[smashface]

I like the idea of this project. Its main goal is to highlight the bias towards English in programming languages and computer science and I think that's a great goal. I also think another great use would be to provide a stepping stone to those who are native Arabic speakers to get into programming. There will still be the English barrier to move on to other languages (and likely more professional or "serious" work) but if you can convince people that programming is interesting in the first place, this could encourage them to keep going further. As it stands now, if you don't speak English you would need to a certain amount of English AND programming languages. Languages like this means you just get to learn programming first while we figure out how to remove English as a barrier to entry.

[rfhjt]

There is even a coined story about languages: Babylon. People there made great progress building things together while they spoke the same language, but everything fell apart when they started speaking different languages. Countries create their own languages and cultures sometimes artificially, to silo its citizens: when you've been taught since childhood to speak some odd language, it's hard to jump the ship later, so you have to restrict yourself to this little playground or make an immense effort and learn the international language. Luckily, such language still exist, although we take that as given. Software today is that Babylon from the story: everyone speaks the same language, everyone can can join and contribute with minimal efforts. No taxes, fees, licenses and permissions needed to join. As software rapidly gets bigger, people that have power start realising that this kind of freedom is unheard of. They are used to the world of borders where they take a toll for a permission to cross. So they pull the trick as old as humanity: introduce artificial fragmentation of languages and cultures and make people in their country use a language they control. And the more obscure and counterintuitive this language is , the harder it is for people to cross the barrier and the more profits they gain. If I were an evil and powerful dictator of a big chunk of the world, I'd force everyone there to switch to an artificial and very complex language, make it the only allowed language in the country, and do the same with software. From now on all these people would naturally have to live in this little artificial playground.