this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Programmer Humor
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Unironically awesome. You can debate if it hurts the ability to contribute to a project, but folks should be allowed to express themselves in the language they choose & not be forced into ASCII or English. Where I live, English & Romantic languages are not the norm & there are few programmers since English is seen as a perquisite which is a massive loss for accessibility.
The hotter take: languages like APL, BQN, & Uiua had it right building on symbols (like we did in math class) for abstract ideas & operations inside the language, where you can choose to name the variables whatever makes sense to you & your audience.
Isn't unicode support for programming not something new? I've seen a lot of code using Cyrillic or Chinese characters.
Inside of strings or comments or as an encoding is close to universal now, but for wide support for operators & variable names I would generally it isn’t. Some languages straight up do not support non ASCII like OCaml, others only support bicameral scripts like PureScript, but others like JavaScript can support Unicode for variable names but doesn’t support defining infix operators or uses Unicode for any existing operators. Raku is probably the most Unicode-friendly language, & some of the mathier ones like Agda as well.