Re:Fun with Unicode in Swift
by hyperpape on Saturday December 15, 2018 @10:40AM
(#18688729)
This is a false dichotomy.
English will continue to be the lingua franca of programming for the foreseeable future, and full professional competence will probably require being able to read APIs that are in English.
However, for the sake of learners everywhere, it is important that it be possible to program using non-ascii identifiers. Asking a 10 year old who doesn't speak English to learn what "while" means is quite different from requiring their variables to be in a language they don't understand.
English will continue to be the lingua franca of programming for the foreseeable future, and full professional competence will probably require being able to read APIs that are in English.
However, for the sake of learners everywhere, it is important that it be possible to program using non-ascii identifiers. Asking a 10 year old who doesn't speak English to learn what "while" means is quite different from requiring their variables to be in a language they don't understand.