Lingua Franca: How Our Mother Tongue Changes Our Code

In the quest for maintainability, we've tried to make code as readable as possible. But our notion of readability is strongly tied to the languages we learn from birth. I'll walk through an example of a library that made a technical compromise for the sake of making code look like English, and how other natural languages may never have pushed this compromise.

Given at Over The Air 2013 (Ignite Bletchley Park)

Transcript

1. @ChrisSinjo
   

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2. Ruby
   

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3. Readability
   

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4. Monkey-Patch
   To open up someone else’s class and generally mess
   around with it
   

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5. Monkey-Patch
   To open up someone else’s class and generally mess
   around with it
   

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6. These are not the language
   features you’re looking for
   

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7. Rails Date/Time
   

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8. 1.day.ago
   

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9. Spanish
   Lessons
   

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10. hace(1).dia
    

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11. Word order is
    arbitrary
    

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12. Subject Verb Object
    (English, Spanish and Object Oriented Languages)
    cat.play_with(string)
    

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13. Verb Subject Object
    (Irish, Welsh, and Functional Languages)
    play_with(cat, string)
    

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14. Compromise
    

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15. Pretending the
    computer
    speaks English
    

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16. The right
    choice?
    

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17. Days.ago(1)
    

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18. (1)day.ago
    

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19. I still like Ruby
    

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20. Different
    approaches
    

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