[HN Gopher] Latino Programming Language
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Latino Programming Language
        
       Author : chespinoza
       Score  : 95 points
       Date   : 2021-04-14 10:09 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.lenguajelatino.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.lenguajelatino.org)
        
       | whb07 wrote:
       | This initially thought this would be a nice tutorial/community
       | for Spanish speakers but it appears to be that they are
       | attempting to write a new programming language.
       | 
       | I'll have to say I prefer the idea of educational site that
       | explains and talks about the idea of programming and what not.
        
         | finiteseries wrote:
         | The person who builds that educational site now has an entire
         | language their students can read and write in.
        
         | yosito wrote:
         | I prefer the idea of a non-English programming language being
         | used in production at scale. Not for technical reasons, but it
         | just seems a little unfair that anyone who is not a native
         | English speaker is at an automatic disadvantage in tech.
        
           | _0ffh wrote:
           | Memorizing a few foreign language keywords is certainly the
           | smallest challenge here. You will have to do so anyway, no
           | matter if in a foreign or your native language. It is
           | incredible to me that anyone could seriously suggest this
           | would make any kind of difference.
           | 
           | I started coding when I was a kid of 12 and certainly not
           | (yet) good at English. If anything, my computer hobby helped
           | me pick up more English just by the way, than I would have
           | without it at that age.
        
             | the_af wrote:
             | Heh, I just wrote a reply saying essentially the same as
             | you!
             | 
             | English keywords in languages aren't an impediment.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | the_af wrote:
           | In general, Spanish-speaking programmers aren't at a
           | disadvantage because of English keywords in programming
           | languages. When I started coding I barely knew English, and I
           | still understood Commodore BASIC's keywords -- even if I
           | pronounced all of them wrong.
           | 
           | The impediment to learning programming is the conceptual load
           | of what the keyword _means_ , not the language. You're
           | already learning a new language with new "words" (e.g.
           | BASIC), what does it matter if it's LOAD or CARGAR, RUN or
           | EJECUTAR, PRINT or IMPRIMIR?
           | 
           | The _real_ impediment for Spanish-speakers learning
           | programming is that the vast majority of articles on cutting-
           | edge tech are written in English. This is changing, but back
           | when I started about 99% of articles /manuals were written in
           | English. It only helped me learn English faster, though.
           | (Videogames -- text adventures and the like -- were the other
           | motivation).
        
             | whb07 wrote:
             | Ding ding ding!!
             | 
             | People forget that there is the English internet, which is
             | wholly different than the other languages.
             | 
             | The idea of a lingua franca in science and business is a
             | net positive to be able to unify and communicate
             | effectively. If anything we need to teach this idea better.
             | 
             | How do you tell someone they are in a smaller fish tank
             | than they currently perceive?
        
             | throwaway8581 wrote:
             | This is less important but I think English is a better
             | source of language keywords than romance languages. English
             | has a lot of short, punchy words due to its germanic
             | origin. Even as a Spanish speaker, the Latino code samples
             | look tedious compared to the English keyword equivalents.
        
               | 908B64B197 wrote:
               | Except English borrows heavily from Romance languages.
        
               | throwaway8581 wrote:
               | I think you think that you're disagreeing with me, but
               | you're not. English borrows heavily from Romance
               | languages ... and it is also of germanic origin and has a
               | lot of germanic origin words.
        
           | whb07 wrote:
           | What exactly is in English within Python? There's but a
           | couple keywords used, and the phrasing things of "for x in y"
           | is something like "para x en y" or similar isn't mind
           | blowing.
           | 
           | Not just that, but given that many inventions and concepts
           | are American (mostly), they have to use "retornar" instead of
           | "return". Again, not a big leap even for a young kid in
           | Buenos Aires.
        
       | yakubin wrote:
       | I started learning programming before I could speak English well.
       | A programming language using English words isn't a barrier in any
       | way. Those words aren't real English words, they are symbols.
       | Instead of "and" you could very well have "/\" and it wouldn't
       | make the slightest difference. As a non-English programmer you
       | don't think of those as words, just symbols. And that's
       | accidentally closer to the truth and probably even moulds your
       | mind into a shape better suited for such an abstract task. Using
       | "if" and "else" neither requires, nor is made easier by knowledge
       | of what those words mean. (At the time when I learnt it, I knew
       | what "if" meant, but not what "else" did. It didn't bother me in
       | the slightest.)
        
         | oscargrouch wrote:
         | Latin-derived language speaker here (Portuguese). Also by
         | studying other languages it turns out that English is quite
         | good at expressing simple and composable symbols and structure.
         | 
         | While i would choose a latin-derived language to write poetry,
         | speech or a novel because the expressivity, at least in those
         | contexts are unparalleled, for clean, honest and even
         | scientific terms, if there's a need for a human language, the
         | english language, at least for me, is what suit those the best.
         | 
         | Apart from that its also a question of chance and historical
         | events.. This sort of tool is great to teach younger kids to
         | program and thinking in programming terms. But just like math,
         | its reduced to a more symbolic level, so the word you are using
         | to define things its not that relevant and giving that
         | property, its a good thing that its more universal, just like
         | in math.
        
         | User23 wrote:
         | I recall reading Dijkstra saying that he preferred that the
         | programming languages he used weren't in his native Dutch for
         | pretty much the reason you give.
         | 
         | Presumably the use of Greek letters in traditional mathematics
         | doesn't present an insurmountable barrier to non-Greek
         | speakers.
        
         | Reli_Salazar wrote:
         | I completely agree, this probably only makes people have to re-
         | learn things when they switch to a more common language, only
         | delaying the process of learning english more and more, when it
         | is something more than necessary, not just for code, also to
         | move around the internet and search for information. I learned
         | english after learning to code and honestly, it was never a
         | problem, as you say, you just learn those words as "symbols"
         | that represent a behavior, nothing more, but, learn different
         | "symbols" and then move on to "standard symbols" such as a
         | while, return, for, etc. will require an extra effort that
         | seems unnecessary to me.
        
         | ModernMech wrote:
         | > A programming language using English words isn't a barrier in
         | any way. Those words aren't real English words, they are
         | symbols.
         | 
         | Okay, but what about error messages? A good error message tries
         | to convey the nature of the error in a complete sentence or
         | sentence fragment. Comments are often written in English.
         | Documentation is often only available in English. Tooling
         | suffers the same issue. Non English speakers are forced to
         | learn English if they want mastery of the programming language,
         | and this goes beyond mere symbol mappings.
        
           | yakubin wrote:
           | _> Okay, but what about error messages? A good error message
           | tries to convey the nature of the error in a complete
           | sentence or sentence fragment._
           | 
           | That's a fair point. I think I saw some compilers with
           | translated error messages, which would solve that problem.
           | But it was a long time ago, so I'm not sure. However, that is
           | an issue external to the programming language per se.
           | 
           |  _> Comments are often written in English. Documentation is
           | often only available in English._
           | 
           | When you get a programming book translated to Polish,
           | comments are going to be written in Polish. Manpages have
           | translations into many languages. As for library
           | documentation, it's long past the point of an introductory
           | programming course.
           | 
           |  _> Tooling suffers the same issue. Non English speakers are
           | forced to learn English if they want mastery of the
           | programming language, and this goes beyond mere symbol
           | mappings._
           | 
           | True. However, I think it pays off big time. I think a world
           | where people are forced to learn a language that everybody
           | speaks is a much better world than one where different
           | regions of the world have siloed repositories of knowledge,
           | and collaboration can only happen on short distances. I think
           | too often people complain that they need to learn A, in order
           | to do B, even when A dramatically broadens their horizons and
           | lifts the ceiling on what they can achieve. It's similar to
           | the common antipathy towards being required to learn maths,
           | if you want to do game engine programming, physics, etc.
           | Without grasping a good chunk of maths, you're not going to
           | be a good game engine developer or physicist. Same with
           | English. Without it you're not going to be able to
           | efficiently collaborate with others. Documentation is just
           | one instance. There is also the usual asking questions on
           | forums, reading blog posts, research papers. Those things may
           | sound like restrictions to some, when in fact they're the
           | opposite.
        
         | smt1 wrote:
         | That being said, different languages have different natural
         | "lowerings" from the syntax/semantics to some sort of
         | isomorphism to mathematical logic. There is also the issue with
         | typology of the symbology.
         | 
         | Consider for example: https://wy-lang.org/
        
         | atleta wrote:
         | Same here. E.g. I remember I had a problem with the proper
         | understanding of AND and OR. But it wasn't because I didn't
         | understand the words, it was because I didn't get the concept
         | at first.
         | 
         | I pissed myself off quite a bit when my logical expression of
         | something like "IF B<50 AND B>100" didn't work. Then my mother,
         | who was also a programmer helped that I indeed needed an OR. I
         | learned it, but it didn't make sense, because that's not what
         | how I would have said it in (any!) natural language.
         | 
         | Later on I've figured out that my misunderstanding was caused
         | by the fact that while I've written "IF B<50 AND B>100" I
         | _meant_ "IF B<50 AND IF B>100", or more precisely "WHEN B<50
         | AND WHEN B>100".
         | 
         | I also remember the surprise when learning that PEEK and POKE
         | (two keywords in BASIC) actually both mean something and not
         | just made up pair of words.
        
         | guenthert wrote:
         | I made the same experience. The 'language' of a programming
         | language is a red herring in any case. More of a burden is the
         | relevant documentation and on-line resources, which
         | overwhelmingly are in English.
         | 
         | I also find it frustrating, when comments or variable/function
         | names are in anything but English. KDE, I look at you (even
         | though I can read German just fine)!
         | 
         | Allowing anything but ASCII in a programming language is just
         | inviting disaster. I'm not looking forward to find Chinese
         | characters in source code ...
         | 
         | Perhaps we'll have some day an automated translation tool for
         | source code, much like we have today for code-beutifiers.
        
           | leephillips wrote:
           | The ability to use Greek letters and Unicode symbols in Julia
           | is delightful, because it helps the math in the code to look
           | more like math, and makes the code in general more succinct.
           | It's optional, but seems to be popular. And Julia is not
           | alone here, but the culture around it has embraced it.
        
