PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Carsten Haese]

On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 18:18 +0200, René Fleschenberg wrote:
> Carsten Haese schrieb:
> > Allowing people to use identifiers in their native language would
> > definitely be an advantage for people from such cultures. That's the use
> > case for this PEP. It's easy for Euro-centric people to say "just suck
> > it up and use ASCII", but the same people would probably starve to death
> > if they were suddenly teleported from Somewhere In Europe to rural China
> > which is so unimaginably different from what they know that it might
> > just as well be a different planet. "Learn English and use ASCII" is not
> > generally feasible advice in such cultures.
> 
> This is a very weak argument, IMHO. How do you want to use Python
> without learning at least enough English to grasp a somewhat decent
> understanding of the standard library? Let's face it: To do any "real"
> programming, you need to know at least some English today, and I don't
> see that changing anytime soon. And it is definitely not going to be
> changed by allowing non-ASCII identifiers.

Even if it were impossible to do "real programming" in Python without
knowing English (which I will neither accept nor reject because I don't
have enough data either way), I don't think Python should be restricted
to "real" programming only. Python (the programming language) is an
inherently easy-to-learn language. I find it quite plausible that
somebody in China might want to teach their students programming before
teaching them English. The posts on this thread by a teacher from China
confirm this suspicion.

Once the students learn Python and realize that there are lots of Python
resources "out there" that are only in English, that will be a
motivation for them to learn English. Requiring all potential Python
programmers to learn English first (or assuming that they know English
already) is an unacceptable barrier of entry.

-- 
Carsten Haese
http://informixdb.sourceforge.net