I am a native English speaker and have always taken for granted that programming languages were in English. I was curious if people had built languages in other languages besides english and what they might look like? Are there any popular ones? Have any taken a drastically different path than the English ones?
Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
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Re: Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
#2I'm pretty sure there's one in French. Can't remember what it is off the top of my head. On a sort of related note, anybody know what software was used for the early Minitels? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
Re: Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
#3I've also never seen non-english languages, but I imagine porting a programming language would be a simple matter of replace code words with their corresponding code word. This seems like a much simpler possess then porting most applications to other languages. (Of course, the apis of common librarys would also need a port for this to be useful.) I would also imagine that if something interesting happened in such a language, it would be ported to english even quicker.
Re: Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
#4There is ChinesePython http://www.chinesepython.org/english/english.html
Re: Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
#5Here is one in Urdu [PDF]: http://init.org.pk/papersandpublications/P5.pdf
The last few pages have some sample code. Clearly this is just an academic exercise. Non one would actually use this.
Re: Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
#6brainfuck (sort of, its symbol based i.e. '>' means ++pointer, the while loop is [ ... ], etc). I like the Perl latin module, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata...., I'm pretty sure there's not a practical non-english lang though...
Re: Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
#7There is Portugol, a programming language in Portuguese used for teaching. This is what it looks like:
http://gpt.berlios.de/manual_big/manual.html#programa_exempl...
If I remember correctly, you could write visual basic in other languages as well.
Re: Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
#8brainfuck (sort of, its symbol based i.e. '>' means ++pointer, the while loop is [ ... ], etc). I like the Perl latin module, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.... , I'm pretty sure there's not a practical non-english lang though...
I saw that listed on the wikipedia page. It looked hilarious. But none of the languages listed looked 'practical' other than simply ports/translations of existing languages. I was really curious to see if there were popular and different languages being used in other countries. To me that would be fascinating.
Re: Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
#9There is actually a wikipedia article dedicated to this topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...
Re: Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
#10There is actually a wikipedia article dedicated to this topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...
Thanks, I took a lot at that before posting. Most seemed to fit into the categories of: old, for teaching/proof of concept, ports of other languages.
None really stood out as in-use and actually different from english programming languages. Was wondering if someone knew more or could offer some insight.
I was thinking there are probably a few candidate countries/languages: Japan, China, Russia. Each would have enough technical people and an economy that might really be able to support something.