             | yellowapple wrote:
             | On this note, Perl 6 (or Raku nowadays, I guess) takes IMO
             | the best approach here (and if Julia doesn't already take
             | this approach, it probably should): allowing both fancy
             | Unicode symbols for those who prefer them _and_ equivalent
             | representations in ASCII (a.k.a.  "Texas") for those who
             | don't want to have to switch keyboard encodings or look up
             | symbols to copy/paste or setup editor macros just to write
             | code.
        
               | leephillips wrote:
               | TeX commands are built in to the Julia REPL. Just type
               | \alpha<TAB> and an a appears.
        
               | lizmat wrote:
               | Re "(a.k.a. "Texas")", that meme has been removed from
               | the documentation. It's now just ASCII vs Unicode:
               | https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii
        
           | oaiey wrote:
           | Hmm .. while I agree there is a case for emojis :)
        
         | e-clinton wrote:
         | While I agree that you learn to treat them as symbols, it
         | certainly elevates the barrier of entry. I know what "while"
         | means in English, so when I'm reading code, there is less of a
         | mental load to interpret that code. As a beginner, if I had to
         | translate "while" or "throw" or "parse", I'd make learning more
         | difficult.
        
           | mort96 wrote:
           | It's not that you would translate them though. You don't have
           | to know what "while" means in english to use it. You just
           | learn that the arbitrary symbol "while" is how you repeat
           | something as long as a condition holds. There's not really
           | anything language-specific about that, except that "while"
           | happens to be a word in English with a meaning which somewhat
           | correlates with what the symbol does in the programming
           | language.
        
           | jgwil2 wrote:
           | Counterexample: as a beginner, I think knowing English made
           | "for" harder to understand: for loops in C don't seem to bear
           | much relation to the meaning of "for" in common usage: yes,
           | there is a condition that initiates the loop, but what about
           | the other two statements? For me it was actually something I
           | had to de-program from my brain before I could understand how
           | they actually worked.
        
             | whatshisface wrote:
             | I think it's rooted in mathematical phrases like "for all x
             | in the set S..."
        
               | Y_Y wrote:
               | That's the problem though, a C for loop doesn't really
               | work like that. We only recently got something close with
               | the "range-based for" in C++, and while python's list
               | comprehensions do pretty much exactly what I think
               | mathematical "for" should, it re-uses the keyword in
               | different ways elsewhere.
        
               | btilly wrote:
               | How recent an innovation this is depends on your
               | language.
               | 
               | It was added in C++11 so it looks recent there. But the
               | syntax was in Perl 4 back in 1991. And someone who knows
               | programming history can probably find older examples
               | still in other languages.
        
               | jgwil2 wrote:
               | Interesting. I suppose you are probably right, but I
               | would still argue it's confusing and doesn't actually
               | line up with the semantics of the C-style for loop. If it
               | were a language like Python, wherein collections can
               | actually be iterated over with a "for ... in ..."
               | statement, then it might make more sense. But the C for
               | loop just has an initializer, a break condition, and a
               | statement executed between loops, so there's not
               | necessarily a connection to the mathematical notation,
               | even if it's often used to execute some function over a
               | collection.
        
               | whatshisface wrote:
               | I was curious so I did a bit of historical research.
               | 
               | The "for" loop comes from ALGOL[0]. In ALGOL, the FOR
               | statement supports syntax like "FOR V:= AEXP1, AEXP2,...
               | DO". That's like the higher-level iterator syntax, except
               | it's assigning V via iteration over a sequence of
               | expressions (AEXP N) that is _fixed at compile time_.
               | That 's the context where FOR makes sense as a term.
               | (Step 1: thesis)
               | 
               | Now, ALGOL also happens to support a FOR-STEP-WHILE
               | format, which works the same way as the C for-loop[0].
               | That makes less sense from a mathematical nomenclature
               | perspective, but it is justified through analogy to the
               | original FOR definition.
               | 
               | When C, which was based in part on ALGOL, implemented
               | for, it dropped the original meaning and kept the special
               | case meaning because the latter was more useful, being
               | dynamic instead of fixed at compile time. Hence, the for
               | loop. (Step 2: antithesis)
               | 
               | Eventually other languages implemented for with
               | iterators, returning to the original ALGOL meaning of
               | for, but synthesizing it with the dynamism of the C for
               | loop. (Step 3: synthesis)
               | 
               | [0]
               | https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/clearpath-
               | mcp...
               | 
               | Disclaimer: references to the Hegelian dialectic are for
               | entertainment purposes only.
        
             | moistbar wrote:
             | I think "for" works better linguistically when taken in the
             | context of a "for-each" loop, where my mental pseudocode
             | becomes "for each of these, do this." It's a touch
             | Yodalike, but it gives me a clearer expectation of what's
             | happening and how long it's going to happen than I get from
             | a C-style for loop.
        
           | dkarl wrote:
           | "while" describes itself particularly poorly for native
           | English speakers. It implies a duration that continues until
           | a condition changes, but really the condition is only checked
           | at the beginning of every loop. English speakers have to get
           | over the incongruity using a word for a contiguous period of
           | time to indicate repeated checks at distinct points in time.
        
       | sergiotapia wrote:
       | Spanish is my first language, if you use this you _severely_
       | hamstring yourself. Don't do it.
       | 
       | English is the world most used programming language, just learn
       | it. Or perish.
        
       | 4lb0 wrote:
       | Another native speaker here. I disagree with most of you.
       | 
       | When I was a kid I played a Captain Tsubasa NES game that was
       | completely in japanese. I have no idea of the meaning of the
       | Kanji characters I choose but I know pretty well what I was doing
       | in short time. I could play the game through trial and error. So
       | no, you don't need to know actual english to code.
       | 
       | Now, you and me were invested. We want to code and we were
       | willing to learn how to code even without knowing what was the
       | meaning of the english words we use. Just like the way I played
       | that game. A lot of people is learning how to code like they
       | learn basic math. They are not invested. They know is useful
       | however didn't want to learn it. This tool is good for them.
       | 
       | I still don't like the name and also don't like they don't allow
       | tildes and n. I also think scratch.mit.edu is a better tool for
       | people starting to learn how to code.
        
       | zarkov99 wrote:
       | Great. Now programming languages are also political tools. We
       | should do the same in science. Every scientist should learn every
       | language of every other scientist so everybody can write their
       | papers in the language of the culture they identify with. That
       | will surely advance science and benefit all of us immensely.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | 8note wrote:
         | We could do the same with units, so Americans could talk in
         | freedom inches while the French talk in metres
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | Apocryphon wrote:
         | This isn't the first language to do this. This isn't even the
         | first _post_ about this.
         | 
         | https://hn.algolia.com/?q=non%2Denglish%20programming%20lang...
        
         | creata wrote:
         | Oh come on. Given that
         | 
         | * there's already an immense body of scientific work written in
         | languages like Chinese and French that the English-speaking
         | world lacks access to,
         | 
         | * the main goal of this language is clearly not for
         | international collaboration or anything like that,
         | 
         | * not everything non-English is "political", and
         | 
         | * sometimes people just want to teach kids programming without
         | having to teach them words in an unfamilar language, too,
         | 
         | your comment comes across as thoroughly nonsensical.
        
           | systemvoltage wrote:
           | The lingua-franca of EU is EuroEnglish, for obvious reasons:
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English
        
             | SamBam wrote:
             | How does this rebut any of the points you are replying to?
        
         | michaelmior wrote:
         | I'm confused what this has to do with politics.
        
           | 8note wrote:
           | The advantage native English speakers have in terms of
           | leading CS projects, making start ups, and getting the high
           | paying tech jobs lessens if speaking English isn't a major
           | requirement for reading and writing code.
           | 
           | If instead you need to know Spanish, or don't need to know
           | any one specific langauge, it challenges or changes the power
           | structure and is thus political.
        
             | jdgoesmarching wrote:
             | People getting defensive in this thread over the idea of a
             | language not made for them is great evidence of this.
             | Instead of ignoring it like the millions of new projects
             | that don't apply to you, we must go out of our way to
             | explain why this is bad and wrong.
        
           | Mordisquitos wrote:
           | Apparently there are two languages: English and _political_.
        
             | TheAdamAndChe wrote:
             | Latino isn't a language, it's an identity. That makes it
             | political.
        
               | xondono wrote:
               | To me the most non-sensical part in this kind of
               | arguments is that most of the people identifying
               | themselves as "Latino" are people from the US. Most
               | people actually born in latin america will self-identify
               | with their country of origin (Argentinian, Colombian,..)
        
               | cpp_frog wrote:
               | As someone who is latin american, I never understood what
               | is the obsession with identity in the US. American
               | hispanics I've talked to use it as something of a catch-
               | all concept, but I've observed that many only have a
               | meagre proficiency in Spanish and know nothing about the
               | other Latin American countries that they pack with the
               | bunch (apart from their own/their parents).
        
               | brudgers wrote:
               | Historically, a large part of it goes back to the Treaty
               | of Hildalgo.
               | 
               | It obligated the US to enfranchise Mexican citizens
               | living in the seceded lands of Alta California.
               | 
               | This immediately threw a wrench in antebellum politics
               | which only allowed "white people" the vote. Eventually
               | the US invented a racial category based on speaking
               | Spanish...well actually two, one black, one non-black.
               | 
               | Fundamentally the identity of people with cultural
               | affiliation to Spanish speaking cultures is complicated
               | by the sanctioned narratives of US history which do not
               | allow for the US to consider its Latin American heritage.
               | 
               | You could sleep in a hotel in Santa Fe and eat in a
               | restaurant when the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth
               | Rock. And when "fulfilled manifest destiny" reached the
               | California coast, there were churches there where people
               | went on Sunday...and chattel slavery had been banned for
               | two hundred years.
        
               | TheAdamAndChe wrote:
               | This is a touchy subject in the US so I don't want to get
               | too into it, its a bit off topic. The shortest and most
               | neutral answer I can give is that minority political
               | groups in the US use identity as a tool to push for
               | political change.
        
               | 8note wrote:
               | Really it's a geographic location of origin.
               | 
               | There's nothing particularly political about being from
               | South america
        
         | SamBam wrote:
         | You're right. Imagine if other countries had science journals
         | in their own languages.
         | 
         | Science would collapse and politics would reign supreme.
        
           | Mauricebranagh wrote:
           | You do know that pre ww2 if you worked in chemistry (and
           | physics to an extent) you basically had to learn German, so
           | you could read the papers.
        
