Do people whose native language isn't English just have to learn English before they can program? That seems pretty shitty of us just because English speakers were the first to make computers. It'd be ... Rough ... For me to have to learn kanji before I could code
@JessTheUnstill Not really. I learned HTML & CSS when I was 8. Sure, at that point, I learned absolute basics of English at school. But I mainly just memorized and learned individual words on the fly. When I started experimenting with JS (probably when I was 10/11, don't remember exactly), I already knew a bit of English, but I was in no way fluent. Having access to great tutorials in Czech sure did help though.
So, is it harder for non-native speakers? Yeah, probably, but it's not a deal breaker.
@JessTheUnstill As many said, while most programming languages are mapped roughly into English, learning a few keywords is not as tough as learning the whole English language.
Documentation, however, it's another story! The vas majority of documentation, tutorials, stack overflow Q&A, and general material *is* in English. So if you don't learn English, improving is that much harder.
@JessTheUnstill It's definitely harder, since so many programming tools aren't internationalised, and hence report any error and warning messages in English rather than the user's native language. Even translating docs requires a big time investment, though - translating the error messages not only needs the time investment to maintain the translations, it adds more opportunities for secondary failures when trying to report errors.
@[email protected] Sort of, although see efforts like hedy.org/ sharing naive language programming.
That said, I've been told it's not quite as bad as it sounds. A lot of code uses abbreviations, terms outside of normal language, or words in unusual ways anyway ('bool', 'for', 'def') so it doesn't help but it isn't any worse than car and cdr.
I can't say that it doesn't feel unfair though.
@mavnn Yeah I guess. As long as you know the latin alphabet (and have those characters available on your keyboard), they're just keywords. Not like sed or grep or zsh or whatever have any particular meaning in English and I know all of those.
@[email protected] yeah, input can be a challenge. Even here in Italy teaching primary age kids I've hit a few things I didn't expect ('~' just doesn't exist on the standard Italian key layout, for instance). I don't have direct experience with non Latin alphabet learners but like you I'm guessing it's a painful extra hurdle.
@JessTheUnstill Global Air Traffic Control is in English as well.
@Lightfighter That would suck - having to learn a whole foreign language just because you want to be a pilot.
@JessTheUnstill Colonialism is a motherfucker.
@Lightfighter @JessTheUnstill on the other hand, not having some kind of Lingua Franca for international tasks like that would make things extremely difficult. English kind of lucked in to this position by timing of when it was dominant, but if it hadn't been that, some other language would have been in that spot. It's no more or less worthy than others that could have been in that position imo
@http_error_418 @Lightfighter It's weird thinking about how there's no particular reason France or Prussia or Spain or whomever couldn't have been the start of the Industrial Revolution and we'd all be learning some other lingua francia
@JessTheUnstill 何‼️ hdym you don't know kanji
@pcambra I know - despicable of me, especially since I enjoy anime
@JessTheUnstill It behooves you to ask.
You might be interested by this page :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages
I don't ptogram, but a friend of mine started around six yeard old, just messing around with GOTO etc in his game programs...
I think it was just a fun secret code at first ;)
@JessTheUnstill no. But usually as you learn to code you learn some English.
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