[beginner] What's wrong?

Rustom Mody rustompmody at gmail.com
Sun Apr 3 10:52:29 EDT 2016


On Sunday, April 3, 2016 at 5:19:33 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Apr 2016 03:12 am, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
> 
> > Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> > 
> >> Steven D'Aprano :
> >>> So you're saying that learning to be a fluent speaker of English is a
> >>> pre-requisite of being a programmer?
> >> 
> >> No more than learning Latin is a prerequisite of being a doctor.
> > 
> > Full ACK.  Probably starting with the Industrial Revolution enabled by the
> > improvements of the steam machine in England, English has become the
> > /lingua franca/ of technology (even though the French often still
> > disagree, preferring words like << ordinateur >> and << octet >> over
> > "computer" and "byte", respectively¹).  (With the Internet at the latest,
> > then, it has also become the /lingua franca/ of science, although Latin
> > terms are common in medicine.)
> 
> And this is a BAD THING. Monoculture is harmful, and science and technology
> is becoming a monoculture: Anglo-American language expressing
> Anglo-American ideas, regardless of the nationality of the scientist or
> engineer.

I think you are ending making the opposite point of what you seem to want to make
Yeah... ok monoculture is a bad thing.
Is python(3) helping towards a 'polyculture'?

To see this consider some app like Word or Gimp that has significant 
functionality and has a history over 20 years.

So let us say some 10 years ago it was internationalized.
This consists of 
1. Rewriting the 'strings' into gettext (or whatever) form along with other
program reorgs
2. Translators actually translating the 'strings'

Or take a modern OS like Windows or Ubuntu -- from the first install screen
we can pick a language and then it will be localized to that

To really localize python one would have to
1. Localize the keywords
2. Localize all module names
3. Localize all the help strings
4. Localize the entire stuff up at https://docs.python.org/3/
5. ...

That is probably one or two orders of magnitude more work than
localizing gimp or Word

So if this is the full goal how far does
"You can now spell (or misspell) your python identifiers in any language of your choice"
go towards that goal?



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