             | Apocryphon wrote:
             | It happened to be the lingua franca for the field at the
             | time. So?
        
       | ghosty141 wrote:
       | That's a great way to make programming more accessible.
        
       | yegle wrote:
       | EPL (Easy Programming Language, EYuYan, Yi Yu Yan ) is a Chinese
       | programming language.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Programming_Language is a
       | terse page explaining it but I guess any actual document would be
       | in Chinese.
       | 
       | From my understanding this language is very popular in amount
       | people writing game cheating tools and other malware.
       | https://manalyzer.org/report/03b2253bcbb611502eba5b43df3e1dc...
       | is one such example.
       | 
       | EDIT: Example EPL code
       | https://gitee.com/yyman001/RightHand/raw/master/%E5%8F%B3%E9...
       | presumably this is in GKB encoding so it's mostly garbage
       | characters.
       | 
       | EDIT: https://www.hexacorn.com/blog/2019/02/13/pe-files-and-the-
       | ea... someone wrote reverse engineering an EPL executable.
        
       | 4lejandrito wrote:
       | Cool! It looks very similar to a language we designed and
       | implemented for a uni assignment years ago, using flex and bison:
       | principal         inicio           entero x, y;
       | leer (x);           leer (y);                si (x > 0) entonces
       | si (y > 0) entonces               imprimir (1);             is
       | si (y == 0) entonces               imprimir (0);             is
       | si (y < 0) entonces               imprimir (2);             is
       | is           si (x == 0) entonces             imprimir (0);
       | is           si (x < 0) entonces             si (y > 0) entonces
       | imprimir (4);             is             si (y == 0) entonces
       | imprimir (0);             is             si (y < 0) entonces
       | imprimir (3);             is           is         fin
        
       | flobosg wrote:
       | Other Spanish-based programming languages:
       | 
       | * PSeInt (http://pseint.sourceforge.net/)
       | 
       | * Pauscal (http://www.pauscal.com.ar/
       | 
       | * IIRC, Logo has some Spanish interpreters
        
       | winniejinping wrote:
       | https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan the ancient Chinese
       | programming language is way cooler than this
        
       | ggambetta wrote:
       | As someone whose mother tongue is Spanish, and was born and
       | raised in Latin America, this feels pointless at best, and
       | counterproductive at worst. It will only add an extra layer of
       | mental translation whenever someone who learned to program in
       | this thing gets a real job.
       | 
       | I started learning BASIC when I was 3 or 4, way before I even
       | understood English was a thing. If I could grasp what GOTO did,
       | anyone can.
        
         | ccortes wrote:
         | > If I could grasp what GOTO did, anyone can.
         | 
         | Then I see no issue translating from this to an "english"
         | programming language, so there would be no extra layer of
         | mental translation.
        
         | jordigh wrote:
         | I disagree (and if you want my credentials, I am Mexican).
         | Being able to reason in your own language is a big help. I do
         | this with mathematics in various ways. I can both easily say
         | "sea equis una variable real tal que equis mas ye son menor al
         | limite de efe de equis mas ye conforme ye tiende al infinito"
         | or whatever in both English and Spanish, and sometimes I prefer
         | saying it in Spanish and sometimes in English. I still count by
         | default in Spanish, although of course I can count in English
         | (or French or Russian). It feels to me like reasoning and
         | language are close in the brain. While you and I have gotten
         | used to thinking of for-loops instead of para-loops, I think
         | there's good reason to think that a learner could benefit from
         | reasoning in their own language.
         | 
         | As far as languages being useless, there's lots of other
         | useless language a person could be learning. That doesn't
         | discredit the raison d'etre of these languages.
        
           | Y_Y wrote:
           | At least in the mind of an experienced code "for loops" have
           | their own semantic existence, once you've understood them and
           | given them a label then you don't need (in fact shouldn't)
           | rely on intuition from your knowledge of English, or whatever
           | natural language. Only one person I work with uses their
           | computer in Spanish, whereas that's what everyone speaks all
           | day, informally at least. I think of these words (programming
           | keywords, names of Unix commands, etc.) as just symbols,
           | doesn't everyone else?
           | 
           | (Of course this doesn't apply to learners, I don't know about
           | that.)
        
             | jordigh wrote:
             | I feel like I have to sound out things. It's important for
             | me to be able to say "cp that over there" and I actually
             | pronounce it as "copy" or say "ls" as "list".
             | 
             | I think a lot in words and about words. When I'm writing a
             | for loop I usually sound out the whole thing, even if just
             | mentally, "for ecks equals one to ten do" or "for whye in
             | the range". I don't think I'm the only one who does this,
             | so offering pronounceable things to other people in their
             | own language might help.
        
           | ASalazarMX wrote:
           | Old pre-Internet Mexican here: when personal computers (think
           | CoCos and Atari 800s) started coming, BASIC ruled, and it was
           | extremely easy to grasp for kids:
           | 
           | GOSUB, RETURN, FOR, DIM, PRINT, PEEK, POKE, etc. were just
           | abstract words that we just accepted without fully
           | understanding their English roots. They might as well have
           | been CALLBACK, THROW, ITER, FOO, BAR, etc., and we would have
           | used them just as well. We reasoned in Spanish, then coded
           | our reasoning in the abstraction that was BASIC. When reading
           | code, it was like reading math, not a story.
           | 
           | More so, with the meme culture nowadays, even kids know
           | enough English words to understand the roots of many tokens
           | in programming languages.
           | 
           | Maybe programming with tokens rooted in your native language
           | actually provides something I wasn't able to enjoy, but
           | programming for me feels very different from speaking
           | English, I'd bet the two don't even use the same brain
           | regions, unless you're forcing yourself to comment in
           | English.
           | 
           | Let's see what comes out of Latino. Hopefully they'll add
           | Unicode identifiers later, because writing "funcion" instead
           | of "funcion" is still bad Spanish.
        
           | atleta wrote:
           | The thing is that it isn't your language, even if you're
           | native English. (I'm not, I'm Hungarian, which is a 100%
           | weird language not too similar to any other.) Most
           | programming languages, especially the ones used for
           | introduction, use a very limited vocabulary. This e.g. pretty
           | much looks like python, I'm sure it has no more that 40
           | keywords.
           | 
           | Most of your programs will not be keywords, i.e. symbols from
           | the programming language, but the identifiers you define. Now
           | you could use your native Spanish (or Russian or Hungarian,
           | etc.) for those, but even that is not very useful. When you
           | think about the program, you think with the constructs of the
           | language (and also, as you get better, with the patterns you
           | have learned). Then you express those thoughts with the
           | language and the constructs you have created.
           | 
           | The only place I can imagine this making sense is a scratch-
           | like block language. But I'd say that even then it just
           | hinders learning and development. Sooner or later you'll have
           | to switch and the later you do the harder it will be.
           | 
           | Also, this can be a great motivation to actually learn
           | English. For me, at least, it was.
        
           | cpp_frog wrote:
           | Curious about your level of mathematics exposure? I remember
           | that maybe in the most basic introduction to higher maths
           | words were coupled with my reasoning, but later on reasoning
           | was wordless (Jacques Hadamard reported something similar).
           | Sometimes when I spend too much time doing math in the day,
           | particularly doing proofs rather than reading, I have dreams
           | about manipulating/deducting but no words or language for
           | that matter is present. I've had similar experiences with
           | programming and chess.
        
             | jordigh wrote:
             | I did my bachelor's in maths in English and my master's in
             | Spanish. I don't think my reasoning is very wordless, but I
             | do think all of my reasoning is kind of geometric. I close
             | my eyes and move my arms around to move a normaliser of a
             | group action or try to trace with my fingers the integral
             | lines of a manifold's tangent bundle.
             | 
             | But as I'm doing these things, I'm often muttering to
             | myself as well, and I may do it in Spanish or English.
        
             | ccortes wrote:
             | I majored in math and I mostly think with words.
        
               | cgriswald wrote:
               | I wonder if that's your training. I do math for fun and
               | don't think in words. I often struggle to express my
               | reasoning to others as a result.
        
             | moistbar wrote:
             | I get this way with Beat Saber. I think I might have a
             | problem.
        
               | riffraff wrote:
               | It's not unusual, it's commonly called tetris effect
               | 
               | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
        
           | ggambetta wrote:
           | I get your point, and I admit I don't even know what language
           | I think in anymore (if that's even a thing). But I'd argue
           | that reasoning or talking about code is not the same as
           | writing code. I went to university in Uruguay, so naturally
           | when discussing stuff we'd say "son dos 'for' anidados" when
           | a word didn't have a similar-sounding translation, or
           | "escribir una funcion" when it did, and I'm fine with that.
           | Discuss and reason in whatever you want.
           | 
           | But very early on I started writing identifiers and comments
           | in English, and I think this is critical if you want your
           | work to go anywhere. Say you write a piece of code and put it
           | in Github, with Spanish identifiers and comments. You've just
           | massively increased the barrier of entry to most
           | collaborators in the world (have you ever come across code
           | commented in Russian or Chinese? Not fun).
           | 
           | And this is just identifiers and comments, not keywords. I
           | imagine using _an entire programming language_ in anything
           | but English can only make things worse :(
        
           | chrisandchips wrote:
           | I agree with OP - the language seems to re-represent the
           | languages key words in ways that are natural for Spanish
           | speakers to understand.
           | 
           | I think the value this will bring isn't very high. I
           | personally believe that early programming has less to do with
           | reading the code as natural language and more to do with
           | understanding what the individual constructs achieve. This is
           | purely anecdotal, but I taught programming to a few students
           | in French and the presence of English never came up as a
           | blocker.
           | 
           | Fun story : for the hell of it, I once tried to code an
           | entire project with some friends in French exclusively (that
           | is, mainly variable/method/class names etc). As much as I
           | love my mother tongue, its not always very concise. The whole
           | thing became super bloated. We ended up reverting back to
           | English.
        
         | ModernMech wrote:
         | But not everyone who wants to learn how to program wants to
         | program as a job. Moreover, proper localization goes well
         | beyond changing keywords. Some languages are written right to
         | left, or bottom to top. There's also tooling, debug messages,
         | and and documentation. Why does all of this need to be in
         | English? I think it's fine for people of other cultures to
         | write tools localized to those cultures.
        
