I speak Spanish and I think it's not as logical as English. It seems Spanish can express more passion but it falls short when it needs to be succinct and to the point. For example "if" is translated to "si", which is the exact word as "yes" (except without the accent mark, which itself another issue). "Or" is just "o", and so on where logical conjunctions aren't unique. That said, I think it could be a good start for Spanish speakers that haven't yet learned English.
I wonder what could be the best human language to use for a programming language, including any ancient language. Maybe Sanskrit or something even more logical than English?
> I wonder what could be the best human language to use for a programming language, including any ancient language. Maybe Sanskrit or something even more logical than English?
I don't know which language would be good in terms of conciseness and preciseness... But would probably need to be a language easily expressible with the ASCII character set.
> The logic of most prominent programming languages, such as Python, is based on English vocabulary and syntax — using terms like “while” or “if not” to trigger certain actions — which makes it that much more difficult to learn for non-native speakers. Furthermore, many of the most popular educational resources for learning to code, including Stack Exchange, are also in English.
It seems to me that the latter is a much bigger problem for Spanish. Programming languages have relatively few keywords. I imagine English keywords might be a big problem for people who doesn't know the latin alphabet though.
“If not” (i.e. else) translates to “si no”. Imagine finding that in a line of code… You need a tilde “‘“ to say “yes” (sí) but… are you really going to introduce keywords with accented chars?
"si no", is a clear spanish construction. Everybody understands its meaning and it does not need a tilde.
You could use "otro" (=another, =different) also, that is even shorter, has the advantage of being a single word instead two, and is used routinely in dichotomic keys.
There are actually several programming languages based on languages other than English, although I don't think any of them have ever been used for serious projects:
I wonder what could be the best human language to use for a programming language, including any ancient language. Maybe Sanskrit or something even more logical than English?