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

461–470 of 657 posts

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

#461

Post by missosoup »

rfhjt wrote: post #416
missosoup wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is a license if you want to hit a nonzero audience. It's called peer review. It's merit based. You might have heard about it.

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

#462

Post by ThinkingGuy »

currymj wrote: post #360
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…

I am a native English speaker in the US and to me it seems palpably unfair. People much smarter than me have to spend a lot of time struggling with a foreign language, and are still unfairly perceived as less intelligent than native speakers. I could imagine it might be less unfair in a situation, like in much of Europe, where nobody is a native English speaker but many speak it (sort of like Latin at one time). And…

"There was no Committee," by Geoffrey Pullam really captures my feelings as a mostly monolingual native English speaker:

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/04/30/ther...

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

#464

Post by missosoup »

danpalmer wrote: post #455
missosoup wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not talking about lowering standards, I'm talking about lowering barriers. The difference is that barriers are things that aren't necessary. It is not necessary to be male, white, or English speaking, to be an excellent engineer, and yet those groups are significantly over represented.

> I'm not talking about lowering standards, I'm talking about lowering barriers.

One and the same. Making it easier to join a group necessarily lowers the barrier for joining said group which necessarily lowers the standard of said group. There are entire books written about this problem which leads to it being impossible to build large above-average skilled teams.

No need to bring identity politics into engineering practice. They have as much place here as they do in getting a pilot license.

There is a minimum bar to pass, and part of that bar is speaking a common parlance with members of your professional body from the rest of the world. I'm sorry you feel upset that English happened to be the language of choice for that, I personally just invested the time to learn it. I get paid more than doctors or pilots with the same amount of experience as me, so I'm not going to start complaining about satisfying the same language requirements that they deal with.

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

#466

Post by johnisgood »

anonymfus wrote: post #400
johnisgood wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something about non-English comments in source code is really off-putting. That, and if you generally do want people to understand, then you should use English. If that does not matter to you, or someone else, then do not.

> Something about non-English comments in source code is really off-putting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_cringe

I am sorry, what? I do not dismiss my own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries. Not at all.

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

#467

Post by [deleted] »

schwartzworld wrote: post #389
johnisgood wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something about non-English comments in source code is really off-putting. That, and if you generally do want people to understand, then you should use English. If that does not matter to you, or someone else, then do not.

> That, and if you generally do want people to understand, then you should use English What if the people you want to understand aren't English speakers?

[deleted]

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

#468

Post by cicero »

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…

We don't have to globalize everything. Yes, it's wonderful that we have the potential for people around the globe to work on and benefit from a particular project, but it is not necessary for every project to work that way.

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

#469

Post by tofflos »

chme wrote: post #438
tempodox wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

syntax error

Excel and other spreadsheet software products localize their function names. So people learn to use those in their native language which is great. But if they need to use the same software with a different language setting, because they move or work abroad, they have to relearn all those function names, which sucks...

It's not great even in the learning scenario. First I have to Google how to solve the problem and then I have to Google how to translate the function names to Swedish.

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

#470

Post by cicero »

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…

Since air traffic can be global, it makes sense to have global air traffic control conventions. However, not every technology has to be global. If a region wants to develop a technology that is optimized for their region, they trade global access for local optimization. There are cases where this may make sense.
Post reply on HN