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Citrine: Localized Programming Language

citrine-lang.org

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Re: Citrine: Localized Programming Language

#11

Post by herbstein »

charles_f wrote: post #9
scoopertrooper wrote: post #6

> designed to allow every man to write code in his mother tongue. Hopefully, by doing so, Citrine will make coding accessible to a wider audience. One day that audience might extend to women.

My thoughts exactly! but it looks like op is Dutch in which language google translation tells me "mens" can mean "person", so hopefully it is just an esl thing

Which is just a perfect example of why anything "universal" is quite hard in practice when these misunderstandings happen even between English and Dutch.

Re: Citrine: Localized Programming Language

#12

Post by Someone »

The site isn’t clear on it, but from downloading the translation package (http://citrine-lang.org/downloads/headers.tar.gz), it seems translation is a simple string replacement. I don’t think that’s enough to cover all languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_... has a list of languages that do at least as well (I think AppleScript tried to do better, but can’t find examples)

Of course, switching language for the programming language itself won’t translate identifiers, so multi-language teams still will have to decide on the language(s) used for those.

Re: Citrine: Localized Programming Language

#13

Post by Jenz »

> Citrine is one of the first∗ embeddable∗∗, general purpose, localized programming languages (...) designed to allow every man to write code in his mother tongue

This concentration of asterixes had me laugh out loud. Anyhow, this reminds me of so-called “auxilliary”, constructed languages of communication, which are supposed to be easy to learn all over the world for as many people as possibe all over the world. In reality though, they’re almost without exception wholly eurocentric, built mostly on germanic and romance languages, which barely covers one of the main language families just in europe... likewise, this citrine promises grossly more than it delivers.

Though we shouldn’t stop at that; if we look away from what it claims to be, what it is seems pretty neat. For education, maybe this is great.

Re: Citrine: Localized Programming Language

#15

Post by zokier »

herbstein wrote: post #11
charles_f wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly! but it looks like op is Dutch in which language google translation tells me "mens" can mean "person", so hopefully it is just an esl thing

Which is just a perfect example of why anything "universal" is quite hard in practice when these misunderstandings happen even between English and Dutch.

Not really, it is more like counter-example; if the author would have been writing in his native language this might not have been issue. So it supports the claim that allowing people to work with their native languages would reduce mistakes.

Of course this also implies that the translations should be done by professional translators, instead of the authors themselves.

Re: Citrine: Localized Programming Language

#16

Post by qayxc »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #4

I've said too much about this subject in the past [1], but my litmus test for "localized" programming languages is a Korean support (both because I speak it natively and because it is very much different from most Indo-European languages). It spectacularly fails. At the very least it is evident that Citrine only ever cares about languages with prepositions (e.g. `x on: 'greet:' do: { ... }`). [1] https://news.ycombin…

You don't have to go as far as Korean - that BS fails H A R D even with other Germanic languages.

It's like whoever did the translations just took the English version and chose the first entry in the dictionary without even a second thought.

The translations are definitely machine translations and not done by native speakers. This results in hilarious constructs that are hard to decipher even when knowing the context.

As soon as I saw inconsistent grammar and even simple words being completely mistranslated, I dismissed the whole thing.

Re: Citrine: Localized Programming Language

#17

Post by qayxc »

k__ wrote: post #14

The grammars langauges are so different, can't imagine how this should work in practice. Sadly the site is dead (503).

Works fine for me (the site, that is).

Spoiler alert: it doesn't work at all in practise.

Grammar is one thing, but the "translation" even fails with single words.

It's basically complete garbage.

Re: Citrine: Localized Programming Language

#18

Post by olodus »

I don't get it at all. Nothing stops you from writing you code in your own language in most other prog langs (as long as it has unicode support). The reason a lot of us chose to write in English is because we want to share our code and English is the most universal lang we have right now. As a non native English speaker I most definitely see the problem in this but it is also an imperfect world and communication is one of those problems which will never have a perfect solution.

Programming languages should imo from the offset be steps ahead of this. They have simple rules that can be parsed despite understanding the subjectives. I could probably understand some rust code written in mandarin after studying it for a while. In our line of work it is important with clear communication. Spoken languages are not good ways of accomplishing that.

Re: Citrine: Localized Programming Language

#19

Post by deepsun »

In Java (among others), you can use any unicode names. Yes, reserved words stay the same ("if", "public", etc), but most of the code still reads like native.

Also I've seen business ERP languages, completely localized. Those who program on them usually laugh on it, they say it's not hard at all to get used to English keywords, business logic is what's hard. Even better, the fact it's English means it's built-in.

Re: Citrine: Localized Programming Language

#20

Post by oneplane »

This is just silly. The whole point of having an abstraction like a higher level programming language is so that we can all work together on tasks instead of spending time on language details.

Unless you are working on an isolated system in an isolated setting that will be destroyed rather than merged, none of this helps. It's the same as localised programming some people do today where you simply can't work together because you lost the most important common denominator.

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