Invitation to Ezhil: A Tamil Programming Language for Early Computer-Science Education

Abstract

Ezhil is a Tamil programming language with support for imperative programming, with mixed use of Tamil and English identifiers and function-names. Ezhil programing system is targeted toward the K-12 (junior high-school) level Tamil speaking students, as an early introduction to thinking like a computer-scientist. We believe this 'numeracy' knowledge is easily transferred over from a native language (Tamil) to the pervasive English language programming systems, in Java, dot-Net, Ruby or Python. Ezhil is an effort to improve access to computing in the 21st Century.