I remember when I was about 13 or 14 we would have this little program in Windows that allowed us to move a turtle around and draw shapes with the turtle. You were able to write little programs in code to move the turtle around and draw more complicated shapes in a shorter amount of time.
We were doing all this in pure Greek, and writing the programs in Greek.
In retrospect, I believe this was one of the worst things we did. Sure, it lowered the bar for students struggling with English to start programming. But given how there is nearly 0 useful documentation on programming or on programming languages in Greek, you were essentially tied to this little program with the turtle. You had absolutely no ability to progress your computing knowledge.
قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
321–330 of 657 posts
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#322This 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 reminds me of projects I did specifically for the Dutch market, but were coded in English because we needed to facilitate non-Dutch developers. Each new feature started with finding translations for Dutch words to be used as variables in code. Then when we created the UI, we'd have everything but the field labels in Dutch, making bug reports confusing, especially for the non-Dutch developers.
Good times!
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#323If there is one thing this will achieve then it should be this: it should help to show those born in the world of English what a privileged position they have. For every other person in the world not born into English that is the first hurdle they have to cross in order to get to the next one: programming itself. Anybody that is born in an English speaking region has a huge head start in this respect.
Note that it goes much deeper than just the programming languages keywords: there are the books, the courses, the documentation, the bulk of all the open source projects out there one could use to study and so on.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
So if it's not such a huge barrier for a foreign programmer to program in an English-centric computer programming language, surely the same can be said about non-Arabic speakers who might want, or have to deal with this language?
While this is true as far as it goes, there's a difference in cost/reward tradeoff in having to understand the Latin alphabet to be able to read materially all programming languages, and having to understand many different alphabets to do so.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#325One of the great things of tech is that it brings different people together to relize amazing new things. The initiative described here does not celebrate the differences, it creates barriers instead.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#326I remember when I was about 13 or 14 we would have this little program in Windows that allowed us to move a turtle around and draw shapes with the turtle. You were able to write little programs in code to move the turtle around and draw more complicated shapes in a shorter amount of time. We were doing all this in pure Greek, and writing the programs in Greek. In retrospect, I believe this was one of the worst things…
That sounds a lot like Logo
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
There ARE successful (used in production) languages with non-English syntax. You're just saying "Everyone should use Chrome, otherwise the web would be balkanized". Or, taking it to the extreme, "every book in the world should be written in English". >I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does You are, but no one promised "without any effort". Almost every developer of not…
they are joking.
How can you tell? It looks like a serious post to me.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
TBH, I didn't get the joke until I read your comment. A small "/s" at the end wouldn't hurt.
To be frank, "/s" would have totally ruined it for everyone else.
I'm assuming that you simply didn't read past the first paragraph? (That's fine, I bet we all do that way too often here) I mean, I have a hard time believing that you really can't tell that a post that states that everybody uses FORTRAN isn't serious.
I care because HN has a way of ruining satire and sarcasm this way. These are only the delightful stylistic devices that they are when you don't say that it's satire (resp sarcasm). I truly wish we'd all "/s" a little less, not more :-)
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#329This 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...
I don't know any Lisp, but I wonder about doing something like this in one, since if I understand correctly, even things like conditionals are functions. I'm sure it would be possible with macros, but I wonder if you make a Chinese Lisp just by redefining functions.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#330Oh, 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.
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…
I'd love to code in an all Swedish environment. But when the I18n is incomplete or poorly done, all English wins out. Better if 100% of the compiler messages are in English than a 50/50 mix of Swedish and English messages because then you have to context switch between the languages all the time.