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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of Damian Conway's module to allow people to program in Latin. One Latin expert that he knew had trouble learning because she kept trying to "correct" the grammar. (He'd found a combination of tenses and genders that was never ambiguous - which was a great help to his parser - but was in many cases not what would really be used in Latin.)

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Except that this problem exists in English-based programming languages as well. Attempting to make grammatically correct code that mimics a human language is a futile effort. The next Twitter doesn't care about "is", "was" and "are" in the code.

"Attempting to make grammatically correct code that mimics a human language is a futile effort"

COBOL attempts this (the syntax is even written out in "sentences") and it suffers for it. Even if it wasn't a futile effort, is it worthwhile?

edit This post is not intended to suggest the language in the topic article in not worthwhile..

Yeah futile like applescript - who ever used that. Or hypertalk, or wolfram alpha or even the google search engine - nobody can figure out how to use those. Visual basic was so unpopular because it tried to use more english keywords and less symbols. The best way for people to learn programming is with pure non-alphanumeric symbols, just like people speak on Twitter.

Except Arabic is a living language and has 300 "expert" speakers :-P

Interesting, where do you get that number?

looks like typo. he corrected it.

Well, maybe he meant that very few people are actually really good at formal arabic? I know I suck at it even though I'm Lebanese and it's supposed to be my mother tongue. Arabic speakers tend to have a colloquial form of Arabic that they speak which is a much simplified version of the formal Arabic language.

I would say the closest analogy is Lebanese is to Arabic what French is to Latin. Clearly derived from it, but very different and much simpler.

300 experts is definitely a very low estimate though. Should definitely be higher.

PS: Hi Ramzi, long time no see :)

300 million speakers, rather.

What do you mean by 300 experts?

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