<html> <body> Some examples in Etoys of Multilingual programming. Besides the Japanese version shown here, some students in Japan have done a better one that also uses Japanese syntax (this turns out to help many young children, as one might expect). The Spanish one is particularly good as it has had the useful pressure of being used heavily in Spain. Cheers, Alan <img src="cid:7.0.1.0.2.20070313061654.0762e5a0@squeakland.org.0" width=717 height=538 alt="[]"> At 07:46 PM 3/12/2007, Andrew Clunis wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ian Bicking wrote: > Since there's been some talk of programming environments and whatnot, I > thought I'd throw out some ideas about the whole English focus of most > programming. > > Anyway, I've thought a lot about how it might be possible to use other > languages in Python code, and I can't come up with anything even > slightly useful.  With sufficient cleverness, it might be possible to > support other languages in isolated code, but it's so isolated that it > requires cutting off the rest of the environment.  You can't reasonable > translate things like dict.items, or the standard library, or the code > that's going to be written by English speakers; and English will be the > only common language among developers indefinitely, since there's no > other common language to replace it, just local languages. > > Still, we could create miniature environments where largely non-English > code could be written.  It would involve lots of wrappers and custom > libraries or wrappers and some hiding of libraries in tracebacks and > elsewhere.  Keywords would still be left.  But the result is so > constructed and isolated, I'm not sure if it's any better than just > using a different language. > > Something that can be localized reasonably easily is the documentation > itself.  That could even include docstrings -- a small hack to help() > and/or pydoc could look up translated docstrings, probably just leaving > the original docstrings in place.  This could be useful. > > Another option that came up in conversation (though I've forgotten the > guy's name) is to use a language more suited to translation (like Logo, > or eToys scripting) but really focus on using that as a bridge to > English programming.  That could be done simply by offering translations > as much as possible.  E.g., if they type in: > >   para cuadrado :longitud >     repetir 4 [ad :longitud iz 90] >   fin > > And they get alongside (and they could use at any time if they want): > >   to cuadrado :longitud >     repeat 4 [forward :longitud left 90] >   end > > This is only somewhat helpful, since the language used in Logo and eToys > doesn't actually line up with Python.  But maybe that should be a goal; > at least with Logo it *could* line up.  There's no repeat in Python, but > "to" is "def", for *could* be added ("for" seems to mean lots of > different things), it could have significant indentation, and some other > renaming. > > Anyway, just throwing out some ideas. > 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 <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Develop" eudora="autourl"> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Develop</a> , though, a translation matrix of language keywords (at least for Python) probably creates more problems than it solves... - -- Regards, Andrew Clunis -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - <a href="http://enigmail.mozdev.org/" eudora="autourl"> http://enigmail.mozdev.org</a> iD8DBQFF9h6tALkUMXSNow8RAiYOAKCHUNwGdm2bIh3mucL1fBMj4jBsAQCfTmBx tNmyM8OgStdCyWDbtfcE36E= =zbZf -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list Sugar@laptop.org <a href="http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/sugar" eudora="autourl"> http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/sugar</a></blockquote></body> </html>