Question: is it a good idea to introduce kids to coding in their mother tongue like this?

▲ _kb 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's already been linked in comments here but there's been a bit of exploration in that area with Hedy. There's some good references to prior work and comments of relevance in this paper https://hedy.org/research/A_Framework_for_the_Localization_o....

▲ zabzonk 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i've always given the advice "program in english, comments, variables, function names, everything", and "always use a uk/us keyboard unless you absolutely have to enter localised strings, and even better get someone else to do that"

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AnonC 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve seen before that this is not followed in certain cases, such as the entire development team being in a specific country where some or many team members don’t know English (well enough). As an anecdote, I’ve seen a team in a large multinational company (US origin) in Spain that used function names, variable names, database table names (and column names), log message text and many other things in Spanish. English was only for the language keywords because that’s what the compiler would accept.

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mbork_pl 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been working with a codebase for a very specific domain where hardly anyone even knew the English terms for the domain-specific things (and some of them probably didn't even exist - highly localized customs etc.). No point in using English then.

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cmwelsh 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

China disregards that and there is an absolutely massive ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software out there if you can read and write their code.

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zabzonk 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I know little about china (except i like the food and art) but do they actually write code in their native language(s)?!

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anonymous908213 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can only speak for Japan, but I suspect China is the same. In Japan, English programming is the norm because all mainstream programming languages are written in English. Keywords, libraries and documentation are in English, so there's not really any getting around the fact that you have to learn to read at least some English. Some Japanese developers do write identifiers in Japanese where languages support it, and documentation / comments are often written in Japanese, of course.

I, personally, think this is a lamentable state of affairs that raises the barrier to entry for programming, especially for children. There are education-oriented Japanese programming languages that try to fill the niche for teaching children, but I think it would be beneficial if there were serious languages with a full ecosystem rather than ones designed to be training wheels before learning English programming languages.

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mr_toad 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Why not use a pre-processor or something like it to simply translate the keywords etc? I know that there isn’t a 1:1 match between English words and words in other languages, but you should be able to get something close enough.

	▲	anonymous908213 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I actually have done that, but there are still problems. It doesn't really do anything to help somebody who can't read English because things like error messages and libraries are still in English, and it doesn't play nicely with IDE tooling, which is fixable in open-source editors but not proprietary editors. It ends up being a lot of effort for an experience that feels very much second-class.

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melagonster 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nope, they just add huge Chinese comments.

▲ culi 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As someone who's spoken English since 5, I'm perplexed by this question. I'm genuinely unfamiliar with any perceived downsides and I would love to hear more of your thoughts

▲ throwA29B 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No. You want 'for' to be a looping construct with no other meanings.

Seeing code in my native language makes me laugh, I can't take it seriously.

▲ anonymous908213 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I strongly disagree. Take, for example...

  foreach (apple in fruitbasket)
    apple.Eat()

vs.

  for (int i = 0; while i < fruitbasket.Count; i++)
    fruitbasket[i].Eat();

Even as a low-level programmer, I truly loathe C-style for loops. It takes several seconds to parse them, while the C#-style foreach is instantly grokkable with zero mental overhead. When you're scanning over thousands of lines of codes, the speed and ease of reading constructs like these adds up and makes a huge difference. The desire to apply human-friendly syntax to low-level programming is among the greatest motivating factors for the language I'm working on. All of that being said, I think there is a huge advantage in having code that reads like natural language you understand, rather than having keywords that are foreign and meaningless to you.

	▲	fooker 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Coming soon to a programming ecosystem near you: LLM(eat apples in fruitbasket) vs foreach (apple in fruitbasket) apple.Eat() Your comment can be repeated almost word for word here.