In many programming languages, phrases are shortened to reduce the time taken to write programs. “var” instead of “variable”, “int” instead of integer, etc. This makes writing code much faster, but what if this was applied to the whole of the English language?
If programmers were to have the power to change how words are spelt and pronounced, what would change? Is every word shortened to three or four letters? Would leet speak become dominant? How practical would it be, how much more productive would the (English speaking) population be?
As for other languages, I’m not sure how well it would work. A majority of programming languages are based on English, and many other languages have restrictions that make it more difficult to change the spellings like this (e.g. gendered words, alphabet-less character sets). English, on the other hand, is infamous for having more exceptions than there are rules.
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You must not get out much. Since people already do this. Examples: r u, gng, lol, rizz. And more
import charisma as rizz import good_game as ggAnd we’re constantly doing this. If a word is used a lot and the word is long, we’re going to shorten it.
So late 90s early 2000 SMS speak?
Fr tho
The Oxford comma would be mandatory.
And logical punctuation.
selfthinkthis.good_idea = Trueif (self.think(idea) == good) { do(idea) } else { // don't }
#include <grammar>
using namespace std;
int main() {
int programmer;
if (programmer > -1) { cout << "Programmers be owning your language. "; }
cout << “Plonk! Fnord!”;
return 0; }
Why say lot word when few word do trick?
They may have already had a go at German, where common word pairs are collapsed into macros (i.e. “in dem” (“in the”) becomes “im”, “zu der” becomes “zur” and so on).
This is just slang
In many programming languages, phrases are shortened to reduce the time taken to write programs.
I really do not think this is why; the amount of time saved is miniscule, especially with autocomplete. It’s so that more can fit on the screen at one time so you can better comprehend chunks/lines of code. There is also probably a historical aspect where the size of code on disk (or paper!) used to matter more.
Why don’t you come to Australia, but when you do, go to the bottlo and get a slab to bring to the barbie where we’ll have snags with dead horse.
Many languages already have shortened or abbreviated words; but their use isn’t always practical and doesn’t always lend clarity to meaning.
Nothing is stopping programmers from inventing and using new words. Getting people to use those words is another matter. You are hand waving the ability for programmers to dictate to non-programmers how language is used, but I think that hand waving also hand waves the idea of language to begin with. So I don’t think any answer you get will be meaningful.
ii would probably be doubleplusungood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak)
There kind of was some attempts, but more from the point of view to strip down the language as a way to standardize it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English
It isn’t so much a reform on spelling as it is a way to standardize vocabulary to make it as mutually intelligible to non-native speakers
You should read the New Yorker article “Utopian for Beginners” by Joshua Foer. Really interesting with a dark twist.
