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Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

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Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#41

Post by xodn348 »

m-hodges wrote: post #33

When I was studying Computer Science in college, I once remarked how lucky we, English speakers, are that programming languages use English nouns and verbs. A ton of my classmates were here on a student visa, and English was not their first language. I always thought that programming in English put me at an advantage on the learning curve. I also always thought it was silly when someone would quip that programming sh…

Thank you for your empathy. English has been the one of the most frequent languages for globe so that it is reasonable to Eng in many coding project, though.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#42

Post by xodn348 »

zellyn wrote: post #34

I love this. Nice work! It’s fun to look at your code samples, have absolutely no clue what any of it means, and think about just how many non-English-speaking programmers must have felt that way looking at our all-English programming languages. Except lisp: that’s just inscrutable symbols like cond and cons and car and cadr and a bunch of parens! :-)

Haha, using Eng has been reasonable for decades. Thank you very much of your comments.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#43

Post by xodn348 »

woctordho wrote: post #37
zellyn wrote: post #34

I love this. Nice work! It’s fun to look at your code samples, have absolutely no clue what any of it means, and think about just how many non-English-speaking programmers must have felt that way looking at our all-English programming languages. Except lisp: that’s just inscrutable symbols like cond and cons and car and cadr and a bunch of parens! :-)

The real barrier is not just the language keywords but lots of documentations and discussions in English. I'm not sure whether there is a solution to this.

This tons of Eng documents and contents cannot be translated once but this project is trying to use another language for future use. Thanks for the comment, though.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#45

Post by lunarboy »

bbrodriguez wrote: post #9
raaspazasu wrote: post #3

I don't know Korean at all, but this looks cool and a fun project. I'm curious if this reduces typing or has any benefits being in Hangul vs Latin?

Korean doesn’t reduce typing compared to English from my experience. What looks like a “character” is actually a syllable block called “eumjeol” that’s made up of consonants (moeum)and vowels (jaeum). You can’t have a vowel only syllable either so you always have to pair it with a null consonant no matter what (which kinda looks like a zero: ㅇ) and while nouns can be much more concise compared to English, verbs can g…

It's fascinating and lucky how well Korean fits into a keyboard designed for English. Japanese and Chinese are notoriously inefficient to type.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#46

Post by xodn348 »

ovciokko wrote: post #36

This is indeed a cool project! Happy to see experiments on non-English programming languages. I have one question — not trying to be offensive or doubting, just out of curiosity — does Han make use of the unique properties of Hangul (or Korean in general)? Like, I remember sawing a Turkish programming language on HN the other day, and I might be wrong but my impression was it makes use of some syntax unique to Turkis…

Honest answer: right now it's mostly a keyword translation with English-like syntax order. Korean is SOV (subject-object-verb) but Han follows English SVO order — 목록.추가(값) reads like "list.add(value)" not the Korean natural order. Changing that would require a fundamentally different syntax design, which is an interesting challenge for the future.

That said, a few things do lean into Korean specifically:

- Method names are real Korean verbs: .추가() (add), .삭제() (delete), .분리() (split)

- Error messages are in Korean

- The REPL prompt is 한> and exit command is 나가기 (literally "go out")

Good question — it pushed me to think about what makes this more than just s/function/함수/g.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#48

Post by xodn348 »

WillAdams wrote: post #38

Have you looked into whether there are any Hanja (Chinese characters) which would be sufficiently expressive to warrant supporting as an alternative way to represent keywords? Perhaps look to APL for efficient ways to represent math concepts/structures?

I personally don't know Hanja at all, and I think that's common for most younger Koreans. Korean did borrow from Chinese characters historically, but it's similar to how English was influenced by Dutch, German, French, and Latin — each language developed independently.

Korean has its own pure Korean words (순우리말) as its foundation, and borrowed some Chinese-origin vocabulary on top of that.

Hangul was specifically created so people wouldn't need to learn Chinese characters.

So Han's keywords use native Korean words where possible — it fits the spirit of Hangul itself.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#49

Post by thisislife2 »

m-hodges wrote: post #33

When I was studying Computer Science in college, I once remarked how lucky we, English speakers, are that programming languages use English nouns and verbs. A ton of my classmates were here on a student visa, and English was not their first language. I always thought that programming in English put me at an advantage on the learning curve. I also always thought it was silly when someone would quip that programming sh…

True. English is a major reason why India is the IT back-office for most of the western world. I too have personally observed how my fellow classmates, who had done their schooling in their regional language, struggled with the coursework in college because it was solely in English. And some of them were state rankers - it felt bad to realise that they had to put in twice the effort needed to keep up their grades. I think there's a lot of potential wasted in India because of this kind of hardship / struggle - a lot of intelligent people are held back just because they lack an aptitude for multilingualism.

Re: Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

#50

Post by anigbrowl »

I wonder why there are not more programming languages not only with non-English keywords, but with different grammars. For example, if X then Y and many other constructions closely follow English grammar, but when you study other languages you quickly become away of many other possible constructions.
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