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Comment by csande17 | Hacker News Reader

It's been tried with Chinese Python back in the early 2000s: http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/11/21/chinese-python-translat...

It never really took off. I think because computers already require users to read and type Latin letters in lots of other situations, and it's not that hard to learn what a few keywords mean, so you might as well stick with the English keywords everyone else is using.

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That probably pops up all over the place, like how there's no real progress making the terminal support different keyboards/languages (e.g. send raw key code to terminal apps).

Technical people already have to make concessions to deal with ascii chars and English in computing by the time they use a terminal, so the upside of changing any one thing kinda peters out.

There has been more recent interest expressed as well, but still with no momentum as far as I can tell. E.g.: https://discuss.python.org/t/supporting-non-english-developm...

I think the actual reason it has not taken off is because of the ecosystem. You can translate Python, but nobody using a high-level language like Python uses just Python. The first time you pull in a library and are met with a wall of English documentation, error codes, and APIs, you're right back to where you started. Low-level OS APIs are also in English. I suspect there is a lot of potential being left on the table here, but it's a massive undertaking because you need to translate not only a language but also enough of an ecosystem for people to be able to make programs.

It might not be hard to learn the keywords in an English programming language but it seems hard to learn something like Spring Boot

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