JavaScript For the Rest of Us

First time accepted submitter my2iu writes "The JavaScript programming language is both widely available and very powerful. Unfortunately, since only 6% of the world's population are native English speakers, the other 94% of the world are forced to learn English before they can start using JavaScript. Babylscript is an open source project that aims to translate JavaScript to all the world's languages, including French, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. The project has recently completed its 12th translation, enough so that the native languages of over 50% of the world's population are now supported!"

sounds like a bad idea

[OleMoudi]

Considering current situation with XSS prevalence, javascript obfuscation techniques and content filters bypassing, this will only make matters worse

Re:Forced to learn English to learn Javascript?!

[dargaud]

Exactly. I learned programming in France, at a time when there were some (rather bad) national programming languages like LSE where the words seemed too grounded and loaded with double meanings. Also there were several translated versions of Basic. Some commands were much longer to type, some others didn't translate directly and the equivalent was unintuitive at best, and finally you couldn't type listings found in programming magazines.

Re:Misguided

[phayes]

Perl hard to read? I beg to differ!
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=963133 [perlmonks.org]

Re:And this is different...???

[jginspace]

And doesn't writing javascript in, say, Arabic, just make it inaccessible to 99% of the people who like look at your code?

Yeah - it'll be interesting to find out what the LibreJS people think about it: https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/ [gnu.org]

Re:And this is different...???

[marcello_dl]

IIRC applescript had localized versions. There wasn't a problem in reading foreign scripts because keywords were translated (at one point keyword must be recognizable to the interpreter, that makes it relatively easy to translate them.

It is still not a good idea, of course. You need to copypaste a script from a blog and have it translated by the interpreter before understanding it.

And as a foreigner I can attest that the translation of keywords is a non-existent problem. Either you know the syntax of the whole command (parentheses, colons, semicolons, tabs, whatever) or you look it up. Once you have memorized it, could be english, your tongue, or LOLCODE, doesn't matter.

I'd possibly endorse localized versions of Logo and Smalltalk for basic teaching to kids. Everything else is overkill.

Re:VBA?

[savuporo]

>>If you're educated, anywhere, you speak english
You should go visit Japan and Korea. EVERYTHING technical is done in local languages. Good english speakers are actually very hard to find even in top technical teams.
I suspect the same is the case in mainland china, although i have no first hand experience ( in Taiwan and Hong Kong english is everywhere )

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

Even here in Iceland where everyone is quite fluent in English (much moreso than in Japan), technical terms still are often handled in Icelandic. Aka, if you read the news about the Higgs announcement, it's not the "Higgs Boson", but "Higgs Bóseindin". It's not "centripetal force", but "miðflóttaafl". It's not "electromagnetic radiation", but "rafsegulbylgjir". Yeah, people sometimes use the English terms too (even for common words, some English words have become pretty much embedded in the language unfortunately), but in general, Iceland strives to avoid that. Even words for new products - computer is "tölva (number-prophet), phone is sími (old word for "line"), etc. The other Nordic languages don't do this sort of thing nearly as much.