Comment by graemep
10 hours ago
> as might be the case with programmers from Asian countries or others where familiarity with English is not guaranteed
Lots of Asian countries where familiarity with English is assumed in professional contexts.
> So if your primary gateway to programming languages are ones that slightly resemble a human language you are familiar with you may have lots of psychological blocks keeping you from making that final jump to reasoning in J, or APL, or even a DSL like regular expressions.
That raises the interesting possibility that J or APL might be more appealing to non-English speaking countries, or maybe where the dominant languages are not Indo-European (so not similar to English either). I wonder whether there is any evidence of this?
I doubt there has been studies on it, but I figure if you are already learning an alphabet and expression in that alphabet that are nonsensical to you to be able to program, then J or APL syntax should be definition not increase difficulty.
It might show up if there are national or even regional numbers for popular languages.
the might at beginning of the clause was also meant to take into account that people might have familiarity with English, as I could not be certain, but probably should have been expressed better.
I should really have worded my comment differently too. You need to filter out those Asian countries.
Thinking about it, I think one thing that might stop that is that most people will start with English like languages first even if they are not English speaking and by the time they learn things like APL they will already be familiar with the more common style of languages.
probably, so harder to check, but if the "english-like" languages are still just gibberish to them that does things they might still be able to learn what to English speaking peoples looks like gibberish that does things easier.