I know this is mostly about keyword substitution but it still tickles me that you still write f(x) in this language and not (x)f given that Korean is SOV but I guess that's just how you notate that no matter what cultural context you're in. Hadn't ever considered that the convention of writing a function before its arguments might have been a contingency of this notation being developed by speakers of SVO languages.
Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
51–60 of 131 posts
Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
#52When I was studying Computer Science in college, I once remarked how lucky we, English speakers, are that programming languages use English nouns and verbs. A ton of my classmates were here on a student visa, and English was not their first language. I always thought that programming in English put me at an advantage on the learning curve. I also always thought it was silly when someone would quip that programming sh…
At a risk of going against the hivemind, I disagree.
I self-taught programming quite early in my life, way before I had a good command of the English language. I've read books in my native language, talked on programming forums in my native language. In the end the "english" in programming languages is just a handful of keywords, and it didn't hinder me one bit that I had no idea "int" stands for "integer".
Of course, I started by writing code like "bool es_primo(int numero)" (in my language), but there's nothing in C that says identifiers must be english, just convention. Standard library and packages nowadays would be a problem, but back then standard library were thin and "strcpy" name is obscure anyway. The real hard part was always learning how to program and design properly.
And for more advanced topics, documentation and learning materials in english only are HUGE problem for ESL, because one has to actually read and understand them. But this is not something programming language can help with.
Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
#53When I was studying Computer Science in college, I once remarked how lucky we, English speakers, are that programming languages use English nouns and verbs. A ton of my classmates were here on a student visa, and English was not their first language. I always thought that programming in English put me at an advantage on the learning curve. I also always thought it was silly when someone would quip that programming sh…
Thank you for your empathy. English has been the one of the most frequent languages for globe so that it is reasonable to Eng in many coding project, though.
It's may also be reasonable to make localized translations for a programming language. This is rarely done in reality for obvious reasons. An exception are Excel's function names. People who don't know English, or hardly know it, appreciate it.
Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
#54I know this is mostly about keyword substitution but it still tickles me that you still write f(x) in this language and not (x)f given that Korean is SOV but I guess that's just how you notate that no matter what cultural context you're in. Hadn't ever considered that the convention of writing a function before its arguments might have been a contingency of this notation being developed by speakers of SVO languages.
I think this notation is superior, because of syntax completion - get_name(user.id) can be syntax completed by IDE, (user.id)get_name can't. Just like "SELECT id, name FROM users" would be better of as "FROM users SELECT id, name" (LINQ in C# fixed this mistake, and most modern query languages do too).
Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
#55I know this is mostly about keyword substitution but it still tickles me that you still write f(x) in this language and not (x)f given that Korean is SOV but I guess that's just how you notate that no matter what cultural context you're in. Hadn't ever considered that the convention of writing a function before its arguments might have been a contingency of this notation being developed by speakers of SVO languages.
Object oriented programming languages also use object.method rather than method(object), so I don't think prefix/suffix notation has much to do with language.
Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
#56I know this is mostly about keyword substitution but it still tickles me that you still write f(x) in this language and not (x)f given that Korean is SOV but I guess that's just how you notate that no matter what cultural context you're in. Hadn't ever considered that the convention of writing a function before its arguments might have been a contingency of this notation being developed by speakers of SVO languages.
I think this notation is superior, because of syntax completion - get_name(user.id) can be syntax completed by IDE, (user.id)get_name can't. Just like "SELECT id, name FROM users" would be better of as "FROM users SELECT id, name" (LINQ in C# fixed this mistake, and most modern query languages do too).
…if you’re typing from left to right. :)
Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
#57Wonderful! 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
These are really cool! Will also add a version of these mnemonics to the Korean guide I have been writing: https://tolearnkorean.com/
Learning the Korean alphabet (Hangul) can be done quite quickly, it's only about as many "letters" as the English alphabet!
Remembering the words is a bit more difficult though, especially if you don't know a similar language. Have been using Anki and my own app for that: https://game.tolearnkorean.com/
Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
#58Curious about the name — if the language uses Korean (Hangul) keywords, why call it “Han”? In Latin letters that usually reads like the Chinese 汉 (Han) / pinyin rather than Korean. Is there a specific reason for that choice?
Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
#59This is indeed a cool project! Happy to see experiments on non-English programming languages. I have one question — not trying to be offensive or doubting, just out of curiosity — does Han make use of the unique properties of Hangul (or Korean in general)? Like, I remember sawing a Turkish programming language on HN the other day, and I might be wrong but my impression was it makes use of some syntax unique to Turkis…
Honest answer: right now it's mostly a keyword translation with English-like syntax order. Korean is SOV (subject-object-verb) but Han follows English SVO order — 목록.추가(값) reads like "list.add(value)" not the Korean natural order. Changing that would require a fundamentally different syntax design, which is an interesting challenge for the future. That said, a few things do lean into Korean specifically: - Method nam…
Thank you for replying! As a non-English speaker too, I always love to see people trying out new things different from the English mindset. Hangul is a very cool writing system and I'd love to see Han live and evolving.
Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
#60When I was studying Computer Science in college, I once remarked how lucky we, English speakers, are that programming languages use English nouns and verbs. A ton of my classmates were here on a student visa, and English was not their first language. I always thought that programming in English put me at an advantage on the learning curve. I also always thought it was silly when someone would quip that programming sh…
Naah, my non-english-speaking friends say that the keywords are less than 1% complexity of a programmer's job, so it really doesn't matter.
Also, in most languages you already can name variables/classes/members in any Unicode letters. So only "if/for/while" keywords and stdlib classes remain English. It makes little sense to translate those.