قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by ithinkso » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:07 AM UTC

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.

People are mentioning MS Excel and the only other example I can think of is Logo (turtle graphics). It was quite popular in Poland when I was a kid to teach children programming and I vividly remember it was fully in polish (which even at that age I found a bit weird).

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

#92

Post by skissane » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:07 AM UTC

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 was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

LSE [1] was more-or-less BASIC with French keywords. From what I've heard (I'm not French so have no first-hand experience with this), for a time (primarily in the 1980s) it was actually heavily used in the French education system, due to the backing the French government gave to it. Over time, the French government lost interest in the project, and use of the language has declined as a result. (The decline in interest in BASIC dialects in general has probably contributed.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE_(programming_language)

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

#93

Post by globuous » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:08 AM UTC

Really cool !! Kinda off topic, but it reminds that there is a mathematical arabic notation which i always thought was pretty cool: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Arabic_mathematical_n...

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

#94

Post by jhiesey » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:08 AM UTC

babuskov wrote: post #42

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…

Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems. Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.

I would guess it comes from calling the universal quantifier ”for all” in logic

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

#95

Post by malikolivier » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:11 AM UTC

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.

I have heard from some people that used to work in some major Japanese companies (famous worldwide) that they had a version of COBOL developed in-house that was entirely in Japanese. It seems it was widely used within the company and used to power some banking infrastructure. I wonder if such system still exists in production nowadays.

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

#96

Post by Scarblac » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:12 AM UTC

babuskov wrote: post #42

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…

Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems. Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.

When I was 10, the Dutch language manual for the Commodore 64 explained the pronunciation of "input#", but not that of just "input". So I (unfamiliar with foreign languages) thought that "input" was pronounced as we would in Dutch, while "input#" sounded like what I now know is English.

A class mate said his father said they were both pronounced as in English.

We had a fight over this in the playground, and I beat him. So I was right. "input" on the Commodore 64 is pronounced like in Dutch.

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

#97

Post by ozzmotik » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:18 AM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #67

jdnenej wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native English speaker and I also don't really get what "for" was meant to mean. At this point it's probably just something that everyone has memorised and part of history.

I'm not a native speaker, but "perform this task, for i in {1,2,3}" seems to make sense as a prose. At least it does in French, when translated literally.

personally as a native speaker it has alwaus made sense to me in the sense of saying "for these given constraints, loop while they are maintained" for the arithmetic style for loop, and "for each of these elements" for the more iterator based style.

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

#98

Post by Moru » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

globuous wrote: post #88

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 t…

Yes, that has been a constant confusion for me since they started translating office. Why would you translate commands to another language?

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

#99

Post by Al-Khwarizmi » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

globuous wrote: post #88

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 t…

Yep, same in Excel. And as a Spanish Excel user, I can attest it's a pain. If you find a solution for a nontrivial Excel problem online, chances are it will be in English. Then, you need to manually translate function names to Spanish to make it work in Spanish Excel. Translations are often non-obvious (average is PROMEDIO, not MEDIA? really?).

While I understand localization can be useful for a subset of users, at least they could have made the English function names also work, or have a suggestion mechanism to suggest the Spanish translation if you type an English function name. I don't understand why they don't do this.

Anyway, the problems of name localization are nothing compared to the problems of using commas as decimal separator. People from English-speaking countries will never know how many extra hours of life they have from not fiddling with decimal separators, text encoding programming issues, etc.

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

#100

Post by aduitsis » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:27 AM UTC

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.

https://metacpan.org/pod/Lingua::Romana::Perligata :-)