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Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

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Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#11

Post by xodn348 »

bbrodriguez wrote: post #9
raaspazasu wrote: post #3

I don't know Korean at all, but this looks cool and a fun project. I'm curious if this reduces typing or has any benefits being in Hangul vs Latin?

Korean doesn’t reduce typing compared to English from my experience. What looks like a “character” is actually a syllable block called “eumjeol” that’s made up of consonants (moeum)and vowels (jaeum). You can’t have a vowel only syllable either so you always have to pair it with a null consonant no matter what (which kinda looks like a zero: ㅇ) and while nouns can be much more concise compared to English, verbs can g…

만나서 반가워요!

What you talked is mostly right and I did not know about typing in Korean, the left-hand side and right-hand side. Btw, Consonant(Jaeum) and vowel(Moeum).

In experience-wise, what you had would be precise.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#12

Post by ralferoo »

xodn348 wrote: post #4
raaspazasu wrote: post #3

I don't know Korean at all, but this looks cool and a fun project. I'm curious if this reduces typing or has any benefits being in Hangul vs Latin?

Thanks! One thing that motivated me was curiosity about prompt efficiency in the AI era. Hangul is beautifully dense — a single syllable block packs initial consonant + vowel + final consonant into one character. I wondered if Korean-keyword code might produce shorter prompts for LLMs. I actually tested this with GPT-4o's tokenizer, and the result was the opposite — Korean keywords average 2-3 tokens vs 1 for English…

I don't know how to read Hangul (I know the general idea about how the character is composed). To me just looking at the examples, it doesn't seem as obvious what the structure of the code is, compared to Latin letters and punctuation. Actually, most punctuation looked OK, but the first couple of examples used arrays and [ and ] seemed to just blend in with the identifiers wherever they appeared. I'm not sure how distinct they look with familiarity with Hangul characters. I'm sure it's also nothing that colour syntax highlighting wouldn't make easier.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#14

Post by xodn348 »

ralferoo wrote: post #12
xodn348 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! One thing that motivated me was curiosity about prompt efficiency in the AI era. Hangul is beautifully dense — a single syllable block packs initial consonant + vowel + final consonant into one character. I wondered if Korean-keyword code might produce shorter prompts for LLMs. I actually tested this with GPT-4o's tokenizer, and the result was the opposite — Korean keywords average 2-3 tokens vs 1 for English…

I don't know how to read Hangul (I know the general idea about how the character is composed). To me just looking at the examples, it doesn't seem as obvious what the structure of the code is, compared to Latin letters and punctuation. Actually, most punctuation looked OK, but the first couple of examples used arrays and [ and ] seemed to just blend in with the identifiers wherever they appeared. I'm not sure how dis…

Fair point that [ ] can blend in.

For Korean readers the character systems look quite different, but I can see how it's hard to parse visually without familiarity.

As you said, syntax highlighting helps a lot — there's a colored screenshot at the top of the README showing how it looks in practice.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#15

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt »

A simple translation of keywords seems straightforward, I wonder why it's not standard.

    # def two_sum(arr: list[int], target: int) -> list[int]:
    펀크 투섬(아래이: 목록[정수], 타개트: 정수) -> 목록[정수]:
    # n = len(arr)
    ㄴ = 길이(아래이)

    # start, end = 0, n - 1
    시작, 끝 = 0, ㄴ - 1
    # while start
Code would be more compact, allowing things like more descriptive keywords e.g. AbstractVerifiedIdentityAccountFactory vs 실명인증계정생성, but we'd lose out on the nice upper/lowercase distinction.

I hear that information processing speed is nearly the same across all languages though regardless of density, so in terms of processing speed, may not make much difference.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#16

Post by xodn348 »

danparsonson wrote: post #13

Wonderful! What a cool idea. For anyone interested, you can learn the whole of Hangul in an afternoon; it's cleverly designed to be very logical and has some handy mnemonics: https://korean.stackexchange.com/a/213

That is a deep knowledge that even Korean-natives would not know. I will add this site as a reference to Github. I am glad that I have you as a supporter!

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#18

Post by xodn348 »

danparsonson wrote: post #13

Wonderful! What a cool idea. For anyone interested, you can learn the whole of Hangul in an afternoon; it's cleverly designed to be very logical and has some handy mnemonics: https://korean.stackexchange.com/a/213

Just added that link to the README — it fits perfectly in the "Beauty of Hangul" section.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#20

Post by xodn348 »

apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #15

A simple translation of keywords seems straightforward, I wonder why it's not standard. # def two_sum(arr: list[int], target: int) -> list[int]: 펀크 투섬(아래이: 목록[정수], 타개트: 정수) -> 목록[정수]: # n = len(arr) ㄴ = 길이(아래이) # start, end = 0, n - 1 시작, 끝 = 0, ㄴ - 1 # while start Code would be more compact, allowing things like more descriptive keywords e.g. AbstractVerifiedIdentityAccountFactory vs 실명인증계정생성, but we'd lose out on t…

Good point about compactness — 실명인증계정생성 vs AbstractVerifiedIdentityAccountFactory is a real example where Korean shines.

One distinction though: Han uses actual Korean words, not transliterations. 함수 means "function" in Korean, 만약 means "if" — they're real words Korean speakers already know.

Your example uses transliterations like 펀크 and 아래이 which would look odd to a Korean reader. That difference matters for readability.

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