Re: Perl, children and foreign languages

[tadman]

You could say I'm a strong advocate of internationalization of Anglo-centric programming languages. Earlier, I suggested that learning languages with English words adds an extra level of difficulty, or two if you don't even know the Latin character set. Mirod even posted a French "translator" code which would remap basic commands.

Of course, you can almost hear merlyn telling you how difficult it is to parse Perl properly. Certainly, something more robust should be developed, perhaps even as a module at the parser level, which would simplify implementation somewhat, although at the expense of compatibility, and the cost of re-working several low-level components to allow such flexibility. As such, you could make a patch to the lexer, re-compile, and have a customized "frperl", "deperl", or "jperl".

A lot of people commented that "English is easy to learn", but I'm skeptical. Learning Perl and English at the same time can't be all that easy, and regardless of how "easy" it is to learn English, learning Perl should be easier. Consider trying to learn something like Ruby, but where all the good documentation happened to be in Japanese only.

These "translated" languages are intended to be like training wheels, to be used where required and discarded when no longer necessary. Once you have a good handle on English, it would be fairly trivial to port any old native language code to regular plain-old Perl.