           | thiht wrote:
           | Debug and error messages in particular should NOT be
           | translated unless an error code is displayed with them.
           | Whenever I use anything that spits me a French error message,
           | it becomes impossible to find out what it means using Google.
           | 
           | Windows error messages and the command line on Linux are
           | particularly big offenders here.
        
         | DominikD wrote:
         | Logo programming language was translated into various natural
         | languages (as AC Logo into Polish for example) and this was the
         | only reason kids w/o foreign language skills (and English in
         | particular) could wrap their heads around it and paint some
         | cool stuff with the turtle, learning about recursion and what
         | not at the same time.
         | 
         | I learned programming when I was five or six, way before I knew
         | any foreign language, but my experience is no excuse for
         | gatekeeping. Making programming accessible to a wider audience
         | is unequivocally good.
        
           | ModernMech wrote:
           | Yes, I teach a Greek student who told me exactly this. His
           | first introduction to programming was Greek Logo, and he
           | attributes his entire trajectory to learning this one
           | language.
        
         | arcticbull wrote:
         | For context, English isn't my first language -- but my Spanish
         | fu is weak to say the least.
         | 
         | Many programming languages especially more terse, modern ones
         | (I'm looking at you, Rust) -- the symbols don't mean anything
         | in English either. Does "for" or "fn" or "impl" mean anything
         | to average English speakers? This feels more like a bunch of
         | extra symbols like "==" and "!" rather than the anglosphere
         | enforcing its dominance.
         | 
         | There's plenty of room in the programming languages space for
         | this one, to be sure -- I've nothing against it. It almost
         | feels like ergonomics and writability are reduced in this
         | language to make it _more_ like Spanish than a modern
         | functional programming language is like English. It almost goes
         | out of its way to replace symbols with words. More like a
         | Spanish AppleScript.
         | 
         | Feels more like it's making a point than solving a problem, but
         | I'd love to get more perspective from Spanish speakers.
        
           | autarch wrote:
           | > Many programming languages especially more terse, modern
           | ones (I'm looking at you, Rust) -- the symbols don't mean
           | anything in English either. Does "for" or "fn" or "impl" mean
           | anything to average English speakers? This feels more like a
           | bunch of extra symbols like "==" and "!" rather than the
           | anglosphere enforcing its dominance.
           | 
           | Yes, they do. When I was learning Rust it was obvious that
           | "fn" was function. "impl" is a little trickier, but I read it
           | as "implements" or "implementation of". "dyn" is "dynamic
           | implementation of" or something like that. And "for" is the
           | same in all the other programming languages I know.
        
             | arcticbull wrote:
             | I was suggesting that while you and I may know what they
             | mean, the average person unfamiliar with programming is
             | definitely going to be thrown for a loop, if you will.
        
           | cgriswald wrote:
           | I wonder how much confusion in learning there for English
           | speakers because of the use of English words. I might be a
           | better programmer if I had been forced to learn abstractions
           | in a different way.
           | 
           | In math, if I see an unfamiliar symbol I immediately know I
           | don't know what it means. If it were English instead I'd
           | automatically try to fill in a meaning. (Of course there is
           | also a problem of overloaded symbols...)
        
         | systemvoltage wrote:
         | It also reduces the surface area of collaboration, sharing,
         | open sourcing, security audits, etc. We have standardized in
         | English and it is as arbitrary as any other language - English
         | just happens to be the one chosen.
         | 
         | This whole thing needs to be condemned, we get it - its fun to
         | do something about your local language and be proud of your
         | culture - everyone is. You should be. But, trying to peddle
         | this into mainstream is a monumentally catastrophic. I don't
         | want the world to be fragmented - we need to get together and
         | build better tools.
         | 
         | If anyone who has worked on Chinese datasheets, oh boy, you
         | know the pain.
        
           | Koshkin wrote:
           | I think it's not fair to require everyone to know English
           | enough to be able to write comments in code.
        
             | systemvoltage wrote:
             | Do you think its fair to require everyone to follow _any_
             | standard?
             | 
             | Think of English not in the context of cultural
             | importance/language but more formally as a de facto
             | standard. A professional would follow the standards. This
             | is why we have IETF. It is unquestionable and indisputable
             | that standardization improves the world.
             | 
             | That said, comments are probably fine in local language.
        
         | justwalt wrote:
         | It's a common theme in posts from ESL programmers that they
         | learned English as they needed while learning to program. I
         | can't help but think that removing that necessity would allow
         | more people who don't speak English to learn to code. It's hard
         | for me to see that as a bad thing.
        
           | AlchemistCamp wrote:
           | It is? I've lived most my adult life in non-English-speaking
           | countries and have seen the opposite--that programmers are
           | _less_ likely to be able to speak English well than people in
           | less technical professions.
           | 
           | This is probably because many of them studied CS and spent
           | comparatively more time with computers and less time
           | consuming foreign language materials as students.
        
         | Koshkin wrote:
         | Actually, this used to be the norm, back in the day. The Algol
         | 68 standard, for example, is language-independent, i.e. it
         | admits representation of code in any natural language.
        
         | mauvehaus wrote:
         | I'm with you, but I went the other direction: native English
         | speaker who learned French localized BASIC (correction:
         | LOGO[0]) in a summer program. The words map pretty quickly to
         | the abstract concepts without any real need for a translation
         | step. I did that as a kid, but I don't see any problem learning
         | a programming language in a different language as an adult.
         | 
         | Realistically, what's far more important than the language of
         | the keywords is the language of the rest of the identifiers.
         | I've typed a lot more distinct function and variable names than
         | keywords.
         | 
         | [0] Jogged my memory:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809211
        
           | 908B64B197 wrote:
           | > Realistically, what's far more important than the language
           | of the keywords is the language of the rest of the
           | identifiers.
           | 
           | Exactly. Or the doc.
           | 
           | Having a standard library with a localized doc would probably
           | help out learners way more than localizing some keywords. As
           | one gets further and further away from the standard library,
           | the doc increasingly won't be localized but by then the
           | reader should know enough "engineering English" to get by.
        
         | foobarian wrote:
         | Not a native English speaker either, and I prefer languages the
         | way they are, but - I don't think of them as English per se.
         | BASIC or C or Java could have "blargh" loops for all I care as
         | long as I internalize them they work fine. I guess you could
         | easily accomplish that in C, heh.
        
         | cambalache wrote:
         | It is just a cash-grabbing,CV-padding project, it adds nothing
         | of value and it paints part of the latin-american tech
         | community like clueless idiots. Do you want to use a "latino
         | language"(whatever the hell that means), use Elixir.At least it
         | is a nice effort for the Erlang VM with real-world uses.
        
         | flobosg wrote:
         | I remember having looked at BASIC code without any English or
         | programming knowledge and having my attention caught by the
         | GOTO statements since it was the most Spanish-looking word
         | around.
        
       | jordemort wrote:
       | Back before I progressed beyond DOS batchfiles, I kind of just
       | assumed that all the commands and keywords would be localized to
       | whatever the local language was - I didn't think, for example,
       | that Japanese-speaking users were out there typing "echo" and
       | "dir" and "printf". I found it surprising and seemingly unjust
       | when I learned that folks that spoke other languages generally
       | had to learn a fair bit of English along whatever programming
       | language they were learning. I can't imagine how much harder it
       | must be to pick something up when the mnemonics are foreign
       | gibberish to you. Of course now I realize that there's an element
       | of practicality to it as well; J. Random Hacker can hardly be
       | expected to translate the API they created into N different
       | languages that they don't speak themselves. It also cuts both
       | ways; GitHub Trending is increasingly full of projects that look
       | like they're probably awesome and extremely useful and I have no
       | idea what they even are because the documentation is entirely in
       | Chinese.
       | 
       | I know some early versions of BASIC would save your source in a
       | "tokenized" format, i.e. instead of literally storing "PRINT
       | $FOO" they would store some bytecode that represented PRINT
       | instead. One could possibly implement a polyglot programming
       | language using a similar mechanism, and translate localized
       | versions of keywords into (human) language-independent bytecodes.
       | You'd have to pick one human language to be the canonical
       | representation though, or have some sort of language declaration
       | at the beginning of the file, or commit to having the canonical
       | representation of your source code not be plain text - all of
       | which seem suboptimal for different reasons. It also seems like
       | it would be tough to extend that approach to code outside the
       | standard library of the theoretical polyglot language.
        
         | TulliusCicero wrote:
         | There are certain obvious advantages to using a single
         | language.
         | 
         | For example: I read r/IWantOut, as well as some CS career-
         | related subs, and I myself am an American coder in Germany.
         | Based on my own experience, as well as my reading and hearing
         | from others, programming is probably the best overall career
         | choice if you want the option of living in various different
         | countries, in terms of how accessible it is as well as having
         | decent pay. A big part of that accessibility is English, that
         | you can find a significant number of jobs in many countries
         | that don't require you to already know the local language.
        
         | 908B64B197 wrote:
         | > One could possibly implement a polyglot programming language
         | using a similar mechanism, and translate localized versions of
         | keywords into (human) language-independent bytecodes.
         | 
         | I'm stretching it here, but assembly would tick all boxes here.
        
         | mywittyname wrote:
         | I really don't think this is as bad as people make it out to
         | be. As you said, it's totally possible -- actually fairly
         | straightforward -- to build a programming language with
         | keywords that can be in various languages. Perl has a package
         | that uses Latin constructs instead of English.
         | 
         | So if there were a huge demand for this kind of thing, we'd
         | probably see a lot of it.
         | 
         | There are other professions which require the use of foreign
         | terminology: lawyers use Latin, doctors use Greek & Latin,
         | chefs use French. Sure, it makes things a little difficult at
         | first, but it's probably not any more difficult than learning
         | technical jargon in you native tongue. In fact, in some ways,
         | it might be easier because the literal translation of "echo"
         | might not actually make much sense to a Japanese speaker in the
         | context of programming, whereas, with English you can teach a
         | Japanese student that "echo" means to put characters on the
         | screen.
         | 
         | I remember reading about an effort Britain had to make the law
         | more "accessible" by using English instead of Latin, and it
         | just made things more difficult because instead of seeing words
         | you had no idea the meaning of, now one knew what the statement
         | said, but it would mean something completely different than
         | they would expect.
        
