[creativecoding]

It seems like a lot of popular languages use functions and such containing English words. Why is this? Are there no like... German-oriented languages?

[Dormilich]

Why ... I guess because English is the Lingua Franca when it comes to people-to-people communication. besides the fact that most of the PL basics were developed in English-speaking countries*.



* - though Germany had the world’s first computer, due to the lost war it was at least 10 years behind in IT-development, which is (as you can imagine) uncatchable.

[creativecoding]

Ah, that makes sense. It's great learning a language written by people who know yours.

[lordofduct]

List of non-english languages on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia....mming_languages

[tlhIn`toq]

For the same reason all pilots and control towers have to speak English,
same reason as when I've traveled to Lebanon, Singapore, Brazil, Dubai English is the language of business, signs, advertising, license plates. Lebanon ATM's dispense both Lebanese pounds and US Dollars and all stores accept both... English is *the* international language making it the largest customer base to develop for.

There is a programming language in Klingon: But there isn't a big customer base for it here.


Like how today's lightbulb still uses the same threaded fitting that Thomas Edison invented, the inventor sets the standards and once the customer base is established everyone else just follows suit.

England, America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore... All English language countries. Let's be honest, for the last 100 years the US and her allies dominated. Financially the Chinese are expanding and buying everyone else in the last several years. But the systems are already in place. Now everything is just a continuation.

380 million people in the USA and this is where things like the .NET framework and Apple's Objective-C are invented. For cars you go to Germany. Watches you go to the Swiss. Computer invention and innovation you go to the USA. Poor outsourcing you go to India. For mass production everything is made in China. Its just how the world is.

[no2pencil]

Apart from tlhIn`toq's accurate answer, I would like to add that perhaps it's because Al Gore is an American, & when he invented the internet, everything just defaulted to English.

[Skydiver]

And somehow QWERTY will stay with us forever, and every naive game developer will assume that WASD will work for everyone.

[tlhIn`toq]

WASD ??

[creativecoding]

Forward, left, backwords, right?

[Skydiver]

Yup.
W - Forward
A - Left
S - Backward
D - Right

After I switched to Dvorak, some games become unplayable when they are hardcoded to only use those keys for movement. Now I get a taste of how left handed people feel living in a right handed world.

This post has been edited by Skydiver: 16 August 2012 - 01:01 PM

[Skydiver]

I had a friend in the Philippines who was just completely fascinated by the C preprocessor when we were learning C. He create a header files with a bunch of #define's to map Filipino words to the C keywords. It was kind of weird to see his code, but he guaranteed nobody would be copying his project code. Since he had a fascination with languages, I wonder if ever made an equivalent parser by the time he took the compiler design class.

Personally, I think that it's great that programming languages are based in English since I think mostly in English despite it being my second language. Most everybody says that computer science and mathematics are closely tied together. I would hate to program in a language that looks like a whole bunch of Greek and mathematical symbols. Imagine a for loop using the capital sigma.

This post has been edited by Skydiver: 16 August 2012 - 03:17 PM

[jon.kiparsky]

I've been interested for a while in the question of natural language syntax and its effect on programming language syntax. There are languages that use case to represent syntactic roles, and languages in which the "standard" and "obvious" syntactic roles are not mapped directly onto overt syntactic patterns (ie, ergative languages). The use of case in programming languages might be an interesting experiment in language design, but I don't know where I'd start to approach it.

Finnish would probably be the best case to begin modeling such a language, I guess.

[AVReidy]

Okay, I'll write a new programming language. I'll call it 'si' (pun intended, hope you get it).

int x = 5;

int principal() {
	si (x == 5) {
		mientras(true) { // Creato memoryo leako
			x = nuevo int(100000);
		}
	}
}

This post has been edited by AVReidy: 21 August 2012 - 10:13 AM

[DarenR]

Well because the majority of English speaking people believe that all should conform to them. Most Native English speaking people I know or have met think it is to troublesome and not worth the efforts to learn another country's language thus the must conform aspect.