[Sanddancer]

Not only that, they are incorrect constants. The definition for :cet, for example, is only correct for non-leap centuries. 2000-2099 has an extra day compared to 1900-1999, or its partner :qad, which has the opposite problem and assumes any 4-year span has a leap year.

Of course, the language has other problems too, like 'moar' being used as a serious part of the language's grammar, or worse, more nebulous verbs like 'snag', which makes the language even more difficult to understand for non-native english speakers. It's just an utter mess.

[cronjobber]

> difficult to understand for non-native english speakers

Au contraire! They managed to almost eliminate any advantage that programmers who speak english usually enjoy.

[wolfgke]

> Au contraire! They managed to almost eliminate any advantage that programmers who speak english usually enjoy.

What are those advantages?

When I was young and my English was really bad, I simply learned the keywords just as mathematical terms (i.e. if, else, for, while, break, next, goto, gosub, signed, class etc.) - I mean, they aren't that many (say 40 and you've covered most mainstream programming languages that aren't really verbose (OK, COBOL is an exception, but who uses COBOL ;-) ). This really isn't much harder than learning mathematical terms as sin, log, cos, exp, cot, asec etc. even if you know no word of English.

What really makes programming hard when you are not sufficiently fluent in English is that lots of documentation is only available in English (this was the main problem I had). And I don't see how Urbit is going to change that.

[chris_st]

> documentation is only available in English

As a native english speaker, I'd like to politely disagree with this phrase! (and that was the GP's joke... since they're using so many made-up terms, it effectively isn't english).

[taneq]

Maybe their clean slate extends to calendars and other time measurement? :P