Live data from Hacker News

قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

nas.sr

141–150 of 657 posts

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

#141
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Originally it was a Anglicization of "für" in German first used in a programming language called Superplan which was then picked up upon by FORTRAN and then it just stuck

Fortran has «do» loops, no «for» loops (to my knowledge). do i = 1, N ...

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

#142
post #2

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

Doesn't almost all major "modern" languages support that? The list is quite long: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Unicode_variable_names

Scala supports not just variables, but operators. * or + are not part of language, but methods in library.

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

#144

This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does. This is the same reason…

I think you are being sarcastic/ironic.

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

#145

This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does. This is the same reason…

[deleted]

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

#146
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’m working on a language for Japanese but it’s not quite in a useful state yet. https://github.com/kayleemann/pinpon

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

#147

It's actually never come to my mind that there are only English programming languages So programmers in China and Russia also using only English programming language?

Yep. That's probably why you'll never met a developer without a rudimentary understanding of written english.

As some empirical evidence, look at how few StackOverflow sites there are in other languages: https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#technology-traffic. Just three (Russian, Spanish, Portuguese), all were introduced 5+ years after the main site started.

Similarly, Github doesn't have localised versions.

There are certainly clones in other languages (e.g. https://teratail.com/ clones SO in Japanese), but it shows how little demand there is when these well-funded platforms for developers de-prioritise local versions. I couldn't imagine a comparable platform for lawyers or accountants doing same thing.

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

#148
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.

You're not barred, you have to learn relevant combinations of 26 symbols. If you cannot do that, I doubt you'll become proficient in programming anyway. OTOH,knowledge sharing in the field would be severely impeded if every piece of source code was localized to the wim of the author/marketplace/whatever.

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

#149
post #144

This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does. This is the same reason…

I think you are being sarcastic/ironic.

That is what I have gotten as well starting from the "This is the same reason that everyone uses FORTRAN." bit.

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

#150

This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does. This is the same reason…

Some games (e.g. the anno series) actually have a german language scripting language for custom maps.

And the original, first high level programming language plankalkül also had nothing to do with english.

Post reply on HN