"about 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet, about 1.3 billion people (18%) use the Chinese script, about 1 billion people (14%) use the Devanagari script (India)"[1]
It'll be interesting to see how the Latin alphabet preference in computer languages changes over time. I'm sure whole different paradigms may be possible in different scripts.
And people complain about the differences between java and python now... Imagine python vs Aheui or similar lol
I'm skeptical that programming languages in other scripts would "discover" new programming paradigms inaccessible to languages written with the latin alphabet. Programming languages hardly follow any rules of english grammar, despite most of them being in English.
I'm also skeptical. The "strong" claims of Whorfianism, that testable things like color perception depend on ones language, have mostly been falsified. I see no reason why programming of computers would be different.
Are some languages structured such that it's easier for its native speakers are better at certain programming tasks? Sure, that's plausible. I can imagine that e.g. German programmers would be better at keeping two-page goto-riddled DO loops in their heads. But would Spanish programmers find it impossible? Hardly.
>I'm also skeptical. The "strong" claims of Whorfianism, that testable things like color perception depend on ones language, have mostly been falsified.
That's not entirely settled, but even so, those to me are the least interesting (and least expected to be true) aspects of Whorfianism. The social aspects of language influence are much more interesting.
That said, I don't see programming languages in other, err, languages discovering any novel ways of programming. That's mostly because in the end they always should just translate to the underlying CPU model and CS concepts, and those are math, they don't change culturally.
> The social aspects of language influence are much more interesting.
Sure, but it's pretty much impossible to make a falsifiable hypothesis in this area that can actually be (ethically) tested. Like, how do you separate the effect of having Japanese as your primary language from the effect of growing up in a Japanese culture (whether actually in Japan or not)?
> [CS concepts] are math, they don't change culturally
>Like, how do you separate the effect of having Japanese as your primary language from the effect of growing up in a Japanese culture (whether actually in Japan or not)?
I guess by using people from bilingual societies, who speak one or the other language within the same culture.
For the case of Aheui, it is essentially a Hangul-branded version of Befunge [1] (or if you are interested in the history of esolangs, it is actually more like Orthogonal [2] but Aheui didn't really derive from it). Besides from the fact that Aheui's usage of Hangul is novel, I wouldn't consider it a fundamental paradigm shift.
You can swap the latin characters for other symbols, but I'm not sure how it will fundamentally change anything. Advances come from thinking of how to formulate abstract concepts differently, like procedural vs. functional programming. The letters themselves are just part of the specification.
Perhaps people whose language is radically different from romance languages will approach programming differently because of that, and invent something new.
It won't change because of tremendous legacy inertia. Everything from assembly to scripting languages are in Latin-English. All kernels are Latin-English. CS is taught around the globe as a 100% English major usually. Our first humanoid AI will almost certainly think in 'English' and speak English.
The language of science has shifted before; I don't think it's reasonable to assume it won't again.
Then again, English might stay around as a, well, legacy language. I could imagine someone a few hundred years from now studying archaic english, in preparation for a dive into the kernel or whatever. Then again, computer translation will probably have gotten good enough that it won't be necessary.
The language of science has shifted before; I don't think it's reasonable to assume it won't again.
The language of diplomacy used to be french. Some of the cultural remnants of this still remain today, even though the role that french used to play is now played by english. If it were to happen how long would it take for english to lose favor as a language of computers?
I have tried to explain to my non-technical friends how strange it is that computer programming language == english proficiency (usually) - because it seems like the large majority of discussion around programming and computers happens in english (open source communities, bug reports, documentation) - I wonder how that will work as the field of computers matures into it's 1st and 2nd centuries- how much and to what level will programming and programming languages fragment? What kinds of things will remain in english/latin and what will transition- what kinds of programming related things will only be in chinese or devanagari (india) script?
Even the act of typing is predicated to the idea of a latin alphabet, I wonder to what degree the languages will continue to change to adapt to that and to what degree the technology will adapt to compensate for the language.
Once you start thinking (as a native english speaker) how much of the world of computers is naturally biased towards latin/english it kind of blows your mind.
Thing is, switching the "world language" becomes a more expensive endeavor as more content exists in it, and more speakers understand it. Last time that happened - when French was replaced by English - the numbers were very different. Sure, many educated people spoke French, but nowhere near as many as there are English speakers today, even in proportion to world's population. And it was not nearly as dominant for content: science was mostly done in national languages, and so were books.
Two things changed the landscape a lot. First, universal school education, which in most countries includes at least some rudimentary English, vastly expanded the number of people proficient with it to some extent. And second, the amount of cultural and scientific interchange has skyrocketed, with both effectively standardizing on English as the common language.
So, short of some kind of near-extinction event that would unwind our progress a couple hundred years back, I don't see a high likelihood for change. It seems that we're in the beginning of the "common language" era, and English - or whatever it evolves into over time, anyway - is going to be that language.
Honestly, I doubt that it will, barring some civilization-scale catastrophe that resets global progress. I'm not being hyperbolic. As the world has shrunk, and intercommunication has increased, the benefits of being able to access the dominant languages have increased dramatically, and part of that process is fixing what is dominant.
English already has the unique distinction of having more ESL speakers than native ones, and has become the lingua franca of world commerce.
(And let's pause for a minute to enjoy the incorporation of the phrase 'lingua franca' in to the English corpus, too. I do love how English is completely shameless about taking whatever it wants from other languages to add to itself.)
>(And let's pause for a minute to enjoy the incorporation of the phrase 'lingua franca' in to the English corpus, too. I do love how English is completely shameless about taking whatever it wants from other languages to add to itself.)
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.
It'll be interesting to see how the Latin alphabet preference in computer languages changes over time. I'm sure whole different paradigms may be possible in different scripts.
And people complain about the differences between java and python now... Imagine python vs Aheui or similar lol
[1]http://www.worldstandards.eu/alphabets/