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At a risk of going against the hivemind, I disagree

At a risk of going against the hivemind, I disagree. I self-taught programming quite early in my life, way before I had a good command of the English language. I've read books in my native language, talked on programming forums in my native language. In the end the "english" in programming languages is just a handful of keywords, and it didn't hinder me one bit that I had no idea "int" stands for "integer". Of course, I started by writing code like "bool es_primo(int numero)" (in my language), but there's nothing in C that says identifiers must be english, just convention. Standard library and packages nowadays would be a problem, but back then standard library were thin and "strcpy" name is obscure anyway. The real hard part was always learning how to program and design properly. And for more advanced topics, documentation and learning materials in english only are HUGE problem for ESL, because one has to actually read and understand them. But this is not something programming language can help with.

Original discussionShow HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust116 source comments · at import
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M-

When I was studying Computer Science in college, I once remarked how lucky we, English speakers, are that programming languages use English nouns and verbs. A ton of my classmates were here on a student visa, and English was not their first language. I always thought that programming in English put me at an advantage on the learning curve. I also always thought it was silly when someone would quip that programming should count for “foreign language” credit. Anyway, always cool to see non-English programming languages.

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A5

I have a similar experience, I learned English much later than my first programming languages, and picking up some keywords and basic APIs was never an issue (it was BASIC and C/C++ at the time). Maybe I would occasionally look up in a dictionary what is 'needle' and 'haystack' in a code snippet, and I was puzzled by the ubiquitous "foo, bar, baz", which to my relief turned out to be equally cryptic for the native speakers. I still don't feel about code as a kind of English prose, it occupies a separate part of my brain, compared to the natural languages.

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XO

I agree with your opinion and I was wonder how the Korean could be used in the world with full of Eng. Thanks for your feedback!

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SU

That's coming from a Spanish speaker used to the alphabet, QUERTY, etc. I imagine you'd find it much more difficult if C were written in Chinese or Arabic, for instance.

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NE

For people that use similar keyboards I don’t imagine it’s that different though like you said occasionally knowing that bool means Boolean or int means integer may make it slightly easier for English speakers I think a big disadvantage would likely be for people from say China that use incredibly different keyboards if I had to add a wildly different second language and switch to it every time I wanted to create a var or import something or write an if statement I’m not sure if I would’ve continued learning to code it may have been one step to many

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