On Saturday, April 2, 2016 at 10:42:27 PM UTC+5:30, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote: > Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > > > Steven D'Aprano : > >> So you're saying that learning to be a fluent speaker of English is a > >> pre-requisite of being a programmer? > > > > No more than learning Latin is a prerequisite of being a doctor. > > Full ACK. Probably starting with the Industrial Revolution enabled by the > improvements of the steam machine in England, English has become the /lingua > franca/ of technology (even though the French often still disagree, > preferring words like « ordinateur » and « octet » over “computer” and > “byte”, respectively¹). (With the Internet at the latest, then, it has also > become the /lingua franca/ of science, although Latin terms are common in > medicine.)
IMHO the cavalier usage of random alphabet-soup for identifiers can lead to worse than just aesthetic unpleasantness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack When python went to full unicode identifers it should have also added pragmas for which blocks the programmer intended to use -- something like a charset declaration of html. This way if the programmer says "I want latin and greek" and then A and Α get mixed up well he asked for it. If he didn't ask then springing it on him seems unnecessary and uncalled for -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
