Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming languages

On 6/6/2012 6:40 PM, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
>> The ASCII character set has been a limiting factor for programming
>> language design for decades. Here I'm talking about the interface that
>> faces the programmer, not "language features" that enable buzzword
>> compliant programming.


The biggest problem with going outside of ASCII is that keyboard support
stops being universal, with the lesser issue of character set
proliferation. The standard alphanumeric ASCII characters (and most of
the standard punctuation characters, though some get hard to type IIRC)
are on pretty much every keyboard attached to a modernish computer.


Beyond that, you have issues: people in the US typically don't have easy
access to even basic accented Latin characters like [e with an accent,
which the moderation software smashed -John] (Which, on this
keyboard, required an Alt+numpad combo, necessitating both memorizing
the Unicode value and enabling/disabling the numpad)


Korean keyboards would let you type Hangul more easily, but accented
characters are as, if not more, difficult to type for them. And good
luck if you decide that some keyword needs, say, Ancient Egyptian
Hieroglyphics to be typed in. Sure, you can make the editor do things
for you (this is what happens for APL IIRC), but to most programmers,
it just seems like you're making their lives hard for no reason.


>> Another limiting factor, not readily apparent to North Americans: the
>> English language. Most, if not all, programming languages applied world
>> wide are based on English, with keywords in English.
>
> I have wondered about this for many years. I have asked people whose
> native language isn't English, but it doesn't seem to bother them
> at all. Of course if I ask them, it is likely that they speak enough
> English not to see much of a problem.


I once recall reading an open source program produced by a Portuguese
university. All local variable names were in Portuguese. Most of the
class and method names were in English.


--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

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