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قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

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

#81

Post by nightnight »

tsanummy wrote: post #70
nightnight wrote: post #61

OT: Languages are the biggest lock-in + market barrier for others an economy has (best example is China). Great that English has got even bigger as a lingua france since the Internet started. I think every try to spread local languages is just wasted time. I am rather afraid that more tech leadership comes from China (I am looking at all the Chinese Githup repo READMEs).

If this is an ironic post, hats off to you.

Dear tsanummy, help us to find the irony in my post or better the message in your post. So, what's your point? I'd love to know what you are talking about.

Just to give another example: Imagine all countries in the world had the same language and people could move freely: You had massive and full competition between all nations/cities/economies for the best people and competition is good. Nobody is locked-in because of odd languages or would you dare to move to Beijing tomorrow?

Or imagine you had the same with languages and a nation forced people to only use Cobol and ignore newer developments. You get it? English is btw also a language which is easily extendable, something like creating verbs out of nouns is not that straight-forward in other languages. It keeps English alive.

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

#82

Post by Someone »

bloak wrote: post #39

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.…

PL/I. The argument there was that one cannot assume anybody to remember all the keywords (over 300 in some implementations. See https://www.cs.vu.nl/grammarware/browsable/os-pli-v2r3/), so they weren’t any reserved words, allowing, for example

    IF IF = ELSE THEN IF = ELSE - 1; ELSE ELSE = IF + 1;
Writing a compiler for that must be fun, especially if one wants to produce useful error messages.

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

#83

Post by fastball »

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.

Eh, I think you're forgetting how much english grammar exists in stdlibs.

`string.toUppercase()` is super intuitive for an english speaker, but is nonsense that needs to be memorized for someone that can't speak english.

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

#84

Post by detuur »

boudin wrote: post #16
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's also wlanguage that supports french, english and chinese https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLangage (in french) It's part of the dev environment windev which is totally closed and (at least last time i had to use it) doesn't allow to use any tools like git (sources are encrypted). This and the fact that the whole environment was extremelly bugy (and even the language itself) makes it a real nightmare to work with…

> binary source format

Easily the single most diabolical thing I've heard all week.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

fastball wrote: post #83
guggle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Eh, I think you're forgetting how much english grammar exists in stdlibs. `string.toUppercase()` is super intuitive for an english speaker, but is nonsense that needs to be memorized for someone that can't speak english.

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by Iv »

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.

Honestly I am pretty sure there must be Japanese ones. Seeing how little of English Japanese programmers speak, there must surely be one.

EDIT: Of course there is!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolittle_(programming_language...

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

#87

Post by mafro »

ewoodrich wrote: post #79
probably_wrong wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 locali…

A long time ago I did some VBA work without any real understanding of the underlying language and even though I had no idea that "Sub" or "Dim" was supposed mean "Subroutine" or "Dimension" my brain just approximately mapped it to "function" and "var" without ever needing to spend time trying to decode the "English" meaning.

Oh so that's what Dim meant :D

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

#88

Post by globuous »

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’s open office calc (and ms excel i guess) !! Its a huge pain for me actually. Once my grandpa needed help with an OOo calc sheet because his bank csv exports were super dumb and listed price columns as strings with the unit symbol as opposed to just the number. So i split the string and casted to number on my ooo calc (in english), but the casting didnt work on his french ooo calc. I spend the next 40 minutes trying to find the god damn function in french. It was surprisingly hard !! But eventually we figured it out (was and i forgot the casting function both in french and english as i never use calc/excel).

So ooo calc vba equivalent is translated in various languages ;p

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

#89

Post by guggle »

fastball wrote: post #83
guggle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Eh, I think you're forgetting how much english grammar exists in stdlibs. `string.toUppercase()` is super intuitive for an english speaker, but is nonsense that needs to be memorized for someone that can't speak english.

That's my point: everyone has to learn a bit of english, and that's good. It's good for everyone. It's a personal annoyance at first but with a bit of effort you turn it into a personal skill which then benefits to everyone.

Community > Individual

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

#90

Post by kalleboo »

ahmaman wrote: post #80

Makes me wonder, if there could be a transpiler of some sort that could take a non-English syntax and convert it to the English counterpart syntax. This way there might not be a need to invent a new programming language per human language.

AppleScript in its original, 90’s classic macOS implementation, was said to support this. It compiled down to a symbolic representation, which was then restored based on which language was selected. IIRC only a French alternate language was ever developed (HyperCard had more, but those scripts were stored as text) but also a JavaScript “dialect”.

The compiled representation was mostly exposed to users when they didn’t have the app used in a script installed and just got FourCCs/OSTypes sprinkled throughout their script instead

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