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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

#71

Post by xodn348 »

all2 wrote: post #64

So... iirc Korean words are constructed out of symbols, would it be possible to mutate the meaning of keywords by giving the symbols meaning and constructing new blocks of symbols?

That's a fascinating idea! Hangul is indeed compositional — 한 = ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ — so in theory you could assign meaning to individual jamo components.

But in practice, breaking syllables into jamo would make keywords less readable, which goes against Hangul's design goal. And considering how AI-assisted coding works today, fully named descriptive keywords actually reduce errors — LLMs perform better with explicit, unambiguous tokens than with cryptic symbol compositions.

So Han leans toward more descriptive Korean keywords rather than shorter symbolic ones. Readability over brevity.

Interesting direction to think about though — thanks for the question.

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

#73

Post by kccqzy »

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…

That’s the least of their problems. The best computer science textbooks are published first and foremost in English and only translated belatedly. The research papers are in English and not often translated. Even the manuals of both commercial and FOSS programming tools tend not be translated. A few keywords is what, half an hour of rote memorization.

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

#74

Post by faitswulff »

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?

If you’re interested in Chinese characters, there’s https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan

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

#75

Post by whacked_new »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #31

I’ve always wondered why there weren’t more non-english charactered programming languages but I can only assume it was just inertia This seems like a reasonably good security measure too

I think another part of it is culture. Outside of Western tech circles there's far less a culture (it feels) to invent new languages. To my knowledge Ruby's Matz is the only notable exception, and he's highly unusual as a Japanese. Then, using non-ascii-friendly character set is an even greater challenge.

Non-ascii encodings are harder to program in due to the need to switch in and out of input methods.

That said, some languages like Arabic and Japanese (and possibly Korean and Hindi) lend naturally to VSO token ordering, which maps directly to LISP syntax, so it's unfortunate that there isn't a lot of interest in this. It would be lots of fun. Maybe agents will make this possible!

Here are some interesting examples.

    - https://github.com/nasser/--- (Arabic)
    - https://honoka.nukenin.jp/Introduction/Loop.html (Japanese)
    - https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan (Chinese, which is SVO like English)

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

#76

Post by booleandilemma »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #31

I’ve always wondered why there weren’t more non-english charactered programming languages but I can only assume it was just inertia This seems like a reasonably good security measure too

Using english for your programming language gives you the widest audience.

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

#77

Post by whacked_new »

anigbrowl wrote: post #50

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.

I'm a little sad that VSO languages didn't start the computing revolution because if they did, we would all be writing LISP. But instead, we are relegated to Python and JavaScript!

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

#78

Post by sushid »

localuser13 wrote: post #52
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…

At a risk of going against the hivemind, I disagree. I self-taught programming quite early in my life, way before I had a good command of the English language. I've read books in my native language, talked on programming forums in my native language. In the end the "english" in programming languages is just a handful of keywords, and it didn't hinder me one bit that I had no idea "int" stands for "integer". Of course…

That's coming from a Spanish speaker used to the alphabet, QUERTY, etc. I imagine you'd find it much more difficult if C were written in Chinese or Arabic, for instance.

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

#79

Post by geokon »

Have you considered rotating the layout? I always though a CJK programming language written vertically would be very ergonomic. Instead of scrolling vertically the program would flow right-to-left or left-to-right. I guess you'd probably want to rotate the bracket/paran glyphs which is a bit less trivial to do

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

#80

Post by nenxk »

localuser13 wrote: post #52
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…

At a risk of going against the hivemind, I disagree. I self-taught programming quite early in my life, way before I had a good command of the English language. I've read books in my native language, talked on programming forums in my native language. In the end the "english" in programming languages is just a handful of keywords, and it didn't hinder me one bit that I had no idea "int" stands for "integer". Of course…

For people that use similar keyboards I don’t imagine it’s that different though like you said occasionally knowing that bool means Boolean or int means integer may make it slightly easier for English speakers I think a big disadvantage would likely be for people from say China that use incredibly different keyboards if I had to add a wildly different second language and switch to it every time I wanted to create a var or import something or write an if statement I’m not sure if I would’ve continued learning to code it may have been one step to many
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