The Latino Programming Language (opens in new tab)

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 "función" is still bad Spanish.

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.

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 :(

(Of course this doesn't apply to learners, I don't know about that.)

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.

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.

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...)

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.

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.

Windows error messages and the command line on Linux are particularly big offenders here.

I too prefer having function, variable and keywords in ascii as there is generally little to no ambiguity about what the character is or how it’s typed, but not being able to assign strings meaningful values in source code or add comments with meaningful and readable text for the domain of your program is an unnecessary burden.

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.

        #! /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.

Para reducir esta barrera la mejor y más fácil solución es aprender inglés. En la programación normalmente hay que aprender muchos lenguajes, diría 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 esté mal aprender a programar usando lenguajes que luego no vayas a usar; así que si Latino sí facilita el aprendizaje para hispanohablantes, en comparación a otros lenguajes usados en la educación (Java, Python, JS), pero que están en inglés, diría que no es un mal proyecto.

Pero si por mí fuera, hubiera preferido aprender a programar, no con un lenguaje en español, sino con un Lisp (Scheme o Racket).

> Pero los novatos y aprendices que nunca han programado y que no hablan inglés, quizás podrían aprender mejor con un lenguaje en su idioma.

Es mi opiñon 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, está empezando con una desventaja. Está condenada a usar esta lenguaje - que quizás 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 español puede ser una trampa - ya dijiste tú en cómo: por ejemplo, no se puede comunicar en StackOverflow para buscar ayuda.

Mucho gusto comunicarme contigo, el español es una de mis lenguas pero no es la primaria. Saludos

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.

Tienes razon que hay aplicación en el sistema de educación. Pero mi respuesta es esta: no sería mas eficiente hacer un tutorial de las palabras ingleses, y luego usar nombres españoles para las variables y funciones?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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 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.

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 Québec, 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.

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"?

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.

Well, yeah....

Latin America, for example, isn’t the same.