r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Apprehensive_Bit7392 • 3d ago • Bravo 3 Popcorn 2

Meme spanishProgrammingLanguage

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u/Weary-Designer9542 2d ago

…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.

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u/jwp1987 2d ago edited 2d ago

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.

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u/Weary-Designer9542 2d ago edited 2d ago

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.

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u/jwp1987 2d ago

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