLanguage, is that it's unambiguous from a structural standpoint. It seems that Lojban is just as expressive as any other human language, with the same capacity for overstatement, understatement, irony, metaphor, simile, pun, etc. A lot of famous works of fiction have been translated into Lojban by enthusiasts.

Your concerns have been brought up and explained in part by the two links above, and in the Wikipedia article I linked to. Allow me to quote some parts from it:

> The removal of grammatical ambiguity from modification [...] seems to heighten creative exploration of word combination. [...] Other areas of possible benefit are (surprisingly in a 'logical' language) emotional expression. Lojban has a fully developed set of metalinguistic and emotional attitude indicators that supplant much of the baggage of aspect and mood found in natural languages, but most clearly separate indicative statements from the emotional communication associated with those statements. This might lead to freer expression and consideration of ideas, since stating an idea can be distinguished from supporting that idea. The set of possible indicators is also large enough to provide specificity and clarity of emotions that is difficult in natural languages.

> The language was built to attempt to remove some limits on human thought; these limits are not understood, so that the tendency is to try to remove restrictions whenever we find the language structure gets in our way. You definitely can talk nonsense in Lojban.

Anyway, you can decide to be ambiguous if you wish to do so, it is perfectly possible. Do not worry, it will not turn our society into something similar to the movie Equilibrium. I think the word "logic" makes people jump to similar conclusions.

That's exactly why all the HN'ers use JavaScript to write FORTRAN!

Truly a Galaxy-brain move

We Programmers need multiple languages to avoid being affected by Snowcrash.

Wait, was the last 30 years some Picard-and-the-flute dream? Thank God! Hopefully the next FORTRAN version will keep the name all-caps.

Kind of remarkable that when I first read this comment thread, this was the top-rated comment, but while I was posting a short agreement with someone in this reply thread who noted that HN has a collective problem with snark and satire, pgcj_poster's comment was downvoted by people who apparently have a problem with snark and satire.

I would put "/s" here, but when I say there are HN readers who really need to lighten the hell up sometimes, I am not remotely being sarcastic.

They had us in the first half I'm not gonna lie.

I love the video on the page. I like the way RTL looks and the way the author/creator specially mentions the beauty of arabic and how the code can be made to look aesthetically pleasing (not that I know anything about arabic personally). Too much of our time is spent on functionality and terseness: so it's great to see this project.

I don't get why this is so controversial. Programming languages should absolutely be in a language that the majority of programmers can understand. Everyone is bringing up the fact that programmers can't understand each others' code; do we really think introducing more languages, whatever they may be, will help that?

Considering that it is a relatively limited set of keywords and operators that make up a programming language, wouldn't it be relatively easy to translate it to a more friendly version?

Nope. You can translate instructions, but standard library and frameworks also should use local naming or it will be completely useless.

Speaking as a Cobol programmer I find your comments deeply offensive.

Some games (e.g. the anno series) actually have a german language scripting language for custom maps.

And the original, first high level programming language plankalkül also had nothing to do with english.

>> It is implemented as a tree-walking language interpreter in JavaScript.

I think this is probably why it is neither useful nor intended to useful other than as an "exercise".

I think you are being sarcastic/ironic.

That is what I have gotten as well starting from the "This is the same reason that everyone uses FORTRAN." bit.

What is wrong with FORTRAN??

Nothing is wrong with (modern) Fortran (2018), although I'd argue that everything is wrong with using FORTRAN (77) for numerical computing in the new millennium. On the contrary, modern Fortran (2003,2008,2018,202X) is still truly the best and most expressive language for numerical scientific computing.

At worst it's about as "useless" as other niche programming languages like Brainf* and the like.

While this language doesn't seem to be geared towards introducing people to computer science, all the languages based on English require someone to learn that script, that language and some of its culture first before being able to use it.

And in much of the world people don't regularly start learning English (or a latin script for that matter) in elementary school. A language based on Arabic (or Chinese, Korean, etc) could help with introducing computer science in school before the students master English at the necessary level...

There ARE successful (used in production) languages with non-English syntax.

You're just saying "Everyone should use Chrome, otherwise the web would be balkanized". Or, taking it to the extreme, "every book in the world should be written in English".

>I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does

You are, but no one promised "without any effort". Almost every developer of not English-speaking origin put that effort, why shouldn't you?

>You wouldn't be able to contribute to an open source project unless it happened to be written in a language that you knew

You've just described the status quo.

they are joking.

How can you tell? It looks like a serious post to me.

The whole second paragraph where they talk about everyone writing FORTRAN and no other programming languages existing.

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