On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 1:29 AM, <csrabak@bol.com.br> wrote:
Em 29/07/2010 03:10, laurent laffont < laurent.laffont@gmail.com > escreveu:
On  Wed,  Jul  28,  2010  at  6:32  PM,  Nicolas  Cellier  wrote:
Once  upon a  time  I wondered  if  it wouldn't  be possible  to  translate the whole sources in any language (via a Dictionary).  In  any other language,  we (think  of a  child) must  learn to  "talk'  to  computer  in  computer  own  language...  So  an  apprentice has to learn a  new language anyway Be it an english  computer language is thus  not that important.  However, one of  the nice  properties of Smalltalk is enabling  "talking" to the  machine in a  language close to our natural  language, and that  lowers  the  barriers.  So  the  question  of natural  language  naturally arises.
2010/7/28 Carla F.  Griggio  Well, that  last comment reminded me of  something: I've read code written in  english by people that clearly didn't know a lot of english, and it kept me weeks thinking that the code did  something  that  it  didn't  (and, of  course,  it  was  more difficult to  realize why the  code didn't  behave like  it was  saying :P).  So... as writing everything in  english can be a solution, it can  be a big problem too :(
 And a lot (majority ?) of developpers don't want to use English, or don't  understand  English,  or  don't  want to  try  to  understand English, or don't have the courage to try to understand English. And they need to communicate their  ideas / code with others developpers in the same position :)
I think you're heading to a position I've already discussed several years ago with Jecel (not surprisingly when he was teaching a tutorial on Smalltalk) on the issue of non native English speakers 'lose' a bit of the user friendliness of certain programming languages because they need to create a full 'dictionary' in their heads about a certain programming concept and the [foreign] language they need to memorize. Â He gave this example (IIRC):
NNN FOR I=1 TO 120 NEXT I
which for the Canadian boys he was accompanying they read as 'natural language', whereas Brazilian children had to memorize that the 'tokens' "FOR" "TO" and "NEXT" had to written in a certain syntax to create a loop in this language.
The same happens in Smalltalk as most of the methods being in English, when I. Tomek in his book or introductory paper mentions that it is natural to have in Smalltalk:
|rusty|
rusty := Dog new.
rusty bark.
For a non native English speaker this syntax is tantamount to some obscure mathematical notation.
 I  don't  like  writing  in  French,  it's  not  suitable  for programming. Have you ever  seen WinDev code with auto-translation ?
I cannot tell if it was successful or not but I remember in the seventies it was reported that in France there was an attempt to translate to French the COBOL keywords. Â Any account on the outcome of that?
I dunno of the translation of COBOL in french, but i remember when i was in high school in the 80ies having using applications built in LSE (Language Symbolique d'Enseignement). It was a kind of BASIC written in french. More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE_%28programming_language%29 and in french here: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE_%28langage_de_programmation%29 I remember doing german lessons with LSE programs. One way to trick the programs was to stop the application, to look at the name of variable used to give the answer. After that everytime you replyed with the name of variable, every exercice was done right ! Regards, -- Serge Stinckwich UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk http://doesnotunderstand.org/