this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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If you're from a non English speaking country, do you first have to learn English if you want to get into programming?

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[–] De_Narm@lemmy.world 58 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Even if pretty much all popular languages are based on English, you do not have to learn English first. There aren't that many keywords to begin with and your variables, functions and comments can be any language you want to. The hard parts of learning a language, like grammar, conjugation, pronunciation etc. all aren't needed.

That being said, English still is the agreed upon language and people probably won't contribute much to projects in other languages and you can't read most documentations.

[–] SquiffSquiff@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago

Realistically you will always need to be able to read documentation for:

  • Your language
  • Your compiler
  • Your platform
  • The APIs you're calling

All of this will be in English even if your project is in another human language. Yes there will be translation for some of it available but it will be partial, incomplete, dated, etc. you'll be using English so much anyway and have people from other countries working on the code regardless that you're adding a needless barrier using a different national language.

Look at the French government open source codee for instance. The overall website is in French but the actual repos are covered and mostly seem to be in English

[–] ChapulinColorado@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I would say the largest loss for a non English speaker is not having the full context of the method and variable names, as well as the comments or API descriptions within the source code. My friends from Mexico all mention English is a requirement on basically any university offering computer science/engineering.

Edit: you can always use google translate, but that will inflate the time required.

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[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 55 points 1 year ago

Not programming but the question reminded me of Aviation English. All pilots and air traffic controllers must learn how to speak "aviation english" in order to communicate. It's essentially a few hundred English words and basic syntax all related to aviation. I'd say learning a programming language is kind of like learning Aviation English.

[–] peter@feddit.uk 52 points 1 year ago
[–] lupec@lemm.ee 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ideally, you need at least some basic understanding to use the vast majority of languages. The problem isn't even writing the code itself, you can definitely just memorize the keywords and some basic concepts and have at it. If you ask me, the real issue is the availability, amount and overall quality of documentation and learning material if you go about it that way.

I have a few coworkers who skipped the learning English part and learned most everything from other non native speakers and they tend to be crippled by often not really being able to make use of official documentation or keep up with new things, since the vast majority of content out there is in English. It also has the unfortunate side effect of pushing them to stick with whatever it is they learned way back when and not really looking for better ways of getting things done.

So basically, you can pull it off without knowing English but it's going to be suboptimal and/or painful IMO.

[–] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bash commands feel like fake English to me. I know they're abbreviations, but that's the closest I felt to simulating that feeling of a non-english speaker memorizing commands to do something.

[–] lupec@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

I love that, great analogy! I don't think I'd ever make that connection since I'm pretty sure they both sounded about equally alien back when I was introduced to them 😅

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

This needs to be higher up, it's the most correct and complete answer.

[–] CallumWells@lemmy.ml 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's always machine code, just writing numbers for the functions of the CPU. Or you have Esoteric programming languages like Brainfuck that doesn't use any words at all, it's just very simple instructions. There's Piet, which is a pixel colour based programming language.

To be frank; no programming languages are based on English, they are all based on logic. They are most often expressed in English, but there's really no reason one couldn't have a translation layer for every programming language. But that would make it a lot harder to find the solution if you have some fairly niche problem. Having everything in one language is simply more efficient since it doesn't fragment the questions and answers.

But a quick search gave me https://analyticsindiamag.com/6-popular-non-english-programming-languages/. The simple answer to your question thus is; No

[–] nabladabla@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

All instruction sets are documented in English and it's more esoteric so the tutorial scene in any non-English language is less developed, so that requires even more English skill than memorizing a couple of keywords in a mainstream language.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

No, they exist but they are rather rare.

Here is an example of a programming language that is completely in Russian: https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_1%D0%A1:%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B5#%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%80_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D1%8B

That said, English is the lingua franca of the field of computing. You aren't forced to learn it, but without it, you'll deny yourself access to the vast majority of material out there, be it books, articles, papers, documentation, specification, and so on.

[–] jaxxed@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would say that while language constructs are typically English words, they don't really require English comprehension to learn. That said, the vast majority of programming support, documentation and community are in English, and are not accessible without English comprehension.

[–] Peck@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

There's also kumir. It was(is?) used to teach kids how to program. I first learned programming using it many years ago. I still think that it made me a better programmer than people who were using Pascal instead. They were both popular in schools at the time.

[–] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No. The Soviets had one that was basically C but a decade early called Адрес (address). The higher-ups were skeptical of the concept of computers, though, so computing in the USSR languished anyway.

I think the Chinese have something going too. Mostly educated global people know some English anyway, though.

[–] Tum@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

there's some really great mini documentaries on YouTube above the Soviet internet of the 1960s, which would have taken over as the central planning committee and managed the supply and demand automatically. When you look at what it was supposed to be, and why it failed (a lot of people worked very hard to make sure it wouldn't succeed) it's really interesting stuff.

here's one I watched recently enough about it; [https://youtu.be/cLOD5f-q0as?si=D8mVJiK603HPdgKY](Asianometry - Why the Soviet Internet Failed)

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[–] guillem@aussie.zone 18 points 1 year ago

My first contact with computers in school was with a dialect (?) of LOGO that used commands based on Spanish. GD (giraderecha) instead of RT (right) or AV (avanza) instead of FD (forward).

