Teaching kids to program in their native language

As someone who's not an English native speaker I feel localized programming languages are sort of missing the point. The syntax of a language usually isn't really the main roadblock in learning a language and while it might help that you have some documentation in your native language, you're essentially cut off from the rest of the world's documentation on the topic. And considering that you should have a workable grasp of the English language by middle school I wouldn't say that it's much of a roadblock when learning to program.

Many musical terms, e.g. “a capella”, “tempo” and others are Italian. I am curious about the potential impact on increasing diversity among musicians, especially when we consider the number of people globally who do not have access to a (good) Italian education that is an implicit prerequisite for learning to play a musical instrument.

I would expect kids to have the least amount of trouble with foreign words.<p>And anyway, learning English is in demand world-wide.<p>If some parents already want their kids to learn English, you&#x27;re hardly going to sell them on the idea that, oh, your kids now have a way to learn programming without English words.

Reminds me of an article about the Scratch programming language, where the author noted that being based around visual drag-and-drop blocks instead of text strings meant it was trivial to translate <i>any</i> Scratch program on the fly:<p>&gt; <i>Scratch, albeit visual, is still a language built around sentence fragments. Instead of using punctuation and assorted ascii art to enchant text into code, the structure and action of a Scratch program is almost as clear as prose. By using natural language fragments instead of magic identifiers in text, Scratch is unique in another aspect — Internationalization — Scratch programs can be built up out of German, French, Chinese, Japanese fragments too.</i><p>&gt; <i>The look on peoples faces when you change scratch into their native language is worth treasuring, an aha moment where the code becomes readable in an instant. Scratch is so readable that it has come as a surprise to some, one remarking “I understand this. It can’t be programming”.</i><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;programmingisterrible.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;76953953784&#x2F;programming-with-building-blocks" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;programmingisterrible.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;76953953784&#x2F;programmin...</a>

This reminds me of an article from the late 80’s: It was about someone having created a new home computer specially made to be easy for kids to use (actually a modified Compis painted in bright colours, if I recall correctly). The computer had the keys on the keyboard <i>in alphabetical order</i>, “<i>so the kids could more easily find the letters</i>”.<p>These kind of things might seem good in the short term, but it does the kids absolutely no good for dealing with the real world.

Localizing Logo has a long and storied history. Papert founded LCSI in Montreal, and LogoWriter, their implementation, was localized in French (keywords and all, but there are very few keywords) and used in Quebec schools. It was also localized in at least Spanish and Russian. Their current product, Microworlds, is available in English, Spanish, Russian and Italian (but not French).<p>I took a programming class in 11th grade in Quebec, with the old DOS version of Logowriter, running on 286s with no hard drives, in 1996-1997. It was pretty creaky, but you could make fun games with it with some effort.

While Perl 6 was designed with English method and object names, it&#x27;s a fully-Unicode-enabled language, with the ability for identifiers and even operators to be defined in any language one may desire. The name of the (currently) primary implementation is a Japanese word, &quot;Rakudo&quot;, which is also a pun in Japanese depending on how you say and&#x2F;or interpret it. Larry specifically wants Perl 6 to noy be limited by English as much as is practical (or even impractical, if you know him you&#x27;ll understand - to him, code is just as much poetry and art as it is engineering!)

As someone who believes in localization, especially in every Indian script (if not the language), I love this initiative and would like to see it succeed.<p>Many people who have been exposed to many languages, but only one script through out their lives, may not appreciate the significance of such localization.<p>Its easy to onboard and educated person in his&#x2F;her language &amp; script. Infact, just doing it in devanagari script (used in Sanskrit and Hindi) can help many native Indian langauge speakers get on the programing bandwagon.

Being that &#x27;geek&#x27; kid taught myself everything through all those sleepless nights and fried boards, and the only outlier branded himself as &#x27;programmer&#x27; my whole family social circle ever know of, I do not have plan on teaching my son any programming language. The last thing I want is taking away the fun he discovering his talent. If he shows a great interests in what i am doing everyday, I will just show him how to write in the programming language I am using for work.<p>as you probably guessed, i&#x27;m not a native-english speaker as well :)

I love this! I started working on a toy language as an exercise, and since I&#x27;m also trying to learn Icelandic, I thought, why not make my programming language Icelandic? Places like Iceland aside (they speak better English than <i>we</i> do), I&#x27;ve often wondered if the Anglocentrism of programming is a barrier to learning in other parts of the world. Maybe not the highest barrier, but an obstacle nonetheless.

I&#x27;ve recently seen some news about research trying to teach people programming. People learning language with randomly named keywords fared no worse than with English keywords (at least C-like).<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;neverworkintheory.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;29&#x2F;stefik-siebert-syntax.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;neverworkintheory.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;29&#x2F;stefik-siebert-synta...</a>

&quot; a library for processing for the THAMIL language &quot; ?<p>I know of it as Tamil.

I like the effort, but I&#x27;m wondering if so many parenthesis are &quot;manageable&quot; by a kid.<p>I have no kids, but I think that at younger age it&#x27;s harder to be precise vs understand a concept. Think coloring within the borders vs understanding to color in or out a shape.<p>Based on this assumption, I think a simpler language would be something that allows being imprecise (e.g. case insensitive, very limited punctuation).<p>I&#x27;m not saying precision shouldn&#x27;t be taught. Imprecision should be allowed, pointed out and expected to be corrected. But allowed in the first place. It&#x27;s like saying, first color and enjoy the result. Then learn to stay within the borders and the result will be even more pleasant.

Basic256 is awesome (previously KidBasic).<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.basic256.org&#x2F;index_en" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.basic256.org&#x2F;index_en</a><p>You can have quick impressive vocal &quot;Hello, world!&quot; with its speech synthesis:<p><pre><code> say &quot;Hello, World!&quot; </code></pre> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.basic256.org&#x2F;doku.php?id=en:say" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.basic256.org&#x2F;doku.php?id=en:say</a>

I&#x27;m relieved that this isn&#x27;t a new, multilingual AppleScript. Using macros to setup native aliases for syntax words seems reasonable, especially if it means you don&#x27;t have to change input methods all the time. Although if you&#x27;re going to use libraries, those names are likely going to have to type those names in English (or wrap them in native aliases too)

This should be easy, since I&#x27;ve brought up my child to sprak and write exclusively in Racket Scheme.

Perhaps this could serve as a helpful middle-man and offer a compromise to those who feel strongly either way.

jslogo has support for translation of keywords (and at least some actual translations, though I don&#x27;t know how to activate them): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;inexorabletash&#x2F;jslogo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;inexorabletash&#x2F;jslogo</a>