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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

#411

Post by saalweachter »

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…

This language is slightly more interesting for being Arabic than (say) German or Greek.

You're got three barriers between the learner and the language: unknown keywords, unfamiliar letters, and the wrong LTR/RTL order.

It all adds up to where, boy, it would be intimidating for me to learn this language, as someone who already knows how to program. Doesn't that imply it would be equally intimidating for someone who only speaks Arabic to learn C?

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

#412

Post by yorwba »

AimHere wrote: post #309
DeusExMachina wrote: post #228

Earlier 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?

The problem is not so much non-Arabic speakers having difficulty dealing with the language, since they're not really the target audience. But if an Arabic speaker tries to use this language to write a program for some specific use case they have, they'll have to work around the complete lack of ecosystem that comes with a novel language in a tiny niche.

It's the same reason why Chinese developers haven't banded together to create a Chinese-based language. They still code in Chinese, but the languages and libraries they use are mainstream: C++, Java, Python, ... All of these languages support arbitrary Unicode in comments and Java and Python also support Unicode identifiers. As a result, Chinese documentation is available even for software that's otherwise in English. However, if you tried to convince Chinese developers to abandon their battle-tested languages with a rich ecosystem for some other language just so they can use different keywords, you'd get laughed out of the room. It's not solving a problem they have.

That doesn't mean that localized programming languages can't be useful e.g. in education. But translating documentation and libraries is useful for many more people than translating the syntax of a language.

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

#413

Post by ____Sash---701_ »

jandrese wrote: post #355
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write Perl in Latin or Klingon: Latin from https://metacpan.org/pod/release/DCONWAY/Lingua-Romana-Perli... : use Lingua::Romana::Perligata; adnota Illud Cribrum Eratothenis maximum tum val inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe. da meo maximo vestibulo perlegementum. maximum comementum tum novumversum egresso scribe. meis listis conscribementa II tum maximum da. dum damentum nexto listis decapita…

Congratulations! You have discovered the absolute nerdiest activity on the planet. Writing Perl in Klingon.

Qapla!

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

#414

Post by msla »

coldtea wrote: post #152

> Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. There are lots of "cultural biases in computer science" -- in UI, neural network training, encodings, terms of service, etc. Of all of them, this is the least helpful, and the least important. It's like doing math in local notation, or translating latin/greek terms doctors…

> Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming.

And using the Imperial system of units is highlighting the cultural imperialism of the metric system, the so-called SI ("International" System) and its Modernist desire to fit man to the unit, as opposed to fitting the unit to man. As long as humans walk on feet, and not meters, or metres, we shall persist! Ich kann nicht anders! (... primarily because I lost my metric socket wrenches)

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

#415

Post by mar77i »

jameshart wrote: post #348

It is, of course, a persistent myth among programmers that the majority of language keywords we use are in English. I will grant that some of the words share a spelling with English words that have different meanings, but most of the core words we use are not ever used with the same meaning in non-programming contexts. I would submit that the following keywords common to a number of languages are not meaningfully ‘En…

Also, the more barriers you overcome to get to the basics (that one's Greek too, btw), the less you'll struggle moving on, getting used to a certain confusion towards foreign concepts.

I really liked your angle, not over-ascribing meaningfulness, yet making an effort not to step too many toes by focusing on context, questioning the stereotypical basis.

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

#416

Post by rfhjt »

missosoup wrote: post #256
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…

> On the other hand, ease of being a developer should be something we strive for. Yeah, no. I want to strive for a field of professionals who know what they're doing instead of every second 'engineer' being a script kiddie with a MOOC or two of Python under their belt and nothing else. The barriers need to come way up from where they are today, not be lowered even further.

Should we introduce a license to publish math papers? This should supposedly raise the overall level of mathematicians.

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

#417

Post by acdha »

falcolas wrote: post #374
jacquesm wrote: post #323

If 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 go…

FWIW, most non-English countries teach children English in their version of middle school. And most English speakers aren’t like the stereotypical French; English speakers are quite tolerant of both sentence structure mistakes and extreme dialects. They’re not really at that great of a disadvantage.

That's a cascade of unsupported assumptions: have you really never heard someone complaining about non-native speaker's use of English, using it to say they aren't qualified for a job, etc.?

“most non-English countries teach children English in their version of middle school” in particular is really dubious unless you're cherry-picking a handful of small, affluent countries. I've known a number of people who moved to the U.S. from non-English speaking countries and the general trend is that the average is closer to, say, how well most Americans speak Spanish than fluency. It's easy to get this wrong if your experience is predominantly in high-level academic or professional contexts where there's been a strong selection bias filtering out people without strong English proficiency.

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

#418

Post by dorfsmay »

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…

In the early days of nginx non-russian doc was a link to Google translate, and that was good enough, it worked fine for everybody.

How do you think non-english speakers read documentation in english?

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

#419

Post by journalctl »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #394
brlewis wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a committee to form standards for sarcasm indicator use in various contexts.

Autism and humor are two irreconcilable elements; attempts to bridge them fare as well as for matter and antimatter.

I don’t think it’s fair to assume that there’s a higher incidence of autism on HN than elsewhere (bad social skills can also occur in neurotypical people), but hot damn does it really bug me that HN has such a hard time with snark.

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

#420

Post by pradn »

probably_wrong wrote: post #31
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.

> it never caught on, even in Francophone countries I started programming at least 4 years before I started learning English. In my experience, not knowing what "if" means doesn't change anything because I never thought of code as prose. Whether it's called "if", "si", or "wenn", all that changes in my head is "what's the magic word that I have to insert before I can branch my code?". This, I believe, it's why locali…

This rings true, but I imagine the difference is higher if you can't read the Latin script or if your keyboard doesn't have Latin characters.
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