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Non-English-based programming languages

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11–20 of 24 posts

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#11
I suppose it's only right they focused on HUMAN languages, otherwise you'd see machine language up there. Most forms of assembly have always felt like a different language to me ...

Someone needs to invent "gibberish" or "crazy cat lady". What kinds of humorous programming languages are there? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is INTERCAL

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#13
post #3

The English language is certainly one of the most flexible ones, on the positive side, and one of loosest ones, on the negative side. In English, even the most stupid thoughts sound right, just because of the language-culture itself. So, it would certainly be very exciting to have e.g. a perfect programming language, expressing itself in say Arabic or Hebrew; but, on the other side, computers and real intelligence (o…

In English, even the most stupid thoughts sound right, just because of the language-culture itself. Well - that certainly doesn't sound right to me.

You got it all wrong: native English folks should be forbidden to vote on this comment.

Anyway, believe me or not: you English ones are certainly the most ignorant in culture anyways; all of non english folks around the world would agree on this...

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#14
post #3

The English language is certainly one of the most flexible ones, on the positive side, and one of loosest ones, on the negative side. In English, even the most stupid thoughts sound right, just because of the language-culture itself. So, it would certainly be very exciting to have e.g. a perfect programming language, expressing itself in say Arabic or Hebrew; but, on the other side, computers and real intelligence (o…

What specifically makes English "loose"? What makes other tongues "tight"?

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#15
Back in the '80s, at the University of Buenos Aires the first intro to algorithms course was taught using the Spanish-based TIMBA language. It was a kind of Pascal/ pseudocode language that we used to program an imaginary one-armed robot to perform some tasks on a deck of cards. We would write a program for sorting the cards by number, or pick all cards with the number 2, things like that. I think it was a good idea for those of us not familiar with either computers or the English language.

The language didn't have a running implementation that I know of; it was all paper-based.

("Timba" means "gambling" in Argentinian slang -- for some reason writing TIMBA programs always reminded me of the late Rene Lavand, the one-armed Argentinian magician.)

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#16
post #11

I suppose it's only right they focused on HUMAN languages, otherwise you'd see machine language up there. Most forms of assembly have always felt like a different language to me ... Someone needs to invent "gibberish" or "crazy cat lady". What kinds of humorous programming languages are there? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is INTERCAL

My favorite is kvikkalkul. Its source looks like full of smileys :)

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#17
post #14
post #3

The English language is certainly one of the most flexible ones, on the positive side, and one of loosest ones, on the negative side. In English, even the most stupid thoughts sound right, just because of the language-culture itself. So, it would certainly be very exciting to have e.g. a perfect programming language, expressing itself in say Arabic or Hebrew; but, on the other side, computers and real intelligence (o…

What specifically makes English "loose"? What makes other tongues "tight"?

While I consider the parent a troll, English is a pretty grammatically odd language among western languages since has dropped a lot of the rigid formalities common in Germanic languages. Also subtlety in the English language tends to come from importing words from other language bases (French, notably) whereas in other languages that's conveyed by modifiers. So it's not really true to call English imprecise, just precision in English comes through subtlety rather than formal structures.

All of that is of course largely irrelevant for programming as the small subset of English words that are used are given precise formal meanings which could be readily exchanged for equivalents in other languages.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#18

They don't seem to distinguish between the language itself and the API. I'd think for many languages the core keywords wouldn't be too hard to translate... Translating the .NET API would be a bigger call (there seem to be examples of this there).

Yeah, just translating keywords doesn't make language very different.

But languages such as Nadeshiko (なでしこ) http://nadesi.com/, a Japanese programming language, may be a challenge for non-Japanese speakers. Its source, especially one- or two-liners, just look like natural Japanese sentences. That means there's no explicit word boundary, and the parsing is based on the particles instead of word positions. (Longer program shows indentations and structures, makes it resembles to other proramming languages).

It's not a joke or experimental language. It aims at scripting for end users, and has pretty decent GUI/database/network bindings. Even a book was published.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#19
post #11

I suppose it's only right they focused on HUMAN languages, otherwise you'd see machine language up there. Most forms of assembly have always felt like a different language to me ... Someone needs to invent "gibberish" or "crazy cat lady". What kinds of humorous programming languages are there? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is INTERCAL

Whitespace, Shakespeare, LOLCode, Homespring (the Salmon-oriented programming language), and of course, Visual Basic.

Edit: the "Visual Basic" was my attempt at a joke, but then I googled in "Invisible Basic", thinking that some crafty hacker out for a laugh would have made such a thing. Unfortunately, I don't think this http://invisiblebasic.sourceforge.net/ is a joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_languag...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_langua...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

http://xeny.net/files/Homespring-Proposed-Language-Standard.... [PDF link]

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#20
post #3

The English language is certainly one of the most flexible ones, on the positive side, and one of loosest ones, on the negative side. In English, even the most stupid thoughts sound right, just because of the language-culture itself. So, it would certainly be very exciting to have e.g. a perfect programming language, expressing itself in say Arabic or Hebrew; but, on the other side, computers and real intelligence (o…

I designed a Lisp dialect in Arabic, there is Arabic C called Jeem:

http://www.jeemlang.com/index.php?page=examples

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