Live data from Hacker News

قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

nas.sr

281–290 of 657 posts

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

#281

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 should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does" You cannot read tons of code written in the 1C language [0] unless you know Russian, but I don't think it's a loss for you or for Russians because it's a scripting language used by a suit of enterprise software dealing mostly with ever changing Russian accounting standards and tax code [1]. At the same time it's economically eff…

My Russian is shitty, but not so shitty to not understand what "govnokod" means :-)

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

#282
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).

Or at least just a few words I guess - if, for, while etc.

You don't really need to know what these words mean in English. You just have to know what they do in the code.

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

#283
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was 10, the Dutch language manual for the Commodore 64 explained the pronunciation of "input#", but not that of just "input". So I (unfamiliar with foreign languages) thought that "input" was pronounced as we would in Dutch, while "input#" sounded like what I now know is English. A class mate said his father said they were both pronounced as in English. We had a fight over this in the playground, and I beat hi…

My brain is parsing how a Dutch input would sound different in Dutch? "in de put" vs "input" sounds the same, no? What is different?

In-poot vs in-puht, roughly.

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

#284
post #248
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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

Yes, but it made me laugh.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people don't speak English and I think it's main barrier to become a programmer or QA engineer.

You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).

I'm really curious now. If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn the meanings of the keywords when they were in a language you didn't understand? Did you have to learn to translate "for", "while", etc into Russian equivalents?

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that I think about it, languages that aren't subject-verb-object probably find OOP insane. I tried to find an example of this and found a somewhat related article about how Japanese grammar maps nicely onto ruby: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/learning-japanese-the-rubyist-wa...

> Now that I think about it, languages that aren't subject-verb-object probably find OOP insane. I'm not sure if that's true in this generality. After all, "agent.doSomeThingWith(object)" is not a declarative sentence, it's a command . So you'd have to look for languages where imperatives don't have subject-verb-object (as an acceptable) order. I'm sure there exist some, but at least I would expect them to start with…

The agent still needs to hear the complete command to carry it out, so there's no strong pressure to prefer a particular word order.

In German, the difference between the imperative "Machen Sie das!" [Do that, you (polite form of address).] and the declarative "Sie machen das." [You (polite form of address) are doing that.] is that the imperative does not put the agent first.

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

#290

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 love the video on the page. I like the way RTL looks and the way the author/creator specially mentions the beauty of arabic and how the code can be made to look aesthetically pleasing (not that I know anything about arabic personally). Too much of our time is spent on functionality and terseness: so it's great to see this project.
Post reply on HN