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This works for builtins maybe, but the majority of the words you use in a language tend to be either from libraries or your own functions, so multi-lingual languages would then put the burden of translation on to every single person to write code in that language.

So despite any potential advantages, it'd certainly never have good libraries.



And not just the libraries --- the documentation and the forums filled with people asking questions. But maybe Chinese will have the critical mass to overcome this problem. Not good enough for corporate usage, but maybe sufficient for teenagers who care about computers and not talking to foreigners, so want to start out hacking without having to learn English at the same time.

(Also I guess it's just sheer dumb luck that Chinese word order and English order are roughly similar enough that something like ZhPy or astine's IDE idea above is basically just an exercise in keyword substitution. Doing that kind of translation in head-final languages like Tamil or Japanese would just result in even more mind-bending than leaving it in English --- e.g. in those languages the equivalent of "from/to" refers to the preceding word, not the following one, e.g. "morning from night to").


Well, keyword substitution doesn't imply a change in syntax, though it's about as asinine I have to believe.




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