My rather simplistic view: as a native Portuguese speaker, I strongly refute the idea of programming languages (and even coding) in a language other than English. Besides the obvious reasons (globalized world, outsourcing, multinational corporations, etc), English is much less expressive than the Romance languages [1], which makes it a better formal language.
Especially because when English is less expressive than a Romance language, we steal those words from the Romance language until we're at least as expressive.
But it`s much easier to create new words in english. Like transform a verb in a noum, or adjective, etc
I`m a native portuguese speaker, and think that romantic languages can be more "emotional" than english. But its amazing how a new idea can be expressed so easilly in English.
I'd contend the opposite, being fluent in German, English and having strong knowledge of Latin.
German and Latin can create new words or ideas much easier than English can. English creates them 'easier' by wholesale importing them. Take the concept of 'karma', there is no word for this in English. In German this word is schicksal. This concept doesn't exist in English at all other than the Hindi import.
English does like to import words wholesale, and I agree that German conjunctions and the fact you can often create new words by combining two different words (my favourite: "scheinheilig"="apparently+holy"=hypocrite) makes it easy to create new words in German (and other Germanic languages).
That said, your example is not a very good one. "Schicksal" can be translated as "fate", "fortune", "destiny" and "lot". Not just "karma".
As someone who is a native English speaker, but close to native level in Portuguese (lived in Brazil for 8 years), I'm curious what you mean by English being less expressive -- I've never heard that before.
Both languages have their expressive poets, authors, etc. It's easier to rhyme in Portuguese (it's almost like cheating, since the verbs all end in the same syllables), it's easier to modify the grammar classes of words in English (turning nouns into verbs and vice-versa), they both have rich vocabulary (although English seems to give more multiple meanings to individual words, and have more synonyms too). But in the end, I'd never call either of them more expressive than the other...
As a matter of fact, I know that English, as a natural language, is much more expressive in the sense that you can communicate many ideas using the same expressions.
Portuguese, for example, is much more expressive in the sense that you can communicate the same idea in many different ways, which may have different meanings.
There is also the contractions issue and the omission of the subject of an expression ("eu estava" == "eu tava" == "tava" == "I was"), which complicates it even more. And all of this is actually valid, depending on the linguist you "follow". ;)
Well, I did not make myself very clear, but this is what I wanted mean when I talked about expressiveness.
PS: I wanted to write something about linguistic relativity too, but I can't remember, lol.
It seems to me like using symbols instead of words makes the most sense. It wouldn't be particularly harder to use for English speakers, and it might actually make code easier to read, since there would be less cognitive load in distinguishing keywords from identifiers.
Yeah, the problems there are that the symbols don't have easy to remember names, and that they can't be typed in a normal environment. Multi-character ascii symbols would be a lot more accessible.
Agreed. I'm also a native portuguese speaker. Another point is that you get used to English, and begins to "think" in it. Guess that, besides the whole globalized world thing, i would find very confuse a portuguese programming language.
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages