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. 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. Any account on the outcome of that?
You end with: i est un entier. x, y sont des entiers. But I think it should be possible to have code in Chinese.
I think it should be possible to have code coded in such a way it could be written in Chinese and understood [tranlated?] in any language in use in the planet ;-) Cheers, -- Cesar Rabak