       | _benj wrote:
       | As a native Spanish speaker, this doesn't make sense to me.
       | 
       | Even if the argument of lowering the entry bar to non-English
       | speakers was valid (I don't think it is) the individual would be
       | severely limited when it comes to collaborating/GitHub/external
       | libraries/learning new programming languages.
       | 
       | A big advantage of learning a programming language is that once
       | you understand what a "loop" or a "if" you can easily transfer
       | that knowledge to another language.
       | 
       | Learning this language as your first language will leave you with
       | very little transferable knowledge without much "translation"
       | needed (pun intended)
        
         | jack_h wrote:
         | I've commented on this before, but I think the issue is
         | programming languages mix presentation with representation,
         | i.e. text is used for both. Aside from making tooling more
         | difficult it also prevents a programming language from being
         | multilingual.
         | 
         | While I agree simple keywords in a programming language aren't
         | that big of a deal to learn as they are essentially symbols;
         | things get a lot more complicated in a real project if a
         | contributor is not a native speaker. Identifiers and comments -
         | which are used for source code documentation - are in a single
         | language and can't be translated easily.
         | 
         | If the presentation and representation were split such that the
         | presentation (still text mind you) is just a rendering of the
         | representation then it could go through a translation process
         | in the same way web pages do. Of course there would be an added
         | project overhead of maintaining translations so maybe it
         | wouldn't be worth it.
         | 
         | This might be somewhat of a moot point as English is quickly
         | becoming the lingua franca. Things such as issue tracking also
         | require some common language outside of the source code itself.
        
       | happynacho wrote:
       | WTF is this? LOL
        
       | ingkarlgauss wrote:
       | Es una locura esto, el siguiente paso es hacer una version para
       | el dialecto de cada pais: en Colombia el "While" se deberia
       | llamar "peroporquehomeeee" o "sisas" !
        
         | kgin wrote:
         | var queMasPues = bien || que
        
         | second--shift wrote:
         | "para cada ... tal cual" que pesada ;)
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | Y en el lado iberico, si ponemos el murciano o extremeno igual
         | invocamos a Cthulu con cada excepcion.
        
       | f14c0 wrote:
       | sounds good for introduction to coding for kids in non-English
       | speaking countries.
        
         | the_af wrote:
         | Spanish speaker here. My experience is that English keywords in
         | programming languages aren't an impediment. Most other
         | programmers in my country (and others, judging by what I read)
         | share my experience.
         | 
         | Localized keywords don't translate well to a later experience
         | with programming languages at large.
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | Kids in the 80's learnt Basic in English just fine. Even basic
         | terminology such as input, output, load, save and so on. Also
         | we began to learn English by age 8-10 or so, so is not an
         | issue. As they stated, the biggest issue is that the
         | _documentation_ itself is, by a huge margin, in technical
         | English.
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | There are 2 popular programming languages of Latin American
       | origin, Lua and Elixir, both from Brazil.
        
       | bigyikes wrote:
       | I thought it was slightly funny that I can read the Latino
       | programming language better than I can read Spanish, despite
       | never seeing the former.
        
       | mariuolo wrote:
       | What kind programming paradigm does it use?
       | 
       | It wasn't clear from the website.
        
       | soldehierro wrote:
       | If you're going to use Spanish keywords, atleast spell them
       | correctly. Is it that hard to use "funcion" instead of "funcion".
        
       | m463 wrote:
       | I vaguely remember Applescript used to be internationalized a
       | long time ago.
       | 
       | The keywords would display in different languages.
       | 
       | That said, why can't other languages be internationalized, maybe
       | in the editor?
       | 
       | I think it would be fun to program in spanish.
       | siesta(5);
        
       | gtk40 wrote:
       | Why is it called "Latino" when it is just in Spanish and not
       | Portuguese (or maybe French? not sure if Haitians are Latino). It
       | seems like "Hispanic" would be the better term since this is
       | language focused rather than geography focused.
        
         | jordigh wrote:
         | "Latino" is kind of a cultural designation of the US to refer
         | to Spanish speakers, although it is used somewhat outside of
         | the US, but not as prominently. I am guessing this language was
         | just being made in the US where Latino is an accepted
         | descriptor for Spanish speakers only.
        
           | gtk40 wrote:
           | It very commonly refers to Portuguese-speaking Brazilians in
           | my area.
        
             | oscargrouch wrote:
             | The big problem of this use for me is that people from the
             | US tend to think in terms of "race". Like if there is a
             | homogeneous "latino race" where it boils down to the
             | average mexican immigrant that the US is more used to.
             | 
             | For instance, you can see this in north-american films,
             | where the mexicans are hired to play Brazilians, where we
             | (brazilians) can spot right-away they dont look like any
             | type of average looking brazilian. But im pretty sure it
             | make sense for the crew of the film and people watching it,
             | even when they speak spanish.
             | 
             | Just to give you a glimpse of famous brazilians north-
             | americans may know: Rodrigo Santoro, Morena Bacarin, Alice
             | Braga, Gisele Bundchen, Alessandra Ambrosio, Jordana
             | Brewster, Camilla Belle, Kaya Scodelario, Wagner Moura.
             | 
             | The thing is, i've just give you this sample, so you can
             | see how they don't have any resemblance between each other
             | or homogeneous look. The ones that speak perfect english
             | can perfectly act in roles not meant for "latinos" and
             | nobody notice it.
             | 
             | I think nowadays is right to use this term in the same
             | sense as you use for Europe to define France or Italy as
             | part of Europe. Albeit is even wrong to use in the sense of
             | a continent giving America is just one continent, with
             | north and south.
             | 
             | Anyway if you dig down and look to all the inconsistencies
             | of the term it boils down to some sort of racial profiling
             | thing, because it makes no sense in any other way you look
             | at it except for labeling it as "not white".
        
           | enriquto wrote:
           | Using "latino" to refer to Spanish speakers is a doubly
           | offensive act of US-ian cultural imperialism.
           | 
           | First, "latin" generally means romance language, i.e.,
           | languages descended from latin, including French, Italian,
           | Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, and so on. Using this word to
           | refer exclusively to Spanish makes sense only from the point
           | of view of the USA, where the largest group of latin people
           | are Spanish speakers. Thus, imposing this usage in an
           | international context reeks of U.S. cultural imperialism.
           | 
           | Second, "latin america" was originally defined by the French
           | in opposition to "anglo america", to designate specifically
           | Quebec, part of Louisiana, Mexico, etc; the areas of the
           | Americas where latin languages are spoken. This excludes
           | large swaths of the americas in Bolivia, Peru, Brasil,
           | Mexico, where other languages are spoken (Guarani, Aymara,
           | etc).
           | 
           | I consider latin or latino myself, but I wouldn't touch this
           | US-assumption-infested "Latino Programming Language" with a
           | ten foot pole.
        
       | crvdgc wrote:
       | To all native English speakers, before talking about standards
       | and lingua franca, try to implement some basic algorithms in
       | Latino and take a minute to imagine a world where it is the
       | standard (programming & documentation). Then you'll understand
       | the meaning of "entry barrier" and "language advantage", if you
       | remember that's the reality for billions of people in the world
       | including me.
        
         | rigoleto wrote:
         | Thank you. Too many commenters here, years removed from being a
         | beginner, aren't getting it.
        
         | hervature wrote:
         | As someone who doesn't care about the language, my question is
         | if the goal is to reduce the entry barrier, what is the benefit
         | of this language versus investing the same amount of time in
         | Spanish documentation and a Spanish transpiler for Python?
         | Multi language documentation is definitely lacking, but making
         | a new language adds to the complexity of the space, it doesn't
         | reduce it.
        
           | brudgers wrote:
           | Multi-lingual documentation is premised on the idea that
           | languages derived from English are better or at least good
           | enough. The premise of this language is that they are not.
           | 
           | The Python community is not committed to multi-language
           | documentation. And it has the ideology of "unpythonic" as an
           | excuse for denigrating anyone who might be.
        
             | hervature wrote:
             | I hardly call the use of a few keywords as "derived from
             | English". There are 36 keywords in Python, one of them
             | being __peg_parser__, what the hell does that mean for an
             | English speaker? Maybe the Python community is not the best
             | example, I did not know they actively subverted any
             | attempts at multi-language. But still, forking the project
             | and simply renaming and translating the documentation would
             | serve much better at lowering the barrier of entry, if
             | that's the goal. The cynic in me thinks that the creators
             | of the language simply used that excuse as a way to justify
             | scratching their itch to create a new language given that
             | there are so many better ways to remove the English barrier
             | to programming.
        
               | brudgers wrote:
               | Python was mentioned in the parent comment.
               | 
               | "List comprehension" is English. "Object" is English.
               | "Keywords" too. As well as "benevolent dictator for
               | life."
               | 
               | Python doesn't embrace non-English efforts. That's the
               | nature of it as a community...not encouraging second ways
               | of doing things is its dogma.
        
               | hervature wrote:
               | > Python was mentioned in the parent comment.
               | 
               | Yes, you're still talking to the same person. But your
               | comment is even more confusing. Are you arguing that
               | "list comprehensions" are part of the language because we
               | have a nice pairing of English words for that thing and
               | that core programming concepts are missing because we
               | don't have English words for them? It seems like an
               | absurd stance, especially because we're talking about
               | Spanish where it's basically a meme to add "a" or "o" to
               | the end of the English word. Almost all programming
               | concepts are words that I'd never use in daily
               | conversation. Again, my root argument is that if you want
               | to serve the Spanish community, forking the <any
               | established language> project and translating everything
               | seems like more payoff for less effort than creating a
               | brand new language. It doesn't really matter what the
               | original community thinks.
               | 
               | As an educator, specifically to South Americans learning
               | programming and data science, the biggest hurdle I
               | encounter is understanding concepts not that the words
               | are in English. Logistic regression, L1 regularization,
               | OLS, for loop, Simpson's paradox, none of the hard parts
               | in teaching those are the fact they contain English
               | words.
        
       | drinkcocacola wrote:
       | I also feel this effort is completely pointless. Java for
       | instance has 52 reserved words. 52!!! the complexity of
       | programming does not lie in the meaning of just 52 english words.
       | That's actually the easiest part. As you get better you
       | eventually will pick a production-ready language such as
       | JavaScript or Kotlin, only to realise that you now have to learn
       | the meaning of the words...
        
