08.21.07
meme: non-Indo-European programming languages
I had a very interesting lunch yesterday with Dan Delorey, who is a PhD student at Brigham Young University and interning at Google Kirkland. While we covered a wide range of topics, there was one meme of his that stuck with me through most of the (four-hour) drive home: Almost all of the programming languages today were developed by men whose native tongues were Indo-European languages. (Obvious exception: Ruby, by Yukihiro Matsumoto.)
What would a language developed by someone with a non-Indo-European background look like?
What would a language developed by someone whose mother “tongue” was sign language?
I was reminded of something I saw ten years ago: a woman commented that if a woman had invented the WIMP interface, there would have been two cursors.
