Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think it would be --lang=deutsch. Gotta internationalize the command-line flags too!
I think you mean, --sprache=deutsch
Absolutely. If we do localization of UI texts, the command line options should be included :)
قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
471–480 of 657 posts
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they are. There is a huge difference between having a language as you mother tongue versus having it as a secondary one. My English is reasonably good, I started young (at age 10) and yet, by the time I was 14 or so the programming books I had access to were way over my head. If English had been my first language I would have had a much easier time. It's not about English speakers tolerance, it is all about the…
Depends on the language, I suppose, but isn't the text of the book the bigger problem than the language? sprintf, uint64_t, #ifndef may as well be foreign languages to English speakers too. There's a benefit if the mnemonics are native to you, but your comment sounds like it's the book that's the key obstacle, and less the language.
> sprintf, uint64_t, #ifndef may as well be foreign languages to English speakers too.
Is the problem those symbols or the fact that the documentation, tutorials, and a significant fraction of the useful discussions around those are in English? That seems like the real concern to me: imagine how much harder it would be to learn something without being able to easily understand the man pages, Stack Overflow, the source code and associated issue trackers or forums, etc.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#473Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the language, I suppose, but isn't the text of the book the bigger problem than the language? sprintf, uint64_t, #ifndef may as well be foreign languages to English speakers too. There's a benefit if the mnemonics are native to you, but your comment sounds like it's the book that's the key obstacle, and less the language.
> sprintf, uint64_t, #ifndef may as well be foreign languages to English speakers too. Is the problem those symbols or the fact that the documentation, tutorials, and a significant fraction of the useful discussions around those are in English? That seems like the real concern to me: imagine how much harder it would be to learn something without being able to easily understand the man pages, Stack Overflow, the sourc…
Oh I'm 100% supportive of having good translations of documentation, tutorials, better ways for people to communicate online if they speak different languages, etc. But that's not what بونج is at all. Quite the opposite - the computer language is derived from another language, but their documentation as checked into Github is still in English.
Translatable comments would also be awesome, and figuring out how to deal with identifiers that appear in both comments / docs and code would be awesome. As it is, I think this language / art project is aimed at what is literally the smallest obstacle for people who have the problem it's discussing.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#475Earlier 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…
What do you mean exactly by "programming in a foreign language is a pretty significant barrier", and why is reducing this barrier to strive for? I believe English as a common language is a good thing for communication, for understanding each other. It could have been any other languages I suppose, but today it is English. It may change. I cannot even talk about programming in my first language because I would not hav…
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Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#476I was interested in hearing what using Arabic as a scripting language might do to change how code might be written -- not just a translation of words, but are there features of a language that are distinct from English that it would actually change our assumptions about a scripting language?
The video mentioned how the ligatures of Arabic can stretch, to allow fixed-width justification, which was neat, although it doesn't actually change our notions of scripting.
Consider, for instance, if English didn't have any imperative form, and instead everything were a request. Would declarative languages like Prolog have been the default?
Perhaps the most interesting thought experiments along this vein could be for conlangs. Can we write a conlang that is more elegant, meaningful, even beautiful for scripting?
Here's an quote from a New Yorker article on conlangs:
> Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. Ideas that could be expressed only as a clunky circumlocution in English can be collapsed into a single word in Ithkuil. A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time is limited. I'd be lying if I said that I read all comments in full when their first paragraph appear to be nonsense. I'd rather move on to the next comment.
Is this what it means for communities to be too large? Like, you'd never do this to a coworker or a friend, but here there's enough content and users that you can say "fuck it" and assume you know better than what you didn't actually read.
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Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#478Oh, 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.
OCaml is French but mysteriously it is neither in French nor particularly popular in France. France could be a global powerhouse of programming if only they could see what’s right under their noses.
Frenchman expat here. I do recall OCaml being somewhat popular among teachers and professors some 20 years ago. All the coding I learned in high school and then the first years of college was in either Basic, Pascal, OCaml or Matlab. I did not touch C or Java which were a lot more popular in the late 1990s until I started a my Softare Engineering degree.
As for French not being used in keywords, I found that state of affair somewhat liberating. I learned some LOGO with French keywords in primary school, then moved on to BASIC with English keywords long before I learned English. The fact that the keywords are in a foreign language somehow helped. I was not randomly trying French words hoping that it would do something. Either I knew the "computer" word (aka English) or I did not.
I find programming using French keywords somewhat distasteful. French does feel ill suited for this kind of endeavor with its complex grammar rules and conjugation. It's also very verbose. When I was in college my friends used to name things in a mixture of French and English. Yes, even native speakers that wanted to use French for variables would invariably use English keywords.
For example, an accessor would be named `getUtilisateur()` instead of `getUser()`, simply because all the equivalents for `get` and `set` are super long and fastidious to type. Also everyone would be super confused if a different convention than `get` or `set` was being used in this context. But often enough the reason was that the English word was so much shorter, and as easily understood.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Conditionals are not functions in Lisp. They are 'special forms' since they have to control the evaluation of their arguments and functions always evaluate all their arguments. So, if you want to translate a lisp into another language you have to resort to macros.
None and none, as what you need is to alias the symbols for most lisps.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well the question is why you'd want to allow it to become your problem, too, though. Having to debug libraries written in Elder Futhark or, case in point, Arabic, seems much more impossible than it may already seem sometimes, and that's why I'm not going to write a programming language in Swiss German, and keep my comments in English too, for that matter.
I think it comes from a good place in the heart, but people really shouldn't look for ways to drag themselves into other people's problems out of "fairness". Many societies have a nominal interest in teaching English to their people, but fail in practice. Fixing English education (or really language teaching in general) is a far more useful thing than torturing yourself with a language not suited to typewriter keyboards, such as APL or Arabic.