       | tombert wrote:
       | I always wondered why there weren't more non-English programming
       | languages...it seems like it gives an incredibly unfair advantage
       | in compsci for Americans and British and Irish compared to most
       | other countries in the world. Programming is hard enough to learn
       | even when you speak the main language, let alone having to learn
       | English in the process as well.
        
         | thiht wrote:
         | Because if you use a keyboard with the latin alphabet, the
         | language of the keywords is not a big deal. What's important is
         | for the tutorials and documentation to be translated, not the
         | language itself.
         | 
         | When you use a non latin keyboard I guess having a language
         | matching your keyboard might be more important.
        
         | ModernMech wrote:
         | There are more than a few, but none of them are nearly
         | mainstream:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...
         | 
         | A lot of these start as passion projects by native speakers and
         | don't gain much traction. Actually, here's one that was posted
         | just over the weekend, so maybe didn't get a lot of attention:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26771369
        
           | tombert wrote:
           | Yeah, I figured that they have to exist (didn't see the Cree
           | one, I will look at it) just due to "law of large numbers"
           | reasoning.
           | 
           | It always just seemed a bit weird to me, there are more
           | native Spanish speakers then English speakers...why has
           | English become the lingua-franca for a base of programming
           | languages? Is it as simple as "Apple, IBM, and Microsoft
           | started in the US"?
        
             | ModernMech wrote:
             | I think it comes down to the fact that the predominate view
             | of programming languages is that they are math and tools
             | for conducting science/business. English was the lingua-
             | fraca for science/business long before programming
             | languages were around so it might have followed naturally
             | that programming languages should be localized in English
             | as well.
             | 
             | But it's hard to say, there are a lot of cultural elements
             | at play. We see one right here in this very language that
             | is trying to escape the English domain -- it doesn't have
             | support for character accents native to the language it's
             | trying to support. This limitation probably derives from
             | the days when bytes were highly expensive, so character
             | encodings had to be frugal with their use of memory. With
             | one byte you can encode enough characters for the English
             | alphabet, numbers, symbols, and control characters, but
             | you're not going to have enough for all the combinations of
             | accents. Just look at what went into the extended ASCII
             | table: they made room for some common accented characters
             | from western nations, but also allocated precious space for
             | copyrights, trademarks, fractions, legal symbols, more
             | mathematical operators, and currency symbols of the largest
             | nations. More than a purely technical decision, this is a
             | statement of priorities.
             | 
             | Again you see programming-as-math/science playing a role
             | here; character encodings for mathematical symbols were
             | given priority, but characters that could be used for
             | communicating in other languages were disregarded. This is
             | likely because the kinds of applications people were
             | looking to use programming languages for were based in
             | math/science, so those symbols were viewed as
             | indispensable. I'm not saying this was wrong, btw, I'm just
             | saying that's the way these things evolved.
             | 
             | This very early (circa 1960) decision still has rippling
             | consequences even today, so it's clear momentum of early
             | choices in computing plays a large role here.
        
             | qwertywert_ wrote:
             | Well most were created in C like, Lua made by a brazillian,
             | Ruby made by Japanese guy. So yea they already had to base
             | of existing US tech.
        
       | rootsudo wrote:
       | Yikes. Same level as people using latinx.
        
       | smsm42 wrote:
       | USSR did it for Russian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira
       | 
       | Wasn't a bad language btw. Support for pretty large numbers (up
       | to 2^1016) out of the box, for example. Flexible data types (e.g.
       | sets, tuples, structures, etc.). Optional typing. Not too bad for
       | early 80s.
        
       | HMH wrote:
       | This is certainly fun to look at. Thinking about this, are there
       | any programming languages that do i18n for their keywords?
        
       | me_me_me wrote:
       | Remember COBOL, this is a path towards a v2 of that disaster.
        
       | jan_Inkepa wrote:
       | Cool to see programming languages using non-english as a base.
       | 
       | However,
       | 
       | > No son validas las letras acentuadas u otros caracteres como la
       | n.
       | 
       | ["Accented letters or other characters such as n are not valid."
       | sez deepl]
       | 
       | https://manual.lenguajelatino.org/es/stable/sintaxis/Variabl...
       | 
       | Looks like it doesn't support accented characters in variable
       | names. I wonder what their reason for excluding those is?
        
         | jgwil2 wrote:
         | It does seem like support for Spanish-language characters
         | should be a feature of a Spanish-based programming language.
        
         | ufo wrote:
         | I don't know what was they reason they chose but a one possible
         | one is that unicode variable names introduce several
         | implementation challenges. You need to worry about
         | normalization (the same character may be represented by
         | different byte sequences) and you might need to have large
         | tables to be able to tell whether an unicode character is a
         | letter or a symbol. There are also problems with encodings;
         | UTF-8 vs Latin-1 and so on...
        
           | mumblemumble wrote:
           | I imagine it wouldn't have been _that_ hard, if the authors
           | had just used ICU4C for string handling. I 've had good luck
           | with just converting all input to normal form C. The bigger
           | challenge there is that, if you're using ICU strings, then
           | you've lost the ability to use any library that is designed
           | to work with C strings. There's no way to avoid 0x00 showing
           | up in the middle of UTF-16 and UTF-32 strings, and, even if
           | you use modified UTF-8 to avoid NUL bytes, you still break
           | the assumption that a string's length is equal to its size is
           | bytes.
        
             | ufo wrote:
             | Not to mention the inherent problem of adding a dependency
             | to an external library.
             | 
             | I know that in the case of Lua that was one of the main
             | reasons. ICU by itself would be larger than the rest of the
             | interpreter.
        
         | matheusmoreira wrote:
         | Lack of Unicode support in the parser? Can't think of any other
         | reason.
        
         | JaumeGreen wrote:
         | Yeah, I wonder the same. After all making a programming
         | language derived from a real language and not using the
         | "features" of said language seems lacking.
         | 
         | In fact it should be "funcion", that way it would not matter
         | whether you are writing code or documentation.
        
           | User23 wrote:
           | Here's the Sieve of Eratosthenes as a fun example of what
           | you're asking for[1].                       #!
           | /usr/local/bin/perl -w             use
           | Lingua::Romana::Perligata;             maximum inquementum
           | tum biguttam egresso scribe.             meo maximo vestibulo
           | perlegamentum da.             da duo tum maximum
           | conscribementa meis listis.             dum listis
           | decapitamentum damentum nexto                 fac sic
           | nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
           | lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis.
           | cis.
           | 
           | [1]
           | http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
        
         | OrbitRock wrote:
         | We really need an n operator
        
         | mumblemumble wrote:
         | I'm guessing it's because the language was implemented in C,
         | whose stdlib doesn't really do Unicode strings, and the authors
         | didn't think to use a different string type for identifiers
         | until it was too late.
        
         | OrbitRock wrote:
         | Great, now everybody will laugh when you try to name a variable
         | "year".
        
           | SamBam wrote:
           | I spent way too long trying to work out if there was an
           | accented Spanish word "year" or something that was funny...
        
             | nperez wrote:
             | For those who don't speak Spanish, ano is "year", and
             | without the accent on the "n", it's a body part that you
             | can probably guess :)
        
               | sergiotapia wrote:
               | that's why I type it `anho` when speaking with latino
               | friends i don't have the n on my english keyboard
        
               | anthk wrote:
               | setxkbmap us -variant intl -option compose:rwin]
               | 
               | Press altgr or right win key + [aeiou] or n.
        
               | SamBam wrote:
               | You're using the Portuguese transliteration of the ene.
               | And if you were doing it with an Italian or French
               | transliteration, you could write "agno."
               | 
               | (That said, it's one that's so common it's worth learning
               | the keyboard shortcut for. On a Mac it's "opt-n, n".)
        
         | dynamic_sausage wrote:
         | Non-English-based programming was common in the Soviet Union,
         | but certainly not unique to it:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...
        
         | BitwiseFool wrote:
         | I know that languages like Swift can support Emoji, so why not
         | support accented latin characters?
        
           | jan_Inkepa wrote:
           | Full Emoji support is ... horrendous ... I look into it about
           | once a year; I think there are proposals for unicode but as
           | of now it's still super hard to detect if something's a
           | single emoji symbol or not (the most current regex I saw for
           | emoji-matching was, IIRC, several KB in size...). Some day in
           | our cyberpunk future we'll get there...probably some decades
           | after full self-driving vehicles have become standard...
        
       | tediousdemise wrote:
       | Couldn't this be accomplished in a language like C++ using
       | macros/typedefs/templates? Just make an alias for every single
       | built-in keyword/type in the target language. Would be an
       | interesting experiment, although you would still have to
       | translate all the libraries that do the heavy lifting, which
       | would be monumental effort... might want to automate it using
       | something like Google Translate, and then review it for quality
       | with a native speaker.
       | 
       | Good luck searching for online documentation and StackOverflow
       | answers in your new bespoke language. You'll probably need an
       | interpreter that translates your search queries back into the
       | base language syntax.
        
       | tapia wrote:
       | I remember from my times at the university that the TI Voyage 200
       | (and probably TI89, too) had the option to program in different
       | languages. I tried the Spanish version, but apart from being an
       | interesting exercise, I didn't see much use in programming in
       | Spanish. Furthermore, if I remember correctly, if you wrote a
       | program in Spanish, then it would not run after you set the
       | language back to English... so not so good if you wanted to
       | interchange code.
        
       | roflc0ptic wrote:
       | The `unison` programming language represents all symbols as
       | labels on hashes, so it makes it relatively trivial to remap from
       | one language to another.
       | 
       | I commented on another thread about being hype about this, and
       | people pushed back, commenting that it's really beneficial to
       | have English as the lingua franca of software development.
       | 
       | It strikes me that lowering the barrier to entry by not forcing
       | someone to learn programming _and_ English is positive. But
       | fragmenting standard communication language harms software as a
       | whole. Plus, learn English and you get access to millions upon
       | millions of man hours in libraries and documentation.
       | 
       | Maybe it's not really an either/or here; better for people to
       | have choices.
       | 
       | All of that said, "Latino" seems like a particularly terrible
       | name for a programming language: it should probably be
       | hispanohablantes for correctness.
        
         | SiempreViernes wrote:
         | > All of that said, "Latino" seems like a particularly terrible
         | name for a programming language
         | 
         | Now I'm not sure who you think python is for...
        
