I see your point - having a global language certainly helps with knowledge transfer, and English has become that standard for programming. But is learning English really 'not a big deal' for everyone? For someone with limited access to quality English education, it could take years before they’re comfortable enough to learn programming effectively. Meanwhile, a fluent English speaker can start coding right away.Rather than fragmenting knowledge, what if we had a system that let people write and learn code in their native script, while still maintaining full compatibility with the existing programming ecosystem? Similar to how Unicode enables multiple languages on the web without breaking global communication. Do you think that could work?
Jtsummers|11 months ago
Algol 68 offered that, for keywords at least. Variables, procedure names, and the contents of strings can't be localized quite the same way (though localization for content is easier now than it used to be if you don't embed the string text directly in the source).
If we switched from a text file based representation of code to a different structure, localization could be performed more easily for source code even down to comments and variables. However, this would help you to work on a project I started, taken too far it would not help us work together (we'd refer to the same variables and procedures with different names). We'd still need to select a common language when collaborating.
Other languages, today, at least work well with unicode source but they retain English-based keywords (Go, Rust, probably others but they like to tout it specifically).
jayathra|11 months ago
But what if we had a system where people wrote code in their native script, and it automatically translated into a universal format when shared? Would that help keep things accessible while maintaining collaboration?