But your numbers are utterly useless, as they are counts of humans, not > programmers. I think that the number of programmers who don't understand > English is very small. They know English because historically, the > programmer's world has been English.
My point was that English speakers are in a minority and that the current bias towards English speakers is not necessarily a good thing, and definitely not something we should seek to preserve. > Of course, the level of comprehension differs greatly. That's why where > things get hard, Perl lets you write the "wrong" thing, like 1th and > 2th, maybe even 5rd and 7nd. And documentation should be written as > simply and clearly as possible. If a word like "mnemonic" is used, it > should first be explained. > > And keywords are new to any programmer anyway. Mnemonically, it may be > easy to remember that say prints something, but it certainly doesn't say > anything. And how is remembering "my" or "readline" or "try" any harder > than the many not-at-all-english \W operators that Perl has? My point was in response to the expressed sentiment that non-ascii letters should not be used in identifiers, rather than in keywords. Then, there are books, documentation, mailing lists and fora, most of > which are available in English only. A small part is translated, but > I find it hard to believe that the translated portion can be enough. > (Still, having them around does help many people, and that's why I think > perldocs should perhaps come in several languages (as a different > project, so translation delays don't delay Perl releases)). I sincerely hope that one day there will be perl books written by non-English speakers that I can find English translations for ;-) Tom
