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Comment by al_form2000 | Hacker News Reader

al_form2000

Assuming there is merit to the idea that the Latin charset gives unfair disadvantage for people from other cultures (I think not(1)), then a language should be formed from a culture neutral alphabet - say, klingon. It better have a number of glyphs in the vicinity or 30 or so (for typing ease) no funky char combining rules (for reading ease) etc. And it would still need guidelines for naming functions, variables, not to mention pronouncing them (these could of course be localized rules) etc. My guess is that it would be a Latin like script, only with different glyphs. And of course, all var and function names would be hopeless gibberish, unless we all decide to become klingon/whatever fluent.

(1) At the very least, someone should explain why the rise of - say - the russian and indian programmers, given the unfair barrier.

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Maybe one shouldn't take the "unfairness" aspect too far.

This project seems to be more about recognizing cultural differences in thought patterns and how they permeate today's computing world.

It doesn't seem to be geared towards teaching programming to students who only know Arabic so far.

And English is being taught and used extensively in the Indian education system and society in general.

That (cultural differences in thought patterns) is indeed an interesting take (I'd like to hear what Larry Wall has to say about it). I do think it would be best addressed at the background level (say predicate logic or somesuch) than at a programming language level (which is more of a consequence).

Unfortunately, the "unfairness" thing has hijacked many subthreads and it takes the proposal at face value (as in "Wouldn't it be cool if any programming language was available in localized form, charset, keywords and kaboodle?" - no it wouldn't) .

I'd say predicate logic and much of the theory behind computer programming would stay the same, regardless of the language.

And yes, I think it would be good for speakers of non-latin based languages to be able to write programs (or notebooks) in their own language. Some stuff, like business logic, NLP, or "Low Code" like in Excel, could benefit from staying in one cultural frame of mind instead of switching between multiple frames.

Especially for different writing directions, like with Arabic. At the very least, Mandarin in Mainland China is now written almost exclusively left to right, so it's not as painful to use latin letters in a Chinese text when appropriate.

So APL?

That was what came to my mind, actually.

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