Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#21

Post by Carioca » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: 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.

At least here in Brazil it's relatively common to mix English defaults and Portuguese variable names. So a Django class declaration would look something like:

    class Pessoa(models.Model):
        idade = models.IntegerField()
        nome = models.CharField()

Then some things wind up having mixed-language variable names:

    class PessoaForm(forms.ModelForm):

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#22

Post by amrnt » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

This reminds me of http://nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/ (Lisp in Arabic(?))

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#23

Post by FanaHOVA » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: 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.

Keyboards switch between the two easily. I've worked with a couple Russian guys and sometimes they'd just write cyrillic jibberish in Slack because they forgot to switch keyboard :) One of them is a really big contributor in the Ruby open source scene, he has no problems switching back and forth.

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#24

Post by jakevn » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: 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.

It probably varies based on country, team, and nature of the project. For Chinese OSS projects on Github, I notice that functions/vars/etc. are in English, but comments are in Chinese.

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#25

Post by dguo » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

A few months ago, I was daydreaming about creating a new programming language and started thinking about language internationalization. I found this page, with some interesting comments: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/alfredth/2011/07/21/why-are...

As an aside, this one stuck out to me: "One of the difficulties in allowing the keyword to be switched on the fly to a different language is that keywords have to be 'reserved' such that they cannot be used as identifiers"...

I find the concept of reserved keywords kind of strange. It seems like a "smarter" language/parser should be able to handle a keyword being used as an identifier.

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#26

Post by andreasklinger » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

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] - written by Zuse (after whom SuseLinux is named) which inspired ALGOL

Also worth knowing about is obviously GERMAN[2] a programming language much like brainfuck that is redused to only the most important German words.

Example code

      SCHNITZEL BEER BEER BEER BEER BEER BEER BEER
      SCHNITZEL BEER SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL BEER SCHNITZEL BEER
      SCHNITZEL BEER SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL BEER BEER SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL
      SCHNITZEL BEER SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL BEER BEER SCHNITZEL

More links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

[2]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/German

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#27

Post by dx034 » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: 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.

Maybe using single characters (e.g. chinese characters) instead of words for keywords is more efficient to type and read for programmers. Not sure how typing compares but it could give code more structure.

Does anyone know how governments in China, Japan or Korea handle this? Do they try to use non-english programming languages?

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#28

Post by Risord » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #14

I've had ideas of where we abstract the syntax of a program language in a way that there would be multiple 'views' of the code. What if you could run a program that would translate Bato programs into Ruby and vice versa? The variables would be a hard part so maybe it would hint you at a translation of it or you could add a hint yourself. Or what if you had a language that had a javascript like syntax and a lisp like…

My experimentation about multi view HTML editor which combine few textual formats, (horrible) GUI and preview for interactive editing experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNryKyBPfws

Some toughts about that by Steve: http://futureofcoding.org/journal.html#niko-autios-microedit...

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#29

Post by Cyph0n » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:44 PM UTC

amrnt wrote: post #22

This reminds me of http://nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/ (Lisp in Arabic(?))

Yes, that's Arabic, and it does indeed look like an Arabic Lisp!

Re: Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language

#30

Post by dx034 » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

nuclearcookie wrote: post #6

perfmode wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A language with Internationalized keywords would be pretty dope.

That's what they do with formulas in Excel. There it sucks HARD. Try googling for documentation on StackOverflow for example. Anything you want to copy paste doesn't work because Excel is expecting the commands in a different language.

If you google in your native language you'll get results in that language. I agree that it takes a bit to relearn all formulas (and I find it too confusing to use different versions at the same time) but when I was still using a non-English version I had no problems finding solutions.

I think it was exactly the right thing to do. Excel formulas are often used by people with little knowledge of programming who aren't aware that "if" is a common keyword. Using the local variant makes formulas much easier to understand (and to get people closer to actual programming).