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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

#101

Post by WalterBright »

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.

Back in the 1980s, I thought it would be great to add German, French, and Japanese error messages to the compiler. I hired native speakers to do the translations.

But nobody cared. Programmers program in English.

I once traveled to Finland to visit a customer. Everyone in the office spoke in English. I asked if they were just being polite because I was there. They said nope, their staff was from all over Europe and the only language they had in common was English.

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

#102

Post by al_form2000 »

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…

As I remember, they had also localised symbolic "constants" so a format spec fed to (some date function) was 'dd/mm/yyyy' for english locale, but 'gg/mm/aaaa' for the italian one . God help you if you had (I did) some combination of - say - English Excel and italian OS (as I remember you got english function names but italian 'constants' as in DATEFORMAT('gg/mm/aaaa'...) with nonsens errors if you used 'dd/mm/yyyy').

An asinine idea indeed.

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

#103

Post by WalterBright »

probably_wrong wrote: post #31
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 locali…

Yes, it's only like 20 keywords to learn.

I wish people who come up with all these inscrutable icons would realize that.

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

#104

Post by jobigoud »

Moru wrote: post #98
globuous wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it's supposed to be more like a DSL, aimed at non-programmers. So it may make sense to translate something like "Average", if you don't expect your target users to know english.

Not as stupid as translating low level error messages.

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

#105

Post by bctnry »

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.

> One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now.

We do have one in Mainland China, popular in the last decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Programming_Language

It's somewhat of a disaster, though: its author probably caught up with the idea of "Language = IDE" & "selling the language for profit" so it's really not that suitable for "real" serious uses.

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

#106

Post by gwd »

filleokus wrote: post #23
lifthrasiir wrote: post #6

Retrofitting an existing language with flexible syntax (in this case, LISP) to non-English languages is relatively easy. They are not necessarily bad and can be useful for learners and casual users, but deviating from ASCII alone doesn't remove a cultural bias as the OP states. Programming languages have to be developed from scratch to fit to other spoken languages and cultures in my opinion. I'm aware of multiple (n…

> Programming languages have to be developed from scratch to fit to other spoken languages and cultures in my opinion. This is really interesting. I wonder if there are some human language with properties that would allow for programming language constructs that we don't really use today. My linguistic skills are not good enough to really suggest an example, but considering there is a language[0] (almost) without rel…

> This is really interesting. I wonder if there are some human language with properties that would allow for programming language constructs that we don't really use today.

Ooh, just thought of something interesting: I lived in Turkey for 4 months, and in Turkish, rather than using location to indicate which words modify each other, you use suffixes. (At least, as much as I could figure out in that time.) Then you can order your words for clarity and emphasis, rather than for meaning.

You could imagine doing the same thing with functions or expressions; rather than being stuck with "infix" operators, which need precedence and parentheses, or "prefix" operators forcing you to use RPN, you could order them the way you want.

So perhaps the following three expressions could all evaluate to the same thing ("a / b" in most C-based languages):

    /' a' b"
    /' b" a'
    b" /' a'
    a' /' b"
    a' b" /'
The idea would be that `/` is the verb, and `'` is the suffix indicating that its two "arguments" are `'` and `"`.

That sounds like an interesting concept to explore anyway.

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by romwell »

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.

>We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language

Who is "we"?

1C is a Russian-based domain-specific language that dominates accounting in Russia and neighboring ex-USSR countries[1]. It competes with SAP, and made its founder a billionaire[2].

[1]https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/1С:Предприятие

[2]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/a-russian...

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

#109

Post by ahmaman »

kalleboo wrote: post #90
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’…

Interesting, haven't heard of these!

I am sure many small projects attempted to innovate similar solutions but never really took off.

If such a thing got popular, would be interesting to see if it would affect international collaboration. Whether it would speed things up.

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