A compiled programming language with Korean keywuords, written in Rust - xodn348/han
I remember our professor at university (Gothenburg, Sweden) was teaching us object oriented programming and her example code had variable names and method names in Swedish because Java could deal with utf8 already beck then in 2008.
We were trying to convince one of the Arabic students to send in his stuff in Arabic, but he was too afraid.
I don’t see why compilers/IDEs couldn’t handle translated keywords the same way we do internationalization everywhere. Have a ‘key’ value that is the actual keyword, and translate it in the IDE only when the user is viewing the file. Otherwise, the key is universal and can be compiled by anything.
I’m actually disappointed it’s not already a thing in new PLs. Open source needs less barriers to entry, not more.
The barrier to entry, or at least to proficiency is access to educational material and community. i.e. currently the necessary skill is to at least understand English. Adding an incredible amount of complexity to understand when something is a keyword or not, depending on the combination between any number of hundreds of natural languages, and worse live-translating keywords without ever messing up functions, variables, and methods is not going to make it better - if it did everyone would using visual programming languages.
Programming languages with different natural language keywords are useful learning tools, but they are basically training wheels on a bike, they need to come out at some point for someone to be good at it.
Excel does it for its formulas. It ends up being just a pain in the ass when you are looking online for info (which means it ends up increasing the barrier of entry, as most stuff online is in English).