           | jgwil2 wrote:
           | I think Python is a good name because although it's
           | arbitrary, there's very little domain overlap that could
           | cause confusion: context can pretty much always tell you
           | whether people are referring to the language or the animal.
           | 
           | Latino, on the other hand, seems to have a little more
           | overlap: it's very close to Latin, an actual language, and
           | also refers to the _latinoamericano_ cultural identity, which
           | is largely defined in relation to language. Thus the
           | possibilities for confusion seem a bit greater (I think OP 's
           | suggestion of "hispanohablantes" would also cause a lot of
           | confusion).
        
             | roflc0ptic wrote:
             | Yes, hispanohablantes was a little tongue in cheek. Perhaps
             | latinx for maximal confusion
        
               | Jtsummers wrote:
               | Presumably latinx will be an X Windows implementation in
               | Latino. At least I hope that happens at some point
               | because I enjoy punny approaches to naming things.
        
               | dragonwriter wrote:
               | > Perhaps latinx for maximal confusion
               | 
               | Latin@ is a little bit less of an USAism, but I'm not
               | sure if that's a pro or con in the maximal confusion
               | department.
        
         | matheusmoreira wrote:
         | > It strikes me that lowering the barrier to entry by not
         | forcing someone to learn programming _and_ English is positive.
         | 
         | In my country's technology courses, students are often
         | introduced to programming through a language called Portugol
         | which is essentially a translated Pascal. There's no compiler,
         | no interpreter or anything. For months on end students have to
         | write procedural code _on paper_ with this useless language.
        
           | benjaminjosephw wrote:
           | Wow, that sucks. Wouldn't a source-to-source compiler into
           | Pascal be a good option in that case? Writing a simple
           | compilers might also be a good learning opportunity for the
           | more experienced. Compilers are a way simpler concept than
           | they might seem and really easy to write too.
        
           | highspeedbus wrote:
           | There is a bunch of portugol compilers, all incompatible with
           | each other since this is not a well defined language. Kinda
           | the point is to not waste time learning syntax and use
           | whatever imaginary functions calls you want.
           | 
           | The more serious problem is when teachers uses it as a hammer
           | to every nail and teach advanced concepts using it, so
           | students are forced to reason about fine syntax of a
           | fictional language.
        
         | qsort wrote:
         | As a non-English speaker, I don't really conceptualize code as
         | English. Tokens being 'if', 'while', 'else' is completely
         | trivial, like using '{' instead of 'begin' or '[]<class T>(T i)
         | {return i;};' instead of '(lambda (x) x)' or 'y => y'.
         | 
         | I wrote my first line of code before I wrote my first word in
         | English, the status-quo doesn't really require you to learn
         | English beyond a couple trivial tokens.
         | 
         | I agree choices are good and I hope the project succeeds, but
         | it must be stressed that learning English isn't really optional
         | anyway, it's a hard requirement for any IT-related job
         | worldwide.
        
           | tsimionescu wrote:
           | That's true for keywords, but a much bigger problem are
           | standard libraries. I don't think you could realistically
           | understand the Swing API to pick an example without
           | understanding English, even if you had access to docs in
           | another language.
        
             | brudgers wrote:
             | Documentation too.
        
           | bombcar wrote:
           | I think it might affect some languages more than others -
           | perl is just line noise in any language, but I could see SQL
           | "dialects" in various languages.
           | 
           | But even then I feel that in that case non-english speakers
           | might have a bit of an advantage as they don't assume things
           | about SQL because it doesn't look like their native language.
        
             | qsort wrote:
             | > but I could see SQL "dialects" in various languages.
             | 
             | IIRC AppleScript used to support French, but it's an
             | unpopular variant of an unpopular language, so I'm not
             | really sure how many people actually used it.
             | 
             | > But even then I feel that in that case non-english
             | speakers might have a bit of an advantage as they don't
             | assume things about SQL because it doesn't look like their
             | native language.
             | 
             | Yeah, the sooner you realize it's the _abstract_ and not
             | the _concrete_ syntax you 're actually manipulating, the
             | better. IME (natural) language is just not a barrier at
             | all.
        
         | jgwil2 wrote:
         | I would think that if there is any language that could be a
         | viable alternative to English for programming, it would be
         | Chinese: more native speakers than any other language, and with
         | a writing system distant enough from that of English that
         | learning English might actually constitute a significant
         | barrier. Spanish is just not there. Yes, there are a lot of
         | native speakers, but it's close enough to English that it's
         | probably not going to be worthwhile to most Spanish-speaking
         | programmers to participate in the alternative ecosystem (not to
         | mention that it has less economic clout than Chinese).
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | loloquwowndueo wrote:
       | To begin with, the page is full of typos and grammar errors. Many
       | parts of it read like they were translated by beginners in
       | Spanish or machine translation (so kind of , what's the point if
       | they're using Spanish carelessly?).
       | 
       | Then, a bunch of the keywords in the programming language itself
       | don't make a lot of sense - "for" maps to "desde", not "para" -
       | so I have to remember an arbitrary term that doesn't do what it
       | means or mean what it does. At that point I might as well learn
       | "for", right?
       | 
       | Remembering that "si" is "if" doesn't seem like a huge burden.
       | The fact that "si" in Spanish is used as both a conditional and
       | affirmative ("yes") can actually lead to more confusion and
       | ambiguity.
       | 
       | Overall it doesn't feel like a very well-designed language nor
       | does it feel natural as a Spanish speaker which defeats the
       | point.
        
       | nmeofthestate wrote:
       | If anyone else is confused, the language has Spanish keywords. My
       | browser automatically translated the code snippet into English
       | for me, leaving me wondering why the language "has received the
       | love and support of Hispanic users around the world".
        
       | bogota wrote:
       | I'm not sure the merits of using this in production but as a tool
       | for introducing someone to programming this is awesome.
        
         | ashneo76 wrote:
         | Agreed. Non-english for introduction is good. But for
         | production it is going to impede collaboration and your
         | understanding.
         | 
         | As a non native speaker, I have seen my friends struggle with
         | english in grad school when they were taught math and science
         | in their native tongue. This is a different programming
         | language not just python with spanish variables. Translating to
         | english and then having to translate the code later on, is
         | going to be a huge barrier.
        
       | ElectricMind wrote:
       | I have feeling someone German/Russian is already working on this
       | one. Davay geht los :)
        
       | ch4s3 wrote:
       | Regarding the WHY question...
       | 
       | > El desarrollo y administracion del lenguaje Latino para que
       | escuelas, universidades, maestros, estudiantes y profesionales
       | encuentre en Latino una herramienta para resolver los problemas
       | del dia a dia.
       | 
       | The development and administration of the Latino language so that
       | schools, universities, teachers, students, and professionals find
       | a tool to solve day to day problems.
       | 
       | It seems to be targeting teaching and learning as well as some
       | simple business use. Interesting idea, I wonder if it will catch
       | on.
        
       | keiferski wrote:
       | If software is "eating the world", it is inevitable that local
       | dialects will arise. I wouldn't be surprised if the world of 2100
       | is full of popular non-English programming languages.
        
         | TulliusCicero wrote:
         | If anything, it seems to be going the other way to me. In
         | Europe, programming jobs only requiring English (and not the
         | local language) seem steadily on the rise, because it means
         | companies can pull talent from other parts of Europe, or even
         | further abroad.
         | 
         | If you're a German company that wants to also be able to hire
         | coders from France and Italy and Romania, requiring German
         | proficiency is going to drastically cut down the potential
         | international labor pool you can draw on. And that's for one of
         | the biggest European languages -- imagine what the calculus is
         | if you're a company in Denmark or Slovenia.
         | 
         | Plus, let's say you start with the local language, but then
         | your company gets big. At some point, you may want to open up
         | offices in other countries...but what do you do then? Have
         | German source code from your German devs, and French source
         | code from your French devs?
        
           | keiferski wrote:
           | The EU is a particularly unique situation where a unified
           | language is useful and that language will probably be
           | English.
           | 
           | Latin America, for example, isn't the same.
        
       | cakebrewery wrote:
       | Instead of entire new programming languages, maybe existing
       | languages can have alternate localizations (done at the IDE
       | level). The same source code would display in a different
       | language from a user with their IDE in Spanish vs the user with
       | their IDE in English.
       | 
       | Edit: Food for thought regarding reserved keywords...
        
       | vehemenz wrote:
       | How about a macro system that replaces keywords in any natural
       | language for any programming language? This would be only an i8n
       | layer that doesn't mess with any core functionality of the
       | programming language.
       | 
       | As long as you don't support COBOL, it should be pretty
       | straightforward.
       | 
       | Edit: Maybe not so straightforward!
        
         | klyrs wrote:
         | A consequence of this is that you can't use keywords from _any_
         | language for your symbol names. Or, I guess, you could do like
         | Perl and defined symbols need a $ prefix or somesuch
        
         | Jtsummers wrote:
         | This would be easier with languages where keywords are in clear
         | and consistent syntactic positions and identifiers can match
         | keywords (that is, the keywords are only "kind of" special,
         | more by position than value).
         | 
         | Otherwise, you'll run into issues when someone is using
         | Language X but has identifiers that happen to coincide with
         | Language Y's keywords. You wouldn't want to error out here, and
         | you don't want Language X writers to be forced to be aware of
         | the many hundreds of extra keywords that are now required
         | knowledge to avoid collisions and permit universal translation.
         | 
         | For instance, in a programming language which uses `and` as a
         | keyword in English for the logical operation, this would be
         | translated into Spanish as `y`. Well, in graphical applications
         | `y` is a perfectly natural variable name for the English
         | speaker (and probably the Spanish speaker, but their dialect of
         | the language wouldn't permit it). Now the English program can't
         | be translated properly into Spanish _unless_ the syntax is such
         | that variables and keywords are always unambiguous so that this
         | can be legal in the Spanish version:                 y < 0 y x
         | > 10       y < 0 and x > 10
         | 
         | Of course, switching to a language which prefers symbols over
         | keywords would help to minimize this issue (as in C where `and`
         | is not a keyword, in contrast with Ada where `and` is a
         | keyword).
        
       | shafin_ wrote:
       | Very cool. I am also working on a non english programming
       | language. Github repo: https://github.com/Shafin098/pakhi-bhasha
        
       | nerdponx wrote:
       | I love the idea, but this an especially un-Google-able name for a
       | programming language.
        
