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A recent meditation asked how to translate a piece of code into English. While the code in question was reasonably well explained in the comments, I feel that the desire behind the question needs to be addressed, in part because it tends to lead to myths about Perl being only suitable for obfuscation.

When we look at natural languages, we can find several instances where things don't translate well. A few examples:

-san, -sama, -dono -- These are Japanese honorifics. '-san' can roughly translate to Mr./Mrs./Miss, but we don't have anything in English that conveys the full meaning of most of the others without at least a few sentences of explanation.
ihr -- A German pronoun that's a plural form of 'you'. "Proper" English doesn't have a direct equivalent, though the vernacular "y'all" is close.
Nearly any romance language and many others -- Many languages have a gender-specific form of "the", and it's used for nouns even when the objects in question have no gender. German uses the male gender for most computer-related nouns. In French, until recently, cats were always noted in the female gender, even when they weren't.

Whenever people learn a new language, the ultimate goal is being able to think in that language. Translating in your head is a crutch for people who have only started learning. That's an important first step, of course, but one can't remain that way.

Likewise, I see no reason to criticize a language because you can't think of a way to translate code into your native language. In the long run, insisting on a direct English translation is likely to inhibit growth.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

In reply to On Translating Code by hardburn

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