A nice podcast episode with Jim Rutt inverviewing @Sam Arbesman on his new book "The Magic of Code" (which is now on my reading list). A good reminder (for those who need it, perhaps not so much people here) that computing is not just utilitarian. Since Sam is around here, some short feedback: 1. It's weird to hear both of you dismissing APL as a mess not even worth learning, and then discussing computing as a tool for thought a few minutes later. The link between the topic should be obvious from just the title of Ken Iverson's Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a tool of thoughtnull", which I definitely recommend everybody to read. APL was designed as a mathematical notation for algorithmic problems, and only later turned into an executable notation at IBM. It is certainly not, and was never meant to be, a language for writing large software systems. But for its intended problem domain, it still is a good choice. 2. Programming languages not based on English are indeed rare, but there are a few interesting examples beyond just translating keywords. 文言 (wenyan) is based on classical Chinese that tries to incorporate even its grammar. Perligata similarly takes inspiration from Latin grammar to build a Perl-like language on something pretty close to Latin (though not being "good" Latin, neither in vocabulary nor grammar). For those who read French, the slides of a presentation by Baptiste Mélès say something about both these projects (I think the presentation was recorded, but I can't find it anywhere). Hedy by @Felienne and coworkers is a very different take on this topic: a language meant to make programming accessible to people from various cultural backgrounds.

Thanks for the kind words and for this feedback. That piece by Iverson is fantastic and I had forgotten it was all about APL! I'll stop crapping on APL in the future! And good pointers re programming languages not based on English; this is wonderful! Thanks.