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قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

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Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#11

Post by est31 »

Santosh83 wrote: post #5
Animats wrote: post #3

Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

A translator that takes say C code written in a non-English language and spits out ASCII C (except for variable/function names) ought to be simple.

Providing a mapping from utf-8 to ASCII is easy, e.g. punycode. The problems arise when it comes to things like checking equality of two identifiers, as it becomes non-trivial in general Unicode: https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#13

Post by jansan »

Animats wrote: post #3

Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

There were localized versions of Visual Basic for Applications in Office 95, at least there was a German one. I had the "pleasure" to use it once, and I can tell you it was no pleasure at all. The first problem was that for some keywords there is no obvious translation (for example "if" can be translated to "falls" or "wenn"), so I had to look up the keywords again and again. Then of course it wasn't easily possible to transfer code snippets from English VBA projects, so everything had to be converted (by hand at that time). And for some reason certain keywords were not localized