this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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No Stupid Questions

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19
What if programmers rewrote the English language? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 5 days ago by sbeak@sopuli.xyz to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In many programming languages, phrases are shortened to reduce the time taken to write programs. "var" instead of "variable", "int" instead of integer, etc. This makes writing code much faster, but what if this was applied to the whole of the English language?

If programmers were to have the power to change how words are spelt and pronounced, what would change? Is every word shortened to three or four letters? Would leet speak become dominant? How practical would it be, how much more productive would the (English speaking) population be?

As for other languages, I'm not sure how well it would work. A majority of programming languages are based on English, and many other languages have restrictions that make it more difficult to change the spellings like this (e.g. gendered words, alphabet-less character sets). English, on the other hand, is infamous for having more exceptions than there are rules.

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[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 38 points 5 days ago (3 children)

There already are plenty of conlangs (constructed languages). The main thing that differentiates them from natural languages is the fact that their grammar generally doesn't have any exceptions (irregular verbs or nouns). It would be possible to create such a language based on the grammar and vocabulary of English.

The only conlang I'm proficient in is Esperanto, which definitely works very well for practical communication. One cool feature about Esperanto is the system of prefixes and suffixes that acts as a vocabulary shortcut, for example the word for "cold" is just "un-warm" (varma / malvarma), or the word for "school" is just "learning-place" (lerni / lernejo). The language you're imagining would likely also consist of words like "unwarm" and "learnery".

Meanwhile I don't think the length of (root) words needs to be especially short. Studies have found that all languages transmit information at approximately the same rate, which is why Spanish with its relatively long words seems to be spoken so fast. Human brain capacity is a limiting factor for things like that.

[–] henfredemars@lemdro.id 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I came here looking for Esperanto and was not disappointed.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 5 days ago

I ~~use Arch~~ speak Esperanto btw

[–] Godort@lemmy.ca 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Studies have found that all languages transmit information at approximately the same rate

Is this only true in speech? Japanese as an example is much more dense in text than English and can convey more information in fewer written characters.

But, those characters take longer to write and often have multisyllabic pronunciation, so speech would be unaffected.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 5 days ago

Yes, of course I'm talking about spoken language. Of course if English were written in kanji we would need fewer characters to express the same information, but it wouldn't change the spoken language at all.

(I remember learning the following graphical user interface design rule: switch your application to Spanish or Portuguese to check whether UI messages still fit in the boxes you've put them in. Spanish and Portuguese are the common languages that need the most characters per unit of information.)

[–] speculate7383@lemmy.today 1 points 5 days ago

This recently came up for LLM coding tools:

https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 2 points 5 days ago

Toki Pona specifically makes me think of overly verbose programming languages. With limited ~120 word vocabulary, describing things can be lengthy. Orange pet cat would be something like "good animal of house and of red yellow".

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

Why say lot word when few word do trick?

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The Oxford comma would be mandatory.

[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 3 points 5 days ago

And logical punctuation.

[–] SolidShake@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

You must not get out much. Since people already do this. Examples: r u, gng, lol, rizz. And more

https://www.bark.us/blog/teen-text-speak-codes-every-parent-should-know/?srsltid=AfmBOoqjrTKXEaUsdItGeixyUiInVg1G3VoFZ2n7zD0Q8CN7n915Mzws

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Does this need to be a share.google tracking link?

[–] SolidShake@lemmy.world -4 points 5 days ago

I guess? Idk why it matters it goes to the same page.

[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 days ago

And we're constantly doing this. If a word is used a lot and the word is long, we're going to shorten it.

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

So late 90s early 2000 SMS speak?

[–] 0ops@piefed.zip 0 points 5 days ago 
import charisma as rizz
import good_game as gg
[–] AstroLightz@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

self think this.good_idea = True

[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) 
if (self.think(idea) == good)
{
    do(idea)
} else {
    // don't
}
[–] RegularJoe@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

#include

using namespace std;

int main() {

int programmer;

if (programmer > -1) { cout << "Programmers be owning your language. "; }

cout << "Plonk! Fnord!";

return 0; }

[–] Einskjaldi@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago

This is just slang

[–] CannedYeet@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

They may have already had a go at German, where common word pairs are collapsed into macros (i.e. “in dem” (“in the”) becomes “im”, “zu der” becomes “zur” and so on).

[–] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Same in English...

Can't, won't, you'dn't've, and if we get into dialects then you get things like owt (anything), nowt (nothing), ont (on the) and int (in the).

[–] farmgineer@nord.pub 3 points 5 days ago

words are spelt

Words are not fish! /s

Spellings can help people understand a word they don't know in some cases. This is especially true for Latin and Greek words in the language.

and pronounced

OK, whose pronunciation will it be? India probably turns out the most programmers who speak English these days, so enjoy your new spellings and entire new sounds and distinctions that don't exist in your variety of English if it's not that one already

--

Efficiency is also not always the goal, nor should it be. I also know a lot of software engineers whose ideas I wouldn't trust running my kitchen let alone my language. You would, as other posters point out, probably be interested in conlangs.

[–] _deleted_@aussie.zone 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Why don’t you come to Australia, but when you do, go to the bottlo and get a slab to bring to the barbie where we’ll have snags with dead horse.

Many languages already have shortened or abbreviated words; but their use isn’t always practical and doesn’t always lend clarity to meaning.

[–] farmgineer@nord.pub 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Is that an arvo-only activity, or is anytime OK?

Arvo is the one that took me the longest to figure out when first hearing it.

[–] _deleted_@aussie.zone 2 points 5 days ago

I think drinking brewskis in the morning would make you a derro.

[–] loppy@fedia.io 3 points 5 days ago

In many programming languages, phrases are shortened to reduce the time taken to write programs.

I really do not think this is why; the amount of time saved is miniscule, especially with autocomplete. It's so that more can fit on the screen at one time so you can better comprehend chunks/lines of code. There is also probably a historical aspect where the size of code on disk (or paper!) used to matter more.

[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 days ago

Nothing is stopping programmers from inventing and using new words. Getting people to use those words is another matter. You are hand waving the ability for programmers to dictate to non-programmers how language is used, but I think that hand waving also hand waves the idea of language to begin with. So I don't think any answer you get will be meaningful.

[–] bravesirrbn@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

ii would probably be doubleplusungood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak)

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 points 5 days ago

There kind of was some attempts, but more from the point of view to strip down the language as a way to standardize it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English

It isn't so much a reform on spelling as it is a way to standardize vocabulary to make it as mutually intelligible to non-native speakers

[–] makyo@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

You should read the New Yorker article “Utopian for Beginners” by Joshua Foer. Really interesting with a dark twist.