       | bigmattystyles wrote:
       | I know they are aiming to be a real language but isn't this
       | effectively an art project? In that sense, it is very effective
       | at pointing out how English-centric programming is. As a non
       | Spanish speaker, I instantly felt what those learning to program
       | must feel when they don't know any English. Utter confusion.
       | 
       | It does seem like it should be trivial for every programming
       | language to have a localization file for keywords to be rendered
       | in a local version on the user's machine. Though then you still
       | have to deal with variables and comments.
        
         | BiteCode_dev wrote:
         | Most things in programming are human conventions that you have
         | to learn. There is rarely a way to guess or figure things out.
         | Keywords, scoping, byte order... It's all arbitrary,
         | understanding the English meaning of the world "yield" in
         | English will do little to help you understand generators.
         | 
         | No, the real problem is the reading material. If you need to
         | debug/read doc/google stuff, anything worth something (except a
         | few exceptions like samemax.com and so on) will be in English.
         | 
         | I've seen French professionals being perfectly capable
         | programmers, but because their English sucked, their struggled
         | to solve some problems that were a Stackoverflow post away.
        
       | juliand wrote:
       | Here are some code examples for anyone curious to see how it
       | looks
       | 
       | https://github.com/lenguaje-latino/latino/tree/master/ejempl...
        
         | ufo wrote:
         | My first impression is that it looks like a mix of Lua and
         | Python.
        
           | yosito wrote:
           | > Latino es un lenguaje de programacion con sintaxis en
           | Espanol creado en C, inspirado en Lua y Python
           | 
           | Well, yeah....
        
           | tgv wrote:
           | I don't see much Python, mainly Lua with Spanish keywords and
           | function names, basically. while => mientras, if => si, end
           | => fin, break => romper, print => poner, etc.
           | 
           | I learned programming with such a "localized" version of
           | simplified FORTRAN, but I didn't find it intuitive or
           | conducive to learning how to program. Later, I read a study
           | (can't cite it; lost the details) that found interference
           | from programming language keywords in English speakers, but
           | not in others, and they suggested it might actually be easier
           | to learn programming with English keywords.
        
             | ufo wrote:
             | It says it has local-by-default scoping, which would be a
             | Python influence. But now I'm not sure. When I tested the
             | program the variables set inside the function seem to still
             | be present after the function returns?
        
       | the_af wrote:
       | I still remember Visual Basic with Spanish keywords. It was... a
       | mess, and it really didn't do anything for Spanish speakers
       | except fragment the VB user base.
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | Also with VBA for MSOffice where even damn Excel functions were
         | localized. Useless crap.
        
       | bobthechef wrote:
       | Not sure what the fuss is about. Plenty of languages[0] have
       | existed that used native keywords over English. Unless your
       | natural language's grammar introduces some novel syntactic or
       | semantic features to the programming language, this is
       | superficial. It's just a kind of localization. You could adapt
       | the parser for any language to do this. Heck, in a Lisp, you can
       | just define a bunch of aliases and wrappers and load that into
       | your current namespace if you want.
       | 
       | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-
       | based_programming_...
        
       | drfuchs wrote:
       | The French Ministry of National Education tried supporting a
       | similar sort of effort 50 years ago:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE_(programming_language)
        
       | ectoplasmaboiii wrote:
       | Awesome! I have always wondered if language like spanish and
       | arabic have (widespread) programming languages.
       | 
       | As an aside: I guess the fact that k only uses symbols makes it a
       | very inclusive language :)
        
       | second--shift wrote:
       | la unica pregunta que tengo es .... porque? Nosotros que somos
       | hispanohablantes no hemos necesitado esto - los lenguajes que ya
       | existen sirven muy bien.
       | 
       | Como un ejercisio tecnico, les aplaudo. Pero no es un `Lisp`, y
       | asi, no es para mi
        
         | commandlinefan wrote:
         | It looks more or less like Javascript with Spanish keywords
         | instead of English. I guess it's an argument for a purely
         | symbolic (and therefore equally accessible) programming
         | language.
        
           | ducharmdev wrote:
           | That's an interesting point - on the topic of readability,
           | its often argued that the more abstract symbols and operators
           | used, the harder it is to read (I think this is why operator
           | overloading is sometimes frowned upon). But if you are not
           | fluent in English, it wouldn't be much more accessible than a
           | purely symbolic language.
           | 
           | The tricky thing about this, is we search based on language
           | all the time. It's harder to search for an operator if you
           | don't already know what that operator is called.
           | 
           | Maybe you could build this into the tooling of the symbolic
           | language? E.g. provide a semantic name for a given std lib
           | function in your chosen language, and get intellisense in
           | your language.
        
           | mywittyname wrote:
           | Symbols have different meanings in language too. For example,
           | would you use "string" or <<string>> to quote a string?
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | paperbackwrter wrote:
         | como ejercicio parece muy interesante pero para algun uso real
         | o educativo creo que no es la mejor opcion.
         | 
         | Fuera de tema: He leido HN los ultimos tres anos y creo que es
         | el primer comentario en espanol que he visto. Solo dato
         | curioso.
        
         | ccortes wrote:
         | Porque se puede.
        
         | ggambetta wrote:
         | De acuerdo... me parece una perdida de tiempo y/o una idea
         | terrible.
        
         | jordigh wrote:
         | Depende de cuales hispanohablantes estemos hablando. Cierto es
         | que muchos de nosotros simplemente hemos aceptado que la
         | programacion, por lo menos las palabras clave, estaran en
         | ingles. Pero los novatos y aprendices que nunca han programado
         | y que no hablan ingles, quizas podrian aprender mejor con un
         | lenguaje en su idioma.
         | 
         | No deberia ser requisito riguroso hablar ingles para poder
         | participar en la creacion de software. Y no lo es, en general,
         | salvo por algunas palabras clave en lenguajes de programacion.
         | Si es posible reducir esta barrera... ?por que no?
         | 
         | La gente habla de que esto fragmentara mas a la comunidad.
         | Fragmentados ya estamos. Hay mucha gente que no puede entender
         | con facilidad las respuestas en Stack Overflow. Si fomentamos y
         | propiciamos mas el uso de otros idiomas, seguramente podriamos
         | acercarnos mas a mucha mas gente que podria ser nuestros
         | futuros colaboradores.
        
           | second--shift wrote:
           | Hola, y saludos!
           | 
           | > Pero los novatos y aprendices que nunca han programado y
           | que no hablan ingles, quizas podrian aprender mejor con un
           | lenguaje en su idioma.
           | 
           | Es mi opinon que el pueblo (hispanohablante) que esten
           | aprendiendo la programacion traslape mucho con el pueblo que
           | por lo menos conoce un poco de ingles. Asi, las palabras
           | comunes como `print`, `if`, y `return` son muy faciles
           | aprender.
           | 
           | Yo estoy de acuerdo con tus comentarios sobre la
           | fragmentacion; el problema que tengo yo con este idea de
           | lenguajes de programacion en otras lenguas es que el
           | vocabulario no es interoperable. Si una persona empieza aqui,
           | esta empezando con una desventaja. Esta condenada a usar esta
           | lenguaje - que quizas no sirve para la aplicacion deseada.
           | 
           | Con todo esto, quiero decir que es una victoria cada novato
           | que empieze aprender la programacion. Solo que el lenguaje en
           | espanol puede ser una trampa - ya dijiste tu en como: por
           | ejemplo, no se puede comunicar en StackOverflow para buscar
           | ayuda.
           | 
           | Mucho gusto comunicarme contigo, el espanol es una de mis
           | lenguas pero no es la primaria. Saludos
        
           | andredz wrote:
           | Francamente, la principal barrera que he visto no es que los
           | lenguajes de programacion esten en ingles sino que la gran
           | mayoria de articulos tecnicos, libros, foros (HN), etc., lo
           | estan.
           | 
           | Para reducir esta barrera la mejor y mas facil solucion es
           | aprender ingles. En la programacion normalmente hay que
           | aprender muchos lenguajes, diria que aprender otro idioma
           | (lenguaje natural) no es tan diferente y el haber tenido que
           | hacerlo nos hace mejores programadores.
           | 
           | Por otro lado, no creo que este mal aprender a programar
           | usando lenguajes que luego no vayas a usar; asi que si Latino
           | si facilita el aprendizaje para hispanohablantes, en
           | comparacion a otros lenguajes usados en la educacion (Java,
           | Python, JS), pero que estan en ingles, diria que no es un mal
           | proyecto.
           | 
           | Pero si por mi fuera, hubiera preferido aprender a programar,
           | no con un lenguaje en espanol, sino con un Lisp (Scheme o
           | Racket).
        
             | jordigh wrote:
             | Dime, ?podrias con facilidad memorizar unas 20-30 palabras
             | claves en chino o en ruso? ?Crees que esto impediria el uso
             | de un lenguaje de programacion?
        
               | anthk wrote:
               | No es comparable, el alfabeto ingles es un subconjunto
               | del castellano.
        
         | cpp_frog wrote:
         | Leyendo el resto de los comentarios, sigo sin entender porque
         | habria de ser mas dificil aprender de una manera u otra. Estoy
         | de acuerdo con la idea de que sea estandar. En el peor de los
         | casos (si fuera cierto que es mas dificil), los empleadores en
         | LA (Latino America) lo tendrian en cuenta, pero a nadie le
         | importa. Eso refuta toda la argumentacion.
        
         | rkzswkr wrote:
         | Pienso que tambien tiene mucho valor como herramienta de
         | educacion mas que para usarse en la industria.
        
           | second--shift wrote:
           | Hola, saludos y gracias por tu comentario.
           | 
           | Tienes razon que hay aplicacion en el sistema de educacion.
           | Pero mi respuesta es esta: no seria mas eficiente hacer un
           | tutorial de las palabras ingleses, y luego usar nombres
           | espanoles para las variables y funciones?
        
       | agubelu wrote:
       | I don't dislike the idea but, as a Spanish speaker, my first
       | impression reading the main page could be notably better:
       | 
       | - Typos: "cabezera", "al rededor", lots of tildes missing in
       | general
       | 
       | - Google "translade" [sic] allowed - Why even ask for translators
       | in the first place then?
       | 
       | - Filler text still present ("esto de prueba")
        
         | flobosg wrote:
         | It seems that the author is not a native Spanish speaker, or at
         | least not an idiomatic one.
        
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