Douglas Heaven, reporter
(Image: Ramsey Nasser)
Maybe you think all programming languages look equally alien. But look again and it'll quickly become clear that most code actually has a lot in common with English.
Here's a program written in Java, one of the most widely used languages in the world today:
public class Hello {
public static void main (String[] args) {
??????? System.out.println ("Hello World!");
???????}
}
Even if you don't understand what the words mean in the context of the program, you'll certainly recognise most of them. Apart from the quoted "Hello World!" and the names "Hello" and "args" (short for "arguments") - which are chosen by the programmer and could just as well have been "Bonjour" and "abc" - everything above is a term of the Java language. And Java, like most programming languages, is based on English.
Does that make programming harder to learn for non-English speakers? Or, indeed, for those whose language does not even use the Roman alphabet? Many people have thought so and developed programming languages that better suit their native tongue. Ramsey Nasser, a software engineer and designer at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York, is the latest.
Nasser has created ??? (pronounced "alb," meaning "heart"), a programming language based on Arabic script, which he hopes will attract new programmers from the Arab world. In essence it is a translation of an existing programming language called Scheme.
Alb is not the first Arabic language - that was?Arablan in 1995 - and similar projects have been set up in China. Some suggest that teaching children to program in their first language might help them learn more quickly. But to make their mark on the rest of the world they would have to switch to a mainstream - English-based - language before long.
Dave Reed at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, who studies computer science education, notes that research has shown that being able to understand variable names - even though they are really just mathematical symbols - helps people understand how a program works. He has tested the idea himself on classes of beginner programmers by showing them code with variables - like "args" above - in German.
"Not surprisingly, it was much harder for them to understand the behaviour of code when the variable names provided no context," he says. "I would guess that this same phenomena would apply to keywords of a language for beginning programmers."
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