Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
As discussed elsewhere in the thread, the few dozen keywords are a different matter (and are just memorized to mean "make the computer do ..."), but having useful error messages from your compiler helps get stuff sorted out more quickly. There are, to this day, people who get in trouble when their computers reply to them in English, including coding folks. I bet they were (and are) thankful for initiatives like yours…
قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
181–190 of 657 posts
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> diabolical
You have no idea.
I've worked with devs using it (and had to debug their code more often than not): the thing is hell, through and through, from the stdlib itself (buggy as fsck[0], terribly leaky abstractions[1], ridiculously contrived[2]) to the IDE to the concepts (worse than VB, you store procedures in windows so changing the UI ever so slightly has dramatic effect on your whole codebase and since it's half static half dynamic you catch that only at runtime) to the source control (worse than VSS, and that's telling[3]) to the database (worse than your random toy-weekend-project database[4]) to the devious marketing ploys[5].
(some links in FR but you can toggle to English)
[0]: JSON parsing and generation is non-conformant, e.g translates null to empty strings. There is basically no memory management and the thing leaks like a sieve. This one can only do GET and POST "automatically", adds a topmost "Accept: * ", and actually only sends credentials on non-HTTPS: on HTTPS they're outright dropped because of a bug, so you have to implement HTTP basic yourself with the hack below! https://doc.pcsoft.fr/fr-FR/?3043007&name=HTTPRequete
[1]: Same proc as above, the overall thing and additional header field is actually a string concat, so if you want multiple ones you pass a string with those separated by \r\n, but god forbid you omit the last CRLF as the headers and body won't have the required CRLF and be right next to each other.
[2]: dict-like stuff (mem leaks included): https://doc.pcsoft.fr/fr-FR/?1514057&name=Tableaux_dynamique...
[3]: http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/windev/sourcesafe.html
[4]: For network access they actually recommended you share a database via SMB shares before they had a "server mode", and still do for "small loads". The indexes get borked once in a while for random reasons so you have to rebuild them regularly. Their main API is something resembling low-level ISAM but with shared global state, and while they introduced a SQL implementation atop of that, it's downright terrible, severely lacking, and has zero query optimisation plan, throw in a HAVING and you can lock a 10000 records table for minutes.
[5]: Car seller tactics like "Buy a license, get a top of the line iphone/ipad for 1€", goodies strategy dialled to 11, heavily sexualised material (down to the IDE splash screen), with scantily clothed women in luscious poses, high heels, leather, you name it, full of bullet-point buzzwords, actual tagline is "develop 10 times faster" and literally "1000+ new features" for each version, dev conventions are cult-like, Stockholm syndrome is pervasive. License for a given version is lifetime (controlled by a hardware dongle labeled with legal threats) but any support is dropped the minute the next release is out (which is every year). Not that it matters, as bugs stay largely unfixed. Wikipedia page is heavily edited by their marketing team (from their own IPs to boot), forums are heavily moderated against any critical post, who get censored, to the point that one of the devs I mentioned was threatened (on the phone, they called him) of legal action for libel because he publicly reported and discussed a bug.
It's so bad that to fix bugs I implemented drop-in replacements for part of that stdlib and software code in C# (they have a .Net bridge which, quite surprisingly, works well, even dynamically generating WinDev proxy stubs from the C# classes) in well under half a day of work (which also had the benefit of moving some things to git and have actual unit testing), and had plans to port wlanguage to the CLR to help people get out of this hole. Guess what, the plan was rejected (even for bug fixing) because of purely irrational cultish reasons and I had to put intricate workarounds in my Ruby code to massage my way out of the endless brokenness, costing me overall months of work and terrible customer impact.
If it feels like I was on some sort of mission, then it's partly true, as the people I worked with were really nice folks I had real bonds with, and witnessing the brainwashing they were victim of, destroying the very real potential they had, was truly disheartening.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#183This 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…
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#184This 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…
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#185Assuming there is merit to the idea that the Latin charset gives unfair disadvantage for people from other cultures (I think not(1)), then a language should be formed from a culture neutral alphabet - say, klingon. It better have a number of glyphs in the vicinity or 30 or so (for typing ease) no funky char combining rules (for reading ease) etc. And it would still need guidelines for naming functions, variables, not…
This project seems to be more about recognizing cultural differences in thought patterns and how they permeate today's computing world.
It doesn't seem to be geared towards teaching programming to students who only know Arabic so far.
And English is being taught and used extensively in the Indian education system and society in general.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#186Makes 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.
The lesser problem is with languages that don't read left to right, since the parsing of the language has to be reversed.
Many languages now support UTF-8 for variable names, so in theory you could code those in any left-to-right language by just choosing different variable and function names,
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#187This 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…
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Changing some accented characters in a well known brand name into strange ones used in "obscure Serb Croat religious documents
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
As discussed elsewhere in the thread, the few dozen keywords are a different matter (and are just memorized to mean "make the computer do ..."), but having useful error messages from your compiler helps get stuff sorted out more quickly. There are, to this day, people who get in trouble when their computers reply to them in English, including coding folks. I bet they were (and are) thankful for initiatives like yours…
The definition of useful varies though. Many people starting out don't have the ability to understand some error messages, so being able to search for the error message is most useful. If everyone in the world has the same error message, finding an explanation for the error is a lot easier.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#190Imagine thinking cultural hegemony is good.