Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

nas.sr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 657 posts

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

#311

Post by sam0x17 »

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…

I think that the root issue here isn't as scary as it sounds (yes I know the OP is being ironic, but this is still a real concern that people have). One could easily write a tool that translates a foreign languages codebase into something english-readable. The plus here is that the bad google translations would probably yield descriptive names that are no worse than what we are already accustomed to.

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

#312

Post by runxel »

fxj wrote: post #229

Visual Basic for Applications has localized Versions. Here is an Example in german, so why not in arabic? Funktion VorherigerGeschaeftstag(dt Als Datum) Als Datum Dim wd as integer wd = Wochentag(dt) ' Wochentag liefert 1 für Sonntag, 2 für Montag usw. Prüfe Fall wd Fall 1 ' Auf Sonntag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zurückgegeben VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 2 Fall 2 ' Auf Montag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zur…

Thanks, I hate it!

It's like how every function in Excel is translated as well. `=SUMMEWENNS(…`

Complete nonsense, it makes my eyes bleed.

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

#313

Post by C1sc0cat »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #199
C1sc0cat wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For science and technology yes - not that long ago you had to learn German in some scientific fields as that was where a lot of the useful work was being done.

Imagine the horror of having to learn another language to access valuable intellectual ressources. I just can't relate.

Pre ww2 that's what you did in Chemistry and to a lesser extent Physics

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

#314

Post by hechang1997 »

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.

With the power of c preprocessor, you can program in any natural languages. /s

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

#315

Post by oefrha »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #193
cyborgx7 wrote: post #171

Imagine thinking cultural hegemony is good.

For science and technology yes - not that long ago you had to learn German in some scientific fields as that was where a lot of the useful work was being done.

Still true today in certain fields. E.g. if you’re an algebraic geometer (algebraic geometry is an important branch of mathematics), you pretty much have to learn French in order to study the foundational work of Grothendieck. To be fair, only a small subset of French is necessary.

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

#316

Post by ourlordcaffeine »

Nasrudith wrote: post #302
jcelerier wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's certainly funny up to the day where you have to debug a codebase where all the function names and comments are in japanese. Also, I lost so much time searching for issues in badly-localized error messages that I nowadays just set my computers in english even though it's not my main language. It's just more efficient.

Yeah I have seen that. It highlights the one weakness of text based code formats - still prevaling for a good reason. Multiple languages for developers is kind of a fringe case for functionality seen more in importers and fantranslaters.

> It highlights the one weakness of text based code formats

This is why I program exclusively in Piet

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

#317

Post by progval »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #228
danpalmer wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason why e.g. air traffic control speaks english no matter the ethnicity (as per the ICAO standard). Yes. The reason is that air traffic control inherently requires people from different regions and languages to communicate quickly in life or death situations. Ease of being an air-traffic controller is not a primary motivating factor, and getting more diverse input isn't really a useful feature. On the…

> Programming in a foreign language is a pretty significant barrier. Not really. I learned programming when I was 14, far before learning English. How many English constructs do you have in a programming language? Func, var, for, if, else, import, etc. You can memorize those in no time, especially if you do that as you learn programming. Documentation and textbooks are a different thing, of course. But I learned prog…

It's much harder to understand an existing source code if you don't understand its function and variable names.

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

#318

Post by fxj »

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…

This is valid python3, try it out.

  數字 = 23
  運行 = True
  假 = False
  整數=int
  輸入=input
  印出=print
  while 運行:
    猜測 = 整數(輸入('輸入一個數字: '))

    if 猜測 == 數字:
        印出('恭喜, 你猜對了.')
        運行 = 假 # 這會讓循環語句結束
    elif 猜測
See:

http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/11/21/chinese-python-translat...

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

#319

Post by pgcj_poster »

jiofih wrote: post #251
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…

While it’s a good joke, in reality it does not compute. “Learning a new language” as in programming language, sits in the days-to-months range, while “learning a new language” as in Arabic takes months-to-years, so you’re building a much, much deeper chasm for others to cross and contribute, even though the source code remains English-based. You can already see this happening with some open source libraries coming fr…

If it's completely impossible to work on something that uses a foreign language, then it must be pretty important for people to be able to program with the language they already know.

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

#320

Post by hechang1997 »

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.

There's a “易(Easy)语言(Language)” in China which advertised itself as epitome of "Chinese Programming". It is basically a re-skinned C with a visual programming tookit, which does has its merit as visual programming tools were rare during that time. However, it only catched on in the "domain" of cheat engines and trainers, and eventually died out.
Post reply on HN