[–] Gxost@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Yes. Although it's possible to learn programming without knowing English, English is required for those who wants to be good programmers. All documentation is in English, naming and comments should be in English too, otherwise it would be hard to maintain code for developers from other countries.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, in ex-USSR there is 1C which in syntax is a bit like Pascal with Russian instead of English.

Also plenty of other languages using Russian keywords, but for the purpose of your question - I think it's safe to assume that anything relevant uses English.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's "One S", not "One C", for anyone reading this unfamiliar with Cyrillic. What looks like a Latin C is actually a Cyrillic S.

Also, while we're at it, leat's clear up one more misunderstanding: Many think СССР is Cee Cee Cee Pee, but it's not, it's really SSSR.

[–] HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 year ago

You kind of learn some English along the way while programming. At the beginning, you just memorize the commands and most of them use rather basic words anyway. Everything you name (functions/variables) you could write in your native language. Also, autocompletion helps...

[–] simple@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago

If you’re from a non English speaking country, do you first have to learn English if you want to get into programming?

You don't necessarily have to learn English well, but yes, everyone programs in English. Some people put variable and function names to be another language, but generally English kind of "won" as the universal language and trying to deviate from it is almost impossible.

You may find Qalb interesting. It's an Arabic programming language made for research on the cultural biases of modern computer science.

[–] Gumus@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

There's OSTRAJava, a parody esoteric language based on a very specific regional accent of the Czech language.

[–] ofek256@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

It's more of a gag language, but there's ChavaScript in Hebrew which is basically just translated JavaScript

[–] Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

The OG SAP application was originally written in German, I don't remember what language it was written in but I remember writing automation scripts back in the day and being like "how do I convert this perl/Python/bash script into German".

[–] NorthWestWind@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

wenyan is quite an awesome joke language based on ancient Chinese

[–] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The French were working on an all French version of Cobol at one point, back when Cobol was still used.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

back when Cobol was still used

try searching for COBOL on any big job site, it's still in use today :)

[–] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

Just maintenance work, for the most part.

[–] Shamot@jlai.lu 7 points 1 year ago

I learned to program at the same time I learned English. I learned the words if, then, else and while in this context.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 year ago
[–] sacredbirdman@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

Well, there are programming languages that are not based on English (like BQN) In reality though the vast majority of the documentation, books, online discussions etc. are in English so I'd say it is at least hugely beneficial to know English.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I did. Not for programming itself because you only need to know basic keywords to write functional code, but because of all the documentation and guides surrounding it. There was information in my native language available but it simply wasn’t as good. And even if there was, most discussions about the related topics were in English.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think there was a language called like Mind Fuck or something, which looked like it only had special characters to do things. Check it out. Maybe not the best for learning though lol.

[–] gramie@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

"False" is a slightly more accessible language, like Forth but using special characters instead of keywords.

https://esolangs.org/wiki/FALSE

[–] Wahots@pawb.social 6 points 1 year ago

This was a really interesting question with good answers! :)

[–] monsieur_jean@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Windev and Wlanguage (French).

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

There was a thing called Basicois at some point.

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[–] Chobbes@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There’s a few programming languages that aren’t based around English, but they’re pretty rare and I’m not sure many people use them. It’s kind of sad because it makes programming much less accessible if you’re not an English speaker… But it’s also sort of a blessing because it’s easier to understand code you might have to interact with because it’s probably written in an English-ish language with the Roman alphabet, and you’re not stuck trying to read Japanese or Arabic or something to understand a library. I have mixed feelings on it. It’s convenient for me as an English speaker, but it also seems kind of unfortunate. I’ve heard that computer science is a field which is having a pretty big impact on the spread of English in the world, but I haven’t found a citation for that and I’m not sure I believe it.

[–] Wahots@pawb.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

English is the language of science and trade on the whole, which I think can be a good thing for the aforementioned reasons in your comment. Makes it much more universal.

I was on a trip in Spain, where students from all over the world came to learn Spanish. There were Americans, Japanese, Germans, etc (others I may have forgotten since this was during highschool!), but the gist of it is that everyone spoke their mother tongue, but the only unifying language there was Spanish. It was incredibly interesting speaking to someone who only knew Japanese and Spanish, where I only knew English and Spanish. People would talk to their friends in their native language, then relay what they said in Spanish for everyone else. It was mindblowingly cool to have a universal language to an otherwise insurmountable language barrier.

This also happened, somewhat annoyingly, in other parts of Spain. You'd be eagerly trying to practice Spanish, and spanish people would hear your accent, and would automatically switch to English for you. Same thing happened all across the world whenever we traveled. I always marveled at just how many people would switch to English whether we were in Germany or Zimbabwe.

[–] zloubida@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I always marveled at just how many people would switch to English whether we were in Germany or Zimbabwe.

English is an official language of Zimbabwe, and German is in the same language family as English. Try to speak English to commoners in Egypt, Eastern Europe, Vietnam or even France, and it wouldn't be that easy.

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[–] mustbe3to20signs@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago

You don't have to learn English to code but it's way easier.

[–] mwproductions@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not an answer to OP's question, but I know in PHP there's at least one error message that's in Hebrew.

[–] hedge_lord@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

APL exists. To me it's about as fun as it is painful.

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