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Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

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Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#91
post #13

One thing I'm completely ignorant of is how to people from countries where non-latin alphabets are write code? Eg if you're Chinese, Arabic even Russian do you have to do everything in English and English characters? I'd hope there is a Unicode mapping into other characters - is there any language that supports this? Even for libraries would be nice.

Russian reporting in. I think everyone here who writes code knows Latin alphabet. It's just a basic requirement - it's a given that if you want to code you'd better learn English, let alone alphabet. In schools, kids learn to code using Algol-like language with identifiers in Cyrillic (essentially, Russian) abbreviations, e.g. "нц для i от 1 до n" rather than "for i := 1 until n do", but even here you see Latin lette…

Code comments, identifier names and e.g. log messages are different matter.

There was (is still?) a project to translate all the German comments in Open/Libre Office into English, a legacy of the German company that originally wrote it.

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#92
Another natural language programming language (in Finnish): https://github.com/fergusq/tampio

It's technically somewhat amusing as it runs a morphological parser in order to deal with the Finnish word inflection system, which is then utilized as an integral part of the language grammar. As a consequence, since this allows relaxing constraints e.g. on word order, the resulting code does actually read like natural language.

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#93
post #85
post #75

There are already way too many languages on this planet being kept alive by all those pathetic governments limiting their citizens to their own (little) country. English should already long be the World's 1st language for every human being IMAO. I'm Dutch and it took me ages of struggling to get to my current level of English and I'm still learning.. So, this feels like a huge step back and a great way for Filipino d…

By the number of speakers, some form of Chinese would probably win hands down. In any case, Hindi and Spanish (the latter with arguably much more regular grammar and spelling) would still take over English.

There's more to what makes a great language than regular grammar and spelling but, that aside, English is already gradually being adopted as the world language. The OP is complaining about parochialism slowing the spread. Whether you agree English is best or not, you might still agree that worse-is-better move to some common language improves things overall

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#95

Awesome stuff - i think this kind of languages are more important than most people (esp with strong english school background assume). I could see this as educational language for kids. Related to this: In the 80/90s i saw a German BASIC variant floating around. Unfortunately i couldnt find it online But… if you are into alternative-language programming languages i highly recommend you reading up on Plankalkül[1] - w…

> I could see this as educational language for kids. In Greece we had (and maybe still have, but it has been almost two decades since i was there) programming lessons in high school. For the most part it was laughable (and TBH almost everyone ignored them) but what i personally found interesting was that someone went and designed a Pascal+BASIC hybrid where everything is in Greek. There wasn't any official implementa…

It strikes me that in a language like Common Lisp, where the identifiers are not strings but symbols with a name, you could give the symbols a map from language->name and have the input language be nearly irrelevant: as long as it was standard practice to distribute source as serialized symbols rather than as text files.

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#96

Awesome stuff - i think this kind of languages are more important than most people (esp with strong english school background assume). I could see this as educational language for kids. Related to this: In the 80/90s i saw a German BASIC variant floating around. Unfortunately i couldnt find it online But… if you are into alternative-language programming languages i highly recommend you reading up on Plankalkül[1] - w…

> I could see this as educational language for kids. In Greece we had (and maybe still have, but it has been almost two decades since i was there) programming lessons in high school. For the most part it was laughable (and TBH almost everyone ignored them) but what i personally found interesting was that someone went and designed a Pascal+BASIC hybrid where everything is in Greek. There wasn't any official implementa…

Neat! Now I just need to develop an Ancient Greek dialect of this ΓΛΩΣΣΑ, and then maybe Italian Liceo Classico high schools will finally have some coding classes...

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could see this as educational language for kids. In Greece we had (and maybe still have, but it has been almost two decades since i was there) programming lessons in high school. For the most part it was laughable (and TBH almost everyone ignored them) but what i personally found interesting was that someone went and designed a Pascal+BASIC hybrid where everything is in Greek. There wasn't any official implementa…

It strikes me that in a language like Common Lisp, where the identifiers are not strings but symbols with a name, you could give the symbols a map from language->name and have the input language be nearly irrelevant: as long as it was standard practice to distribute source as serialized symbols rather than as text files.

