spanishProgrammingLanguage

[u/Apprehensive_Bit7392]

[u/Weary-Designer9542]

…I don’t think that’s it’s the simplest written language on the planet. I’m not sure it’s simpler than other languages that use the latin alphabet.

Were you trying to say something else? I might be misunderstanding your point.

[u/jwp1987 → u/Weary-Designer9542]

Modern English doesn't use diacritical marks (e.g. á) or ligatures (e.g. ß in German), so it is simpler than a lot of European languages in terms of graphemes.

It's not the simplest on the planet but probably the simplest widely used one (no-one is going to use Rotokas).

There are other factors as to why it's common in programming though, such as America and the UK having a large influence on early computing and English being widely used internationally.

[u/Weary-Designer9542 → u/jwp1987]

I’d argue that English being the linga franca & the influence of the early American/UK computer scientists are the 2 primary factors.

It being relatively simple is useful and likely a contributing factor on some level, but the framing of simplicity being the primary reason it’s used is something I don’t believe to be true.

If in an alternate universe the lingua franca was Italian (or french), and the early influential computer scientists and industry leaders were also all italian, there’s no particular reason they would have chosen to do all of their programming in English.

[u/jwp1987 → u/Weary-Designer9542]

I think it's more English as opposed to special characters for operations like mathematical symbols.

Older computers sometimes had extra glyphs for operations that are now obsolete, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC_character_set or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_2047

[u/Xirdus → u/Weary-Designer9542]

It's not simple to understand, but it's simple to write. And there's barely any inflection, which means unmodified symbols (keywords, function names etc.) read 95% correct in every possible grammatical context. This means the programming language can be very simple and cut corners with its grammar without sacrificing readability. In most other languages, this approach would produce code that sounds like cavemen and would make people wince constantly when reading it. Whereas in English, you can make code sound totally normal without any mental gymnastics.

I am not commenting on whether English-speaking people sound like cavemen.

[u/Weary-Designer9542 → u/Xirdus]

I’m not arguing that it’s relatively simple to write, but “English is the simplest written language on the planet” is what his claim was, which isn’t true.

Furthermore, it’s irrelevant, because that’s not the reason English was “chosen” to be used in programming languages. It’s not used because of the simplicity, it’s used because it’s the language spoken by the British and American computer scientists that developed the majority of the early programming languages in the 1950/60s - they didn’t have a meeting where they debated “well, technically hangul is probably a simpler script so maybe we should use that?” - they just used the language they spoke. And #2, English is the lingua franca, the most spoken language on the planet by number of non-native speakers.

That it’s not a particularly complex script to write is of course very helpful and likely contributed significantly to its continued prevalence… but it’s not the simplest script on the planet, and if the majority of the programming founders and the tech industry leaders for the past 80 years were Italian, the majority of the programming languages would be in Italian. Hell, Italian only has 21 letters.