People will read my subject heading and think I'm asking "what computer language?" but I'm actually asking what world human languages should be used to share computer science -- or should they need to be in world languages at all? What's wrong with comp sci in Visayan, spoken by millions in the Philippines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visayan_languages Some people are of the opinion that since English has come so far as a world language, that computer science should simply be taught in English. That's fine for English speakers, but isn't going to fly with Chinese, so we need some better ideas than that. I'd say any human language is up to embracing STEM, starting from where it is. Obviously extending a human language means inventing namespaces, just like we do in Python. We've been doing it for many thousands of years, to keep up with our own tools just for starters. The devil is in the details. How should we teach Python in multiple languages. Maybe we should expect more multi-lingual texts and examples e.g. regular expressions with Cyrillic should be as common as rain even in a book mostly in English. The point is: if all you use in Latin-1 in your examples, you're hardly showing much Unicode fluency. Python teaching meets LEX Institute I guess (an old theme here on edu-sig). Here's some more on that topic: http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=9769308 (about the overhead in memorization incurred by having to learn a whole other vocabulary). As I posted earlier this month, I think hospitals are under the gun to at least get patient names in their native script on computer monitors. That brings up issues of collation / alphabetization across languages. I ask basic questions about that here: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/i18n-sig/2015-May/002131.html Insights / feedback / comments welcome. Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
