How do you pronounce it? Kalb?
'Kalb' sounds more like the word dog, 9alb is the correct way.
Nine Elby?
For non-speakers, it's a bunch of scribbly lines.
قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
241–250 of 657 posts
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#242Earlier 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…
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 l…
I would hope Excel could convert all the built in functions by changing a language setting somewhere. The problem you describe should have been the first thing to come up when they decided to localize it.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is a good way to see all the HN users who go off of a comment without reading it fully.
I honestly don't understand how people can reply without even reading what they're replying to. And when they do, why aren't they downvoted to oblivion?
It's not always easy to get these jokes in the internet, even more so for non-English speakers which are, precisely, the ones who may be more harmed for not getting this particular joke.
I only downvote when I see some comment that goes against the rules, I do not think that it is my task to punish those who do not read a comment or do not get a joke.
Our comments, however, clearly go against the guidelines:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#244This 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…
This comment is a good way to see all the HN users who go off of a comment without reading it fully.
Time is limited. I'd be lying if I said that I read all comments in full when their first paragraph appear to be nonsense.
I'd rather move on to the next comment.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#245This 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…
So glad this turned out to be a joke in the second paragraf. The first is very believable. I've definitely encountered people who would write something like it unironically.
That's one of the biggest problems with sarcasm/irony in casual writing. There's always someone who misunderstands and treats it as serious. This problem is amplified by the number of eyes a typical internet comment receives. It's a major way people are radicalized by internet communities. There's always a proportion of members who are being "ironically" sexist/racist/discriminatory but eventually people take it seriously, the ironic commenters are pushed out of the community and presto, you have 4chan and worse.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see the connection with this comic, are you suggesting the person walking is you therefore should complain in the universal language to make society stop using such universal language so we can no longer understand you next time you complain?
I will leave the interpretation of the comic as an exercise to the reader. (Partially because I'm unable to parse what it is you are trying to say in your last comment.)
Oh, you were unable to understand me, I can relate, it sure is inconvenient when someone uses words one doesn't understand.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#247Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#248This 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…
* https://wordsandbuttons.online/fortran_is_still_a_thing.html "Fortran is not, of course, outdated, and it’s not at all complex. In fact, it has grown into these myths exactly because it is that good at what it does." Just wanted to share some positive FORTRAN vibes...
> Its users are scientists and engineers; not computer scientists and software engineers, but the real ones
That's an unnecessary slight
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#249We already have like 100 hundred programming languages, adding localization to the tokens of each one would grow that to say least 1000; the human race doesn't need more excuses to create divisions among us, it actually needs the opposite. I already hate with a passion the Stackoverflow version on my native language (Spanish), the answers are always subpar (or just missing) to their English counterpart due being such…
Or, we use content-addressable and immutable code like in Unison. It doesn't matter what you call the function or what I call it. It's the same code.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#250Any programming language can be made “foreign” by choosing appropriate terms in a non-English language (perhaps written in a non-ASCII character set) and then writing a front-end script that goes through the “foreign” code and does the required substitutions before feeding it into a standard for-that-English-based-programming-language compiler (or interpreter, or whatever). The English words are, after all, only tokens that are then translated into the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) for that language. The problem with this particular rendition is that it doesn’t in the abstract define a particularly interesting, or novel, or even useful for specific situations new language.
As far as I can tell, this is a LISP, and I can remember having read about it ages ago.