قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

Post by usrusr » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 11:37 AM UTC

black_puppydog wrote: post #9

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.

My SO works on a project with leeeeeegacy software that still uses an RDBMS/OS combination (yes, it's one product. don't remember the name) in French. `SELECTIONNER * DE clients TRIER PAR ...`

Post by wongarsu » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 11:38 AM UTC

jdnenej wrote: post #123

yodsanklai wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In python it makes sense but when you have `for(let i=0; I<length; I++)` it makes less sense

Post by mattigames » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 11:38 AM UTC

cyborgx7 wrote: post #167

pgcj_poster wrote: post #135

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…

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.

Post by qubex » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 11:41 AM UTC

oaiey wrote: post #219

First: That is culturally a very important project I really like. As a German, English was a barrier for me as well (imagine a 15 yo with little English proficiency). But it was just the language, not the letters and symbols. I think the interesting question would be if you could build an IDE replacing keywords, interpunctation, writing order etc on the fly while emitting in the end "standardized" output (aka. Englis…

Post by pgeorgi » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 11:42 AM UTC

cowsandmilk wrote: post #189

pgeorgi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> having useful error messages from your compiler helps get stuff sorted out more quickly. 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.