>> Good luck learning Scheme or most other programming languages then. > > How much time have you spent teaching non-English speakers programming > languages? I've spent time both as a teacher and a student with > people for whom English was not their first language, and while it's > always disconcerting to me to hear English keywords pronounced > strangely, it certainly doesn't mean that you have to know English to > learn Scheme, or Pascal, or any other programming language.
No, but it makes it hard. And yes, I have spent time with non- English speakers learning how to program. And I did it with some people who spoke no English at all, and for which the keywords of the language had no intrinsic meaning. It was hard for them to remember what to use when, as they were meaningless sequences of characters, and they couldn't even pronounce many of them. Try pronouncing 'while' in Spanish. > > Scheme, in fact, makes it uniquely easy to rename the various > identifiers at its core to be more suggestive in the native language > of the student. I don't know if anyone's tried this, but surely we > should make it easier, not harder, to try. But then they'll have the same problem importing libraries, etc. You can't really avoid it. The French tried with 'French Fortran'. I believe they eventually gave up. It's not that I have an a-priori desire for English 'to win'. English is a particularly hard language to learn. But it 'has won', whether we like it or not. At least until geopolitical conditions change significantly. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
