If you’re from a non English speaking country, do you first have to learn English if you want to get into programming?
Brainfuck certainly isn’t. Most assembly languages use opcodes that are sorta English abbreviations, like STA for Store value in the A register. I haven’t done much work in assembly but I think there are several standards which don’t strictly speaking use English keywords.
I do recall hearing of a language described as “You can write in it in any language” I guess meaning the various bits of syntax are done with special characters? I forget which it is.
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.
there’s some really great mini documentaries on YouTube above the Soviet internet of the 1960s, which would have taken over as the central planning committee and managed the supply and demand automatically. When you look at what it was supposed to be, and why it failed (a lot of people worked very hard to make sure it wouldn’t succeed) it’s really interesting stuff.
here’s one I watched recently enough about it; [https://youtu.be/cLOD5f-q0as?si=D8mVJiK603HPdgKY](Asianometry - Why the Soviet Internet Failed)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
[https://piped.video/cLOD5f-q0as?si=D8mVJiK603HPdgKY]](https://piped.video/cLOD5f-q0as?si=D8mVJiK603HPdgKY])
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There’s a few programming languages that aren’t based around English, but they’re pretty rare and I’m not sure many people use them. It’s kind of sad because it makes programming much less accessible if you’re not an English speaker… But it’s also sort of a blessing because it’s easier to understand code you might have to interact with because it’s probably written in an English-ish language with the Roman alphabet, and you’re not stuck trying to read Japanese or Arabic or something to understand a library. I have mixed feelings on it. It’s convenient for me as an English speaker, but it also seems kind of unfortunate. I’ve heard that computer science is a field which is having a pretty big impact on the spread of English in the world, but I haven’t found a citation for that and I’m not sure I believe it.
I agree. I speak English very well now, but it is a weirdly hard requirement for a lot of jobs/hobbys in life.
You are interested in psychology? Awesome, go study psychology.
You are interested in physics? Here is a two year English course. You’re bad at languages? Well, sucks for you.I am wondering how much of an economic advantage it is for English speaking countries to have English as the base language of science. I bet at least 5% of students in other countries will not get as good as they could be because they are lacking the understanding of the language their study material is written in.
English is the language of science and trade on the whole, which I think can be a good thing for the aforementioned reasons in your comment. Makes it much more universal.
I was on a trip in Spain, where students from all over the world came to learn Spanish. There were Americans, Japanese, Germans, etc (others I may have forgotten since this was during highschool!), but the gist of it is that everyone spoke their mother tongue, but the only unifying language there was Spanish. It was incredibly interesting speaking to someone who only knew Japanese and Spanish, where I only knew English and Spanish. People would talk to their friends in their native language, then relay what they said in Spanish for everyone else. It was mindblowingly cool to have a universal language to an otherwise insurmountable language barrier.
This also happened, somewhat annoyingly, in other parts of Spain. You’d be eagerly trying to practice Spanish, and spanish people would hear your accent, and would automatically switch to English for you. Same thing happened all across the world whenever we traveled. I always marveled at just how many people would switch to English whether we were in Germany or Zimbabwe.
Honestly, the world lucked out with a minimal Latin alphabet become the standard. English even lost its weird special symbols because all the good printing-press typefaces were made in Germany. It’s only twenty-six discrete characters (admittedly in two cases) and they’re the most common throughout all the European languages that, uh, spread their influence.
Shame you all have to deal with our bullshit spelling.
I try and pretend the spelling oddities are a feature and not a bug. If you can recognize the language of origin of a given word, it helps you know how to pronounce it,and often the definition.
Needing etymology to guess at pronunciation is why it’s bullshit.
People have tried to fix it. Their partial success just created more exceptions.
I always marveled at just how many people would switch to English whether we were in Germany or Zimbabwe.
English is an official language of Zimbabwe, and German is in the same language family as English. Try to speak English to commoners in Egypt, Eastern Europe, Vietnam or even France, and it wouldn’t be that easy.
I’m from a non-english country and some of my coworkers don’t speak English at all, so… no. That said, it’s very inconvenient and they use the google translator all the time (which is shit, told them to use deepl at least).
Anyhow, there are programming languages that aren’t English based: I don’t remember the names but, for example, there is one that uses Latin
No, they exist but they are rather rare.
Here is an example of a programming language that is completely in Russian: https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Встроенный_язык_программирования_1С:Предприятие#Пример_программы
That said, English is the lingua franca of the field of computing. You aren’t forced to learn it, but without it, you’ll deny yourself access to the vast majority of material out there, be it books, articles, papers, documentation, specification, and so on.
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There’s also kumir. It was(is?) used to teach kids how to program. I first learned programming using it many years ago. I still think that it made me a better programmer than people who were using Pascal instead. They were both popular in schools at the time.
Not that you mention it, it’s kind of strange that Java isn’t based on Javanese
Or Brazilian Portuguese since they are the largest exporter of coffee beans :)
This was a really interesting question with good answers! :)
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.
The OG SAP application was originally written in German, I don’t remember what language it was written in but I remember writing automation scripts back in the day and being like “how do I convert this perl/Python/bash script into German”.
It’s more of a gag language, but there’s ChavaScript in Hebrew which is basically just translated JavaScript
wenyan is quite an awesome joke language based on ancient Chinese
Honestly, no. I do know English, however the syntax is always very far removed from actual sentences and learning how to use the syntax is way different from how languages work.
That said, you’re kinda porked when it comes to reading through documentations, APIs, and watching tutorials, as most of them are in English.
I do have about 2 friends though who can code and are not particularly versed in English.
I worked in a company that outsourced code.
The only English speaker, English was his fifth language and he would still struggle. We had to write followup emails after every meeting so he can take time to decipher my exact request.
All the deliverables were in broken English. If catch things like “reqiured” that were easy fixes. Code logic was readable, but not great. I mean it worked though.
APL was evidently written by an alien.