Or, maybe, you could add another segment analogous to the package segment to each read symbol, e.g.:

    (defpackage :foo
      (:use :cl)
      (:source-language :en))
    (in-package :foo)

    (defun show (:translations :de schau) ()
      ...)
EDIT (forgot): and then, if you needed to access the symbol directly by some particular language's representation, do something like foo:en:show

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#98
post #75

There are already way too many languages on this planet being kept alive by all those pathetic governments limiting their citizens to their own (little) country. English should already long be the World's 1st language for every human being IMAO. I'm Dutch and it took me ages of struggling to get to my current level of English and I'm still learning.. So, this feels like a huge step back and a great way for Filipino d…

I agree that the would already should have had a lingua franca, but I must say that it English is far from the best candidate. The language is huge, and the grammar is full of irregularities. Pronunciation must be learnt case by case (why are "women" pronounced "wee-men"?). (also recall this cute poem: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/english-lesson.htm... )

> English is far from the best candidate.

It's also the only candidate. English is the most commonly learned foreign language by far[1], and I don't foresee any major economic movement to change that.

English has a momentum no other language have ever had. There is no language that has a larger body of knowledge online than English. Virtually all cross-border hobbyist communities, expert platforms, etc (eg Stack Overflow) are in English. People all over the world use English to communicate, even when nobody in the group has English as their native language. I was a member of a European student network called BEST, which had 0 member universities in English-speaking places and still the entire thing was in (bad) English. The entire EU is running on English informally, and I bet formally too a few decades from now (and not because we like the Irish so much). My startup has some customers in the UAE, in India and in Pakistan - their sites main (and sometimes only) language is English. The list goes on and on.

Chinese would've had a chance if they weren't so isolationist. Call me when the first Chinese language TV show gets popular outside China and Taiwan. I bet English language TV shows will be popular in China long before then (if they aren't already - I honestly don't know).

Like it or not, English has won.

[1] There's a bunch of sources, I liked this Duolingo post: http://making.duolingo.com/which-countries-study-which-langu...

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#99
It's really interesting to see non-English languages being used as programming languages.

I recall Aheui (아희) programming language that was posted on HN a while back. It's truly exotic.

https://aheui.github.io/specification.en

> 밤밣따빠밣밟따뿌 빠맣파빨받밤뚜뭏 돋밬탕빠맣붏두붇 볻뫃박발뚷투뭏붖 뫃도뫃희멓뭏뭏붘 뫃봌토범더벌뿌뚜 뽑뽀멓멓더벓뻐뚠 뽀덩벐멓뻐덕더벅

will print hello world according to the example. Reading it phonetically in Korean, makes no sense at all.

If I knew how to design programming languages I would do it like this:

> ㅍㄾㄴHello Worldㄱ

this is the equivalent of the acronym for 프린트 (ㅍㄹㅌ) or print (english word phonetically typed in Korean) and then using the "N" and "G" Korean alphabet to depict a square parentheses.

> prt(Hello World)

인쇄(印刷) would be the more formal word in which case further simplifies the acronym.

> ㅇㅅㄴHello Worldㄱ

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#100
post #99

It's really interesting to see non-English languages being used as programming languages. I recall Aheui (아희) programming language that was posted on HN a while back. It's truly exotic. https://aheui.github.io/specification.en > 밤밣따빠밣밟따뿌 빠맣파빨받밤뚜뭏 돋밬탕빠맣붏두붇 볻뫃박발뚷투뭏붖 뫃도뫃희멓뭏뭏붘 뫃봌토범더벌뿌뚜 뽑뽀멓멓더벓뻐뚠 뽀덩벐멓뻐덕더벅 will print hello world according to the example. Reading it phonetically in Korean, makes no sense at all. If I knew ho…

I feel like using 니은 and 기윽 for your quotations limits you in terms of keywords quite a bit. AFAIK, in Korean, they use for their quotations.
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