this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2022
6 points (63.6% liked)

General Programming Discussion

7814 readers
1 users here now

A general programming discussion community.

Rules:

  1. Be civil.
  2. Please start discussions that spark conversation

Other communities

Systems

Functional Programming

Also related

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Given that international auxiliary languages allow for more efficient cooperation; I think more people should consider using an easily learnable IAL, like Esperanto.

IALs would reduce the English dominance that gate-keeps software development to English persons; and hence allow more potential software developers to better develop software. The English language is mostly dominant in software development because of linguistic imperialism.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Amicchan@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The programming language is the IAL.

Then why are most programming languages in English and why are there non-English programming languages? Remember, tokens can be anything as long as it is usable.

This all is ofc excluding the other problems in IALs,

What are the problems?

And IMO English as the current Lingua Franca is most understood,

It's also a very difficult language and largely spread through imperialism.

and the hassle of having to learn a new language for even communicating about programming.

Which is what foreign programmers have to do to be able to interact with the English software development industry: they often have to learn English, and it's unfair that they have to learn a non-native language to even use most software, let alone develop them.

(That's why I'm increasing my usage of Esperanto in my programming.)

I love conlangs, but this is not the use case for them.

Conlangs ≠ IALs

This is an excellent use case; the development of the internet has resulted in unprecedented collaboration between countries. This means that conflicts on which language to start will inevitably occur, due to the effort it would take to translate all of them. (I think that language should be an IAL, like Esperanto.)

Esperanto can also be used for older programs as it can be encoded in ASCII through the H/X writing systems.'

I just think we should common terms among languages, and design them such that they are usable to speakers of other languages.

Then the terms would have to be translated into other languages' spelling systems, which would be impossible because of their massive difference.

How do you expect to accomplish this?

Having totally different terms in my native language and English is pretty confusing at times…

Likely because the U.S have imposed a culture of expecting you to learn English to support software development without taking much action to improve IALs.