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Show HN: Spanish Basic

vainilla.app

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#21

of this is cool a language specifically to help new programmers to learn programming when their primary language is spanish? honestly this would a be godsend for my girlfriend. Most algol programming languages are super focused on english keywords that are very intuitive for a natibe speaker but nto so much for a Spanish speaker. case in piint. "if" in spanish is "si", but "si" is also spanish for "yes" as you can im…

Accents are important in Spanish and lot of other romance languages. You are missing one here or didn't think it was important.

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#22

Supongo eres hablante nativo, pero la sintaxis es horrible: "Para i=1 hasta 7 hacer" no hace ningún sentido. En todo caso sería " Para i en (1..7)" o "Desde i=1 hasta 7" o "Para i=1 mientras i In any case, all these copy-paste-just-literally-translate-the-keywords languages offer nothing new.

“For i=1 to 7” doesn't make any sense in English, either; BASIC, even if inspired by English, isn't at all English, ditto with every other programming language that borrows keywords and/or library function names from English.

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#23
Office 95 (and maybe 97?) had localized versions of Visual Basic, where the keywords and VBA objects were translated into the respective local language. I’m not sure if Spanish was supported, although the following page at least lists Spanish object libraries: https://mskb.pkisolutions.com/kb/211404

In any case, you might want to install a Spanish Office 95 version in a VM for inspiration ;). Microsoft soon dropped the localized VB versions due to interoperability considerations.

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#24

As a spaniard, please don't. I'm fine with programming in english, this only complicate things for everyone involved. Imagine if every popular language out there had their own adaptations or even their own programming languages. Also, you must know english for coding. There is no way you can be a good developer without a good english knowledge - docs, specs, protocols, guides, tools, books, remote jobs with internati…

Here's a really interesting talk (in Spanish) about programming in one's (natural) language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ2ZGNUqWXg

Thanks, interesting project but I disagree with the proposal. Actually the project is more about using your own style for coding and then transpiling that, than the language itself. And both are terrible ideas IMHO.

In fact, what's popular now is to do just the opposite: linters and formatters which force the same coding style for everyone, which is way easier to implement for all the different languages and way more reliable.

And as far as the language itself is concerned, I'd say that it is a bad idea as well because of context switching, translating what you type into other languages (which is not a trivial task for both machines and humans) and because, as I said above, you still need a good english proficiency level if you want to be a good developer, so it makes sense to prepare your students for the real world by teaching programming in english and getting used to it.

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#25
post #19

of this is cool a language specifically to help new programmers to learn programming when their primary language is spanish? honestly this would a be godsend for my girlfriend. Most algol programming languages are super focused on english keywords that are very intuitive for a natibe speaker but nto so much for a Spanish speaker. case in piint. "if" in spanish is "si", but "si" is also spanish for "yes" as you can im…

Spanish for "yes" is "sí", not "si".

Pedantic is being the friendly, correcting cynic. Native Spanish speakers use si as si in texts and informal messages all the time. It's understood from context; I think.

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#26
Not a native Spanish speaker, but i think they mixed up sino and si no.

This is a common typo and they are etymologically the same.

I guess by collapsing multiple words into a single token they collapse the two phrases. Eg. I look again and see finsi which seems strange from a Spanish grammatical sense (just like endif is clearly not English)

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#27

As a spaniard, please don't. I'm fine with programming in english, this only complicate things for everyone involved. Imagine if every popular language out there had their own adaptations or even their own programming languages. Also, you must know english for coding. There is no way you can be a good developer without a good english knowledge - docs, specs, protocols, guides, tools, books, remote jobs with internati…

Agreed. I think it's a bad idea (for the stated purpose, not as a nice little project which is always good to see of course). There's already sort of a problem in spanish texts (articles, some books) where the author chooses to make up (often cringy) translations for terms that don't really have an accepted counterpart in spanish. So they just translate the thing literally, and without consistency. Each author decides what to translate and how. This is probably an issue too in other languages.

Example: "arreglo". Why would you call an array that way?

Learning a programming language is already hard enough (especially the first one) to add another axis to the process, and you'll get much less out of the experience if you are limited to a "vainilla" universe.

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#28

Not a native Spanish speaker, but i think they mixed up sino and si no . This is a common typo and they are etymologically the same. I guess by collapsing multiple words into a single token they collapse the two phrases. Eg. I look again and see finsi which seems strange from a Spanish grammatical sense (just like endif is clearly not English)

You're right about sino, most likely they collapsed it for parsing purposes.

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#29
post #23

Office 95 (and maybe 97?) had localized versions of Visual Basic, where the keywords and VBA objects were translated into the respective local language. I’m not sure if Spanish was supported, although the following page at least lists Spanish object libraries: https://mskb.pkisolutions.com/kb/211404 In any case, you might want to install a Spanish Office 95 version in a VM for inspiration ;). Microsoft soon dropped t…

Excel formulas are a perfect example of how horrible localized versions can be for coding.

I hate them, all the good guides and docs are in english but if the application is in spanish then all the function names are different. I have everything in english in my computer because of this and to avoid context switching, but when my gf asks for help I have to google every corresponding function name. Terrible design choice IMO.

Re: Show HN: Spanish Basic

#30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish for "yes" is "sí", not "si".

Pedantic is being the friendly, correcting cynic. Native Spanish speakers use si as si in texts and informal messages all the time. It's understood from context; I think.

Some native Spanish speakers make abhorrent mistakes when using their language. That doesn’t make it okay.
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