If you’re from a non English speaking country, do you first have to learn English if you want to get into programming?
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There’s OSTRAJava, a parody esoteric language based on a very specific regional accent of the Czech language.
Ideally, you need at least some basic understanding to use the vast majority of languages. The problem isn’t even writing the code itself, you can definitely just memorize the keywords and some basic concepts and have at it. If you ask me, the real issue is the availability, amount and overall quality of documentation and learning material if you go about it that way.
I have a few coworkers who skipped the learning English part and learned most everything from other non native speakers and they tend to be crippled by often not really being able to make use of official documentation or keep up with new things, since the vast majority of content out there is in English. It also has the unfortunate side effect of pushing them to stick with whatever it is they learned way back when and not really looking for better ways of getting things done.
So basically, you can pull it off without knowing English but it’s going to be suboptimal and/or painful IMO.
This needs to be higher up, it’s the most correct and complete answer.
While many languages read right-to-left and have other artifacts of English words order, you do not need to learn English first. Knowing English makes it easier, but learning English first would make it harder.
Am I confused? Doesn’t English read left-to-right?
Blah. First comment after waking up, sorry.
Np! I was just sat here moving my hand from right to left thinking I’d somehow had it wrong all this time XD
Windev and Wlanguage (French).
The Windev advertising material is really something…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/02/french_software_developers_are_all_beautiful_women/
I learned to program at the same time I learned English. I learned the words if, then, else and while in this context.
Not programming but the question reminded me of Aviation English. All pilots and air traffic controllers must learn how to speak “aviation english” in order to communicate. It’s essentially a few hundred English words and basic syntax all related to aviation. I’d say learning a programming language is kind of like learning Aviation English.
Well, in ex-USSR there is 1C which in syntax is a bit like Pascal with Russian instead of English.
Also plenty of other languages using Russian keywords, but for the purpose of your question - I think it’s safe to assume that anything relevant uses English.
That’s “One S”, not “One C”, for anyone reading this unfamiliar with Cyrillic. What looks like a Latin C is actually a Cyrillic S.
Also, while we’re at it, leat’s clear up one more misunderstanding: Many think СССР is Cee Cee Cee Pee, but it’s not, it’s really SSSR.
No. The Soviets had one that was basically C but a decade early called Адрес (address). The higher-ups were skeptical of the concept of computers, though, so computing in the USSR languished anyway.
I think the Chinese have something going too. Mostly educated global people know some English anyway, though.
The higher-ups were skeptical of the concept of computers
It’s arguably dumber than that. The higher-ups treated R&D like any other centrally-planned ordeal, which meant a bunch of incredibly smart people in different countries were at each others’ throats for the privilege of trying to build a thing… rather than just building multiple things and picking the ones that worked.
When it was a 5-ton, room-filling affair - called the Small Electronic Calculating Machine, because all programmers are the exact same kind of dork - building exactly one kinda made sense. When the west had three competing 6502 minicomputers for like a hundred bucks each, it was just tight-fisted control for the sake of political grandstanding. The fuckin’ BBC rolled out a better centralized computing standard.
The root problem is having “a bicycle for the mind” in a country that restricts travel.
Mostly true, but Stalin also came right out with an essay that called it a fake capitalist concept, so that was part of it. I imagine Truman wouldn’t have gotten it either, but as you say in the US you don’t need everyone to agree something is a good idea to try it out.
The root problem is having “a bicycle for the mind” in a country that restricts travel.
This is the one I’m less sure about. They had censors but reading and learning approved content was also very encouraged, and in the early days it was a machine mostly just for number crunching. AFAIK computing languished roughly the same way as most basic research did, and Kateryna Yushchenko managed to invent something early anyway.
For better or worse, if you want to do anything meaningful with programming you’ll have to learn english. You need to be able to find and understand documentation and help from other people online to get work done.
There are Arabic based programming languages, which is pretty interesting because right to left.
Generally though you need to know some English to learn the more widely used ones.
Neat. That’s something I never even thought of. When typing in Arabic, does the cursor proceed from right to left, then?
Is this somehow handled with locales, are custom operating systems required, or is it really only handled by specific editors like word processors?
I’m trying to imagine how this would work at, say, a console bash prompt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-left_mark
It’s just a Unicode character; Copy-Paste and experiment!
(If you’d like more direction on how to play with this in a *NIX terminal let me know.)
Terminal environments are always awful at RTL, they always need to make shitty compromises that graphical environments just don’t need to make. The fact that you even need a RTL mark is already a bad start - graphical text renderers can deduce text directionality based on the characters in it.
Try using a website in an RTL language some time. Facebook and Google both support Arabic and Hebrew for example. The entire site is flipped - a left sidebar would instead appear on the right, a logo might be at the top right instead of top left, etc. Getting it right is hard, especially with mixed RTL/LTR content (like if you have a Hebrew page with some English words on it).
This was a really interesting question with good answers! :)
It’s more of a gag language, but there’s ChavaScript in Hebrew which is basically just translated JavaScript
My first contact with computers in school was with a dialect (?) of LOGO that used commands based on Spanish. GD (giraderecha) instead of RT (right) or AV (avanza) instead of FD (forward).
APL was evidently written by an alien.
