Gregory's Serverthis thought first came to me after I had a brief discussion with a colleague who's from a Polynesian island and has ties to communities with their own less common languages. We talked about autonomy and how some of these communities want to learn to program computers and develop technology by themselves, for themselves.
The first question I thought to myself was "do they know English?". To me, that's the reality of mainstream programming languages and the ecosystem, which is unfortunate.
@andrew_chou i wonder about writing guides, using the local language, to program assembly as a first experience in this type of situation?
the short names are hardly more significant at a first glance than random symbols, which means they can be assigned significance without accruing additional linguistic knowledge.
and the skills and intimate computer knowledge one picks up there are useful for all downstream contexts. kinda esoteric but maybe under-explored?