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Comment by m-hodges | Hacker News Reader

When I was studying Computer Science in college, I once remarked how lucky we, English speakers, are that programming languages use English nouns and verbs. A ton of my classmates were here on a student visa, and English was not their first language. I always thought that programming in English put me at an advantage on the learning curve. I also always thought it was silly when someone would quip that programming should count for “foreign language” credit. Anyway, always cool to see non-English programming languages.

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At a risk of going against the hivemind, I disagree.

I self-taught programming quite early in my life, way before I had a good command of the English language. I've read books in my native language, talked on programming forums in my native language. In the end the "english" in programming languages is just a handful of keywords, and it didn't hinder me one bit that I had no idea "int" stands for "integer".

Of course, I started by writing code like "bool es_primo(int numero)" (in my language), but there's nothing in C that says identifiers must be english, just convention. Standard library and packages nowadays would be a problem, but back then standard library were thin and "strcpy" name is obscure anyway. The real hard part was always learning how to program and design properly.

And for more advanced topics, documentation and learning materials in english only are HUGE problem for ESL, because one has to actually read and understand them. But this is not something programming language can help with.

I have a similar experience, I learned English much later than my first programming languages, and picking up some keywords and basic APIs was never an issue (it was BASIC and C/C++ at the time). Maybe I would occasionally look up in a dictionary what is 'needle' and 'haystack' in a code snippet, and I was puzzled by the ubiquitous "foo, bar, baz", which to my relief turned out to be equally cryptic for the native speakers. I still don't feel about code as a kind of English prose, it occupies a separate part of my brain, compared to the natural languages.

I agree with your opinion and I was wonder how the Korean could be used in the world with full of Eng. Thanks for your feedback!

That's coming from a Spanish speaker used to the alphabet, QUERTY, etc. I imagine you'd find it much more difficult if C were written in Chinese or Arabic, for instance.

For people that use similar keyboards I don’t imagine it’s that different though like you said occasionally knowing that bool means Boolean or int means integer may make it slightly easier for English speakers I think a big disadvantage would likely be for people from say China that use incredibly different keyboards if I had to add a wildly different second language and switch to it every time I wanted to create a var or import something or write an if statement I’m not sure if I would’ve continued learning to code it may have been one step to many

True. English is a major reason why India is the IT back-office for most of the western world. I too have personally observed how my fellow classmates, who had done their schooling in their regional language, struggled with the coursework in college because it was solely in English. And some of them were state rankers - it felt bad to realise that they had to put in twice the effort needed to keep up their grades. I think there's a lot of potential wasted in India because of this kind of hardship / struggle - a lot of intelligent people are held back just because they lack an aptitude for multilingualism.

Naah, my non-english-speaking friends say that the keywords are less than 1% complexity of a programmer's job, so it really doesn't matter.

Also, in most languages you already can name variables/classes/members in any Unicode letters. So only "if/for/while" keywords and stdlib classes remain English. It makes little sense to translate those.

However, in the vast majority of cases, non-ASCII characters are rarely used for variable or function names during programming. This is because they can cause conflicts when using different encoding systems, and some automation tools fail to recognize them. Consequently, programmers in non-English speaking regions must invest more effort into naming variables than English speakers, as they have to translate all localized expressions into English.

When Toss, a Korean unicorn startup, announced that they would start using Korean for variable names within financial contexts, it sparked significant debate and a wide range of reactions among Korean programmers.

Nah. If anything, treating keywords as special sigils actually helps.

Also, not all natural languages are suitable for programming languages. In highly inflected languages you often end up with grammatically incorrect forms. Or with stilted language.

Thank you for your empathy. English has been the one of the most frequent languages for globe so that it is reasonable to Eng in many coding project, though.

It's may also be reasonable to make localized translations for a programming language. This is rarely done in reality for obvious reasons. An exception are Excel's function names. People who don't know English, or hardly know it, appreciate it.

That’s the least of their problems. The best computer science textbooks are published first and foremost in English and only translated belatedly. The research papers are in English and not often translated. Even the manuals of both commercial and FOSS programming tools tend not be translated. A few keywords is what, half an hour of rote memorization.

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