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قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

nas.sr

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Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#31

Post by probably_wrong »

Animats wrote: post #3

Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

> it never caught on, even in Francophone countries

I started programming at least 4 years before I started learning English. In my experience, not knowing what "if" means doesn't change anything because I never thought of code as prose. Whether it's called "if", "si", or "wenn", all that changes in my head is "what's the magic word that I have to insert before I can branch my code?".

This, I believe, it's why localized programming languages never catch on: because it solves a problem I don't have while bringing a new problem I do have, namely, not being able to find support for my niche programming language.

Variable names and comments? Sure, those are definitely prose. But I doubt anyone suffered too much when Python chose "elif" instead of "else if" (other than developers trying to remember whether a particular script should use "else if", "elsif", "elif", or "|").

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#32

Post by guggle »

springogeek wrote: post #24
guggle wrote: post #21

"All modern programming tools are based on the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin Characters and was originally based on the English Language. As a result, programming has become tied to a single written culture. " And that's good. That means "we" hackers/programmers/developers/coders/whatever share something in common, no matter our culture/country/religion/beliefs/whatever. Heck, I'd even go as far as saying…

It is beautiful, but it's a barrier also. I don't think you should be barred from learning to code because you don't speak a language which uses the Latin/ASCII character set.

Missing the point... Everyone has to jump that barrier so that there's no barrier between us, which is much more important.

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#33

Post by _Wintermute »

gedy wrote: post #12

I've always wondered why this is not more common. Is there a reason you can't just have localized keywords in each language that map to the same thing? Chinese JavaScript, etc?

That's how it works in Excel, I'm not sure how it works under the hood but it's translated to your system locale so you can open up your French speaking colleagues spreadsheet and not notice the difference until they start asking about "=RECHERCHEV()".

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#34

Post by lifthrasiir »

gedy wrote: post #12

I've always wondered why this is not more common. Is there a reason you can't just have localized keywords in each language that map to the same thing? Chinese JavaScript, etc?

Different word order (especially, verb-noun order [1]), different syntax for affixes and adpositions, difficulty in segmentation and even the non-existence of English-like "words", ...

You can't "localize" programming languages in that way. A new programming language, probably similar in semantics but with a completely rethought syntax, is needed for the true localization.

[1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2019/10/verb-noun-vs-noun-verb....

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#35

Post by jrh206 »

guggle wrote: post #32
springogeek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is beautiful, but it's a barrier also. I don't think you should be barred from learning to code because you don't speak a language which uses the Latin/ASCII character set.

Missing the point... Everyone has to jump that barrier so that there's no barrier between us, which is much more important.

Native English speakers don’t

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#36

Post by niceworkbuddy »

gedy wrote: post #12

I've always wondered why this is not more common. Is there a reason you can't just have localized keywords in each language that map to the same thing? Chinese JavaScript, etc?

I think it's cognitive overload. I remember when I was pretty young, there was a language named Logo. It has different but similar syntax in Polish and English. Eventually you used only one of them.

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#37

Post by ahje »

jansan wrote: post #13
Animats wrote: post #3

Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

There were localized versions of Visual Basic for Applications in Office 95, at least there was a German one. I had the "pleasure" to use it once, and I can tell you it was no pleasure at all. The first problem was that for some keywords there is no obvious translation (for example "if" can be translated to "falls" or "wenn"), so I had to look up the keywords again and again. Then of course it wasn't easily possible…

Yeah, the translated VB functions in Excel are a nightmare, especially when one works in a multi-lingual workplace. If you haven't heard finns complain about things being in Swedish before, then I can recommend handing them an excel-sheet with the VB code in Swedish and watch the chaos unfold. :D

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#38

Post by jakeogh »

vectorEQ wrote: post #29
springogeek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is beautiful, but it's a barrier also. I don't think you should be barred from learning to code because you don't speak a language which uses the Latin/ASCII character set.

feel the same. there's a lot of people out there who never get a chance to learn any english. to write your own code based on ascii / latin char set might be ok, but to interpret other's code etc. would be very difficult. so for example in a school, having only code examples with ascii could be a significant barrier to teach ,when all other subjects presented are in the local language / character set.

But it still works! Right? The constraints imposed by the programming language self document our var names.

I understand Hindi YT vids that are science related. I dont know Hindi. It's fantastic.

Latin1 is critical. Handing over acceptiable byte sequences that our cli's acccept to standards bodies is a mistake. https://github.com/jakeogh/angryfiles

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#39

Post by bloak »

A technical problem with localising a programming language is reserved words: either you decide in advance which localised variants will exist and you can't add any later, or the variants are potentially incompatible and to combine code written for different variants you would need to do some translation that involves changing identifiers, and I can't immediately imagine how that would work with libraries and so on.

Alternatively, you pick a programming language that doesn't have any reserved words, such as FORTRAN. (Are there any other well known ones?)

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#40

Post by gatestone »

jankotek wrote: post #2

Scala supports Unicode characters in identifiers. It would be interesting to know your take on that.

So does Go.

And in Plan 9 all compilers did. I bet this is the first exmaple of a humorous Hello world in C with Unicode smileys in identifiers: https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M?t=695, by Dennis Richie I think.

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