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قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

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

#361

Post by justbaker »

protomolecule wrote: post #260
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 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…

Anyone with experience in 1C/tales of 1C? I've been curious about it since discovering it existed.

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

#362

Post by bovermyer »

As an intellectual exercise, this is clever. I imagine it wouldn't take long to learn how to use it to write a basic application.

I'm also willing to bet that the time I spend learning the Arabic writing system in order to use this would be of general value, too. I'm fascinated by writing systems.

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

#363

Post by euske »

Iv wrote: post #86
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.

Honestly I am pretty sure there must be Japanese ones. Seeing how little of English Japanese programmers speak, there must surely be one. EDIT: Of course there is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolittle_(programming_language...

Actually, a whole bunch of them.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%B4%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%E5...

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%AA%E3%81%A7%E3%81%97%E3...

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%B2%E3%81%BE%E3%82%8F%E3...

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_(%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%82...

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

#364

Post by pgcj_poster »

big_chungus wrote: post #351
pgcj_poster wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is an obvious difference; English is still the lingua franca. If you're dealing with anything international, you use it because everyone has a decent shot of knowing it; assuming most oss isn't confined to a single nation, english is still the best choice. Plus, for this reason, other nations are usually much better than America about teaching a foreign language.

Sure, if you want to start an international project, then English is a pretty good language to use.

However, I have heard people say that all software everywhere should be written in English, including things like personal projects and internal tools for companies in non-anglophone countries. I think that's kind of ridiculous.

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

#366

Post by gwd »

azernik wrote: post #233
gwd wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is really interesting. I wonder if there are some human language with properties that would allow for programming language constructs that we don't really use today. Ooh, just thought of something interesting: I lived in Turkey for 4 months, and in Turkish, rather than using location to indicate which words modify each other, you use suffixes. (At least, as much as I could figure out in that time.) Then you ca…

There are a lot of languages like this - this is the much-studied spectrum of analytic vs. synthetic. English is one of the most strongly analytic languages (Chinese being even more extreme) - it determines word relationships and function with word order and helper words. Whereas Standard Arabic, Ancient Latin, and Finnish are very synthetic, changing words to indicate their function and relationship to other words i…

> some linguists have hypothesized that analytic languages are easier for foreign speakers to learn as adults, and that this causes languages with lots of geographic spread and inter-language contact to become more and more analytic.

That's an interesting theory, and certainly fits with Mandarin (aka "Common Speech"); but how well does it fit with the prevalence of Greek in the ancient world, Latin during the Middle Ages, and Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa now? Those are all towards the "synthetic" scale, aren't they? Did/have those languages drift/ed to become more "analytic"?

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

#367

Post by rtkwe »

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…

All that said I think there are benefits to confining languages principally to Latin script or making some kind of direct transliteration utility to Latin script since it's the language for ~70% of the worlds population [0]. It's very hard to learn to read and even more importantly hard to type in a different script.

[0] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-world-s-most-popular...

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

#368

Post by kerkeslager »

This is far from the first non-ASCII programming language[1].

Some folks have brought up balkanization as a bad thing, but there are some reasons to believe that balkanization could be a good thing. By putting up barriers (like language) between silo-ed groups, you allow each group to develop their own ideas under different selective pressures, which leads to different results. Then, at some point, someone with vision and skill breaks through the barrier and their ideas from one silo revolutionize the other. It's unclear whether these ideas would ever develop and mature in a more homogeneous programming environment.

Looking at a different field: climbing. The industrial rope access, arborism, and recreational rock climbing communities have developed fairly independently, despite having a lot of the same base equipment and needs. The results are some fairly different solutions to the same problems. As a rock climber, I've learned a lot by cross-pollinating ideas with the other two groups. Sometimes the rock climbers do things better (dynamic ropes are a much better way to prevent spinal compression than full-body harnesses and screamers) and sometimes the other groups do things better (rope walking is far superior to hand ascenders). And these come from the independent selective pressures of each field (rock climbers fall more because they're pushing their limits of skill, so their fall protection is better, while arborists ascend the rope constantly so their rope ascension is better). It's not entirely clear to me that these very different techniques would have developed if the fields had not been able to grow their own communities fairly separately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

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

#369

Post by big_chungus »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #364
big_chungus wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an obvious difference; English is still the lingua franca. If you're dealing with anything international, you use it because everyone has a decent shot of knowing it; assuming most oss isn't confined to a single nation, english is still the best choice. Plus, for this reason, other nations are usually much better than America about teaching a foreign language.

Sure, if you want to start an international project, then English is a pretty good language to use. However, I have heard people say that all software everywhere should be written in English, including things like personal projects and internal tools for companies in non-anglophone countries. I think that's kind of ridiculous.

I guess it depends how you define, "Written in english." Standard keywords in, say, C++ are derived from english, though they have a symbolic meaning everyone has to learn. I'd understand variable names and docs being in a foreign language.

Best-case is still engligh, though; working in another language is like doing science in American units. It works fine as long as you stay localized, but if you need to hire foreign devs to supplement your team, good luck (see the infamous Mars rover crash.)

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

#370

Post by j-pb »

Mirioron wrote: post #280
j-pb wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good! We need less shitty software, the fewer people that write it the better. I don't get why you have to be a certified engineer to build a bridge, but you can be some bloke with a 2 weekend course in python to program medical computers, avionics, train scheduling systems and other stuff that kills people when it breaks. Non native speaker btw.

Because man-hours is the limiting factor in software that is made. Additional software simply gives you more options to choose from. Yes, it contributes to noise, but it's nothing like building two bridges.

And thats why Apple and Microsoft have the best software?/s A monkey with a typewriter will produce garbage no matter how many monkey hours it puts in.

The only way to have as little bugs as possible is to have as little software as possible.

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