قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by Mirioron » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC

hhas01 wrote: post #602

big_chungus wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See APL, equally horrendous for everyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

Not for those who professionally speak Mathematics; which is the audience APL was made to serve, after all. Amusing so many programmers will complain how they feel horribly excluded by APL, but see no issue with every other programming language in existence speaking exclusively ASCII English. At least Math is a true lingua franca, unlike our awful Saxon bodge. I know which I'd be safer speaking when Aliens come to vi…

But math is also very difficult to understand. The information density on all of the symbols is too high and it's easy to misunderstand (or not understand) as a result. I've met very few people who were comfortable with reading math, even fairly simple things that they otherwise understand.

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

#622

Post by Izkata » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 11:02 PM UTC

babuskov wrote: post #446

eru wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is learning 20 inscrutable icons harder?

It's hard to reason and talk about something until you name it. With named keywords, you already have a name for it, even if you say it different than the English pronunciation. Unless the script is so foreign to you (ex. Latin vs Arabic) that the keywords look like inscrutable symbols anyway.

For a perfect example, try learning APL without having any background or reference names for its symbols: http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_APL_symbols.html

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

#623

Post by neop1x » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 11:16 PM UTC

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #500

The negative reactions here claiming that everyone should use English are really disappointing, on hacker news of all places. Nobody is saying we need to rewrite the Linux kernel in Arabic. But a language such as this could be a great tool to introduce programming to people who would otherwise be turned away by the language barrier. What is important is not the keywords for, if else, etc but the concepts of logic and…

English unite. Finally, after failed attempts with Esperanto and others, lots of educated people understand this single common language. Life is much easier. I am Czech and there are so little info in Czech on any technical subject so I rather search info straight in English. What I hate about Europe are these language barriers. There are so many countries with different languages, it is annoying that one is expected to talk differently after driving just 100 km. German, Polish, Slovak, Italian, Spanish, ...argh. This single language is a big advantage of USA! They will understand you in Miami, as they will in North Dakota or California. Very cool!

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

#624

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 11:33 PM UTC

neop1x wrote: post #623

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #500

The negative reactions here claiming that everyone should use English are really disappointing, on hacker news of all places. Nobody is saying we need to rewrite the Linux kernel in Arabic. But a language such as this could be a great tool to introduce programming to people who would otherwise be turned away by the language barrier. What is important is not the keywords for, if else, etc but the concepts of logic and…

English unite. Finally, after failed attempts with Esperanto and others, lots of educated people understand this single common language. Life is much easier. I am Czech and there are so little info in Czech on any technical subject so I rather search info straight in English. What I hate about Europe are these language barriers. There are so many countries with different languages, it is annoying that one is expected…

[deleted]

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

#625

Post by Myrmornis » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 12:18 AM UTC

There’s nothing stopping us writing software that reversibly transforms code so that the keywords are expressed in a different language, with the transformation being reversed before the compiler/interpreter sees it, right? What’s stopping us from treating language as a superficial “view level” property of code?

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

#626

Post by fastball » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 12:50 AM UTC

guggle wrote: post #618

fastball wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your underlying point seems to be that the world would be better if we all spoke one language. I disagree, and to my mind programming is no different than linguistics in this regard.

Sorry, there is no underlying point.

You are going to need to more clearly explain how this

  That's my point: everyone has to learn a bit of english, and that's good.

is "good" then.

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

#627

Post by azernik » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 1:45 AM UTC

housecarpenter wrote: post #536

gwd wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah, Latin and Greek became somewhat more analytic during the time periods where a lot of foreign speakers were adopting them as their main languages. (That was during the Roman period, not the Middle Ages, for Latin; Latin in the Middle Ages was a dead language used only by learned people in non-everyday contexts, so its grammar was mostly preserved.) I don't know about Arabic.

Standard Arabic is similar to Latin in Medieval Europe - it is a second language that is used for formal education and communication, but that no one speaks as a native language. All the Arabic languages that people speak as first languages are much more analytic.

It's a similar phenomenon to Latin, where the formal written Latin used in Europe preserved things like case endings and flexible word order, while the Vulgates that later became the Romance Languages dropped a lot of that and started relying much more heavily on word order.

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

#628

Post by oefrha » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #608

oefrha wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are 800 million Chinese internet users almost all are mobile only. What's that supposed to imply? Just Googled "number of software developers in China" and "number of software developers in the world". Got 5.79 mil (2017) and 23 mil (2018) as answers. Not sure how accurate but can't be that far off. > Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much…

Parent poster >You can already see this happening with some open source libraries coming from China, where the documentation and all discussion being in ZH already completely blocks foreign contribution. You >Given that one in five person on the planet speaks Chinese as their first language, lack of “foreign” contribution will probably work out okay for them. The point is you are using number of native speakers as a…

> First thing is the single most popular l1 language in China manderin is more like 1 in 8 humans

Wrong in this context.

1. People who speak other dialects like Cantonese overwhelmingly use the same written language, so there's no barrier in written communication;

2. AFAIK Mandarin is the mandatory teaching language in Mainland Chinese schools, so even if you want to be pedantic I'd say 1 in 5 has native or bilingual proficiency in Mandarin.

> starting a manderin only software project would mean choosing between only Chinese developers and Chinese devs and the rest of the planet as well.

First, there's no such thing as a "mandarin-only software project", you use Chinese the written language as explained above.

Secondly, it's still a reasonable choice if the author finds the alternative mentally draining, or the primary audience does. No point in global-proofing your project if the primary audience need to spend extra time and energy to communicate worse. I don't necessarily advocate for it, but I don't pretend that every project on earth has the obligation to make it convenient for me to contribute.

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

#629

Post by _8j50 » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #500

The negative reactions here claiming that everyone should use English are really disappointing, on hacker news of all places. Nobody is saying we need to rewrite the Linux kernel in Arabic. But a language such as this could be a great tool to introduce programming to people who would otherwise be turned away by the language barrier. What is important is not the keywords for, if else, etc but the concepts of logic and…

I agree,that being said I think everyone agrees languages with good internationalization support (as in built to support translation of source code to a different language without affecting the logic and machine/byte code generated). Power to anyone making a language in their native tongue. I wonder if dying languages can be kept alive longer this way.

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

#630

Post by munmaek » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #591

alienallys wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long-term perspective, all world should converge on one medium of exchange and everyone must learn that. I'm not suggesting an English hegemony here. We need to avoid balkanization. Arabic language has subsumed many local languages to be dominant in that part of world. A Bedouin feels a cultural bias towards Arabia if he starts coding in this language. I'm from India and non-Hindi speaker; if coding is done in…

Is there a programming language that uses Esperanto?

No, but programming languages exist in English, which is used by more than 15 people.

Esperanto is a very interesting language but it will never be more than a plaything, a linguistic experiment, or a framework for people to learn a language that actually gets spoken by people.