[sugar] Multilingual programming

[Ian Bicking]

Andrew Clunis wrote:
> This has been a pretty serious concern for Develop activity.  It seems
> like we are basically resigned to forcing people to at least learn the
> pseudo-english mnemonic keywords.  However, I have been thinking that it
> might be possible to make a gettext-like translation database of the
> docstrings in commonly used APIs.
> 
> That, and a properly translatable OLPC Programmers' Manual would go a
> long way to improving matters without doing anything too drastic.
> 
> As I mention in the last section http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Develop ,
> though, a translation matrix of language keywords (at least for Python)
> probably creates more problems than it solves...

There's two reasons for children to be programming too -- one is just to 
learn stuff via programming, and another to make useful programs.  When 
you start making useful programs it becomes more important to integrate 
yourself with the larger infrastructure on the laptop, perhaps with a 
larger community of people that don't share your language, etc.  But if 
you are just learning via programming, none of that is so important.  I 
don't think the Develop activity is really trying to be 
learning-via-programming, so maybe it's okay that it not go to heroic 
efforts to be neutral.  Substantial efforts, sure, but there's just a 
lot of constraints, many of which aren't even technical.

-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org