When I started writing this blog I figured I’d need to install a spellchecker. According to wikipedia I’m a native English speaker but unfortunately I’ve yet to acquire the ability to write a single article without errors. I installed the English spellchecker for my editor of choice namely visual studio code and for a reason unbeknownst to me the Esperanto variant has 233 downloads. There’s a rough estimate of two million Esperanto speakers of which 233 felt the need like myself to install a spellchecker in visual studio code. The extension has no reviews either. I’d really like to get into contact with these 233 people and start a study about the purpose of installing an Esperanto spellchecker. Maybe Stack Overflow could include favorite “human” language in their yearly survey and ask a few questions to people who identify themselves as Esperanto speakers.
Since I don’t live anywhere near an Esperanto speaking community I found a reddit post about the kinds of people who feel attracted to acquire Esperanto. Funny enough it seems that computer programmers are more inclined to do so. There’s also an UML aficionado that calls UML the Esperanto for computer programmers. I made an effort to find some usages of Esperanto in the tech space. I’ve yet to find documentation for a programming language written in Esperanto but if you find one feel free to leave a comment.
Esperanto used in tech
- Programming in Esperanto is challenging
- Mozilla localization guide
- A proposal to use Esperanto as the default language in the Crystal programming language
- A few projects that were named using Esperanto.
Interestingly enough the translation service deepl.com doesn’t include Esperanto while google translate does. If you’re using postcss then you won’t have the ability to write css in Esperanto while css keywords are translated in many other languages.
And to top it all off there’s only a single repository on github that uses Esperanto which has 629 forks for no apparent reason because the README only states “HelperScript”. Which I don’t find particularly helpful at all.
Update: I took it upon myself to write a PostCSS plugin for Esperanto. Help would be much appreciated