There was a talk about this at the Clojure/West conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqjMZNwnYCY&index=19&list=PLZdCLR02grLrKAOj8FJ1GGmNM5l7Okz0a
Aside from just the technical challenge of needing a language that lends itself to renaming the core primitives, there's the fundamental challenge that coming up with good names for core functions is hard in any language. Naming the control constructs is also has. For example, how do you write the two-part "if/then" in a language that uses "if" but not "then" for conditionals? Also there are a lot of stylistic questions that come up with other languages that don't occur in English because English is more grammatically fuzzy than most, and that sort of works well for programming. For example, when a variable is passed as an argument to a function, it should presumably be in objective case, but in the body of the function it should be nominative case. Should functions use an imperative tense if the language has one? What if it is being used as an input to a higher-order function, is it a verb, a noun, or an object in such a situation? In languages that have different forms for the different parts of speech, this becomes a tricky issue, and there's no established body of code that I know of in which these stylistic issues have been decided. On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 6:54 AM, kirby urner <kirby.ur...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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 > >
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