
Ask HN: How can a non-English speaker(they have diff script)learn how to code? - jelliclesfarm
I mean..like if their language..doesn’t have Romance language scripts like alphabets. Asian languages, Cyrillic etc. I suppose Italian&#x2F;French&#x2F;Spanish have alphabets that is common to English language.<p>How do they relate to the English language and it’s alphabetical script? They would have to learn English, yes?
======
iraldir
Coming from a french background so I don't have the experienced ask in the
question. But I learned programming quite early on, when I did not speak
english, so here is how I can imagine it works: \- Developer who don't know
english will learn programming word without any context as to what they are in
real life. "string" "array" "forEach" are just like commands that you learn by
heart. It's not so different for an english speaker in some regards as if you
think about it, a "map" or a "string" don't really evock what they are in
programming just from the name.

\- most company that aren't international probably write their code in the
language. In french it would be something like

const carteDuJeu = new Carte();

Because of UTF-8, I believe you can use any character, including Cyrillic etc.

Some languages tried to be translated (looking at you VBA) but that just makes
a mess where you can't find references to what you want because of the much
smaller local community (this might not be as much of a problem in china).

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Interesting. I am getting back to the computer after a long gap(20+ years).
Testing the waters with Python and I find it refreshingly simple and easy. It
seems to be a different flavor somehow..

I was wondering if it felt this way to me because decades ago, I learnt how to
code when I was in school in a non English speaking country and even though my
primary medium of education wasn’t the vernacular, English was still a foreign
language(I ‘thought’ in my own lanaguge inside my head even though I spoke and
studied and wrote in English)

Fast forward 20-25 years, English is now my default language/mode of thinking
and I was wondering how easy programming and coding would be to a non English
speaking school child in Vietnam or Russia or elsewhere in the world with
languages employing a non roman script. I can’t relate.

------
dirktheman
If I remember correctly there was a complete Cyrillic translation of COBOL
back in the Soviet days. Other than that, I think that although it would help,
it's not absolutely necessary to learn English. Learning the Roman script is,
though.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Indeed..but there are many languages don’t use the Roman script..are they at a
disadvantage?

~~~
yorwba
Unicode support for URLs came only late (and the encoding looks ugly), so most
popular websites even in countries with non-Roman scripts still use ASCII.
E.g. Baidu's Chinese address would be 百度.中国 [http://xn--wxtr44c.xn--
fiqs8s/](http://百度.中国/) but they didn't even bother to register it, instead
still using [http://www.baidu.com/](http://www.baidu.com/)

So internet users will be at least somewhat familiar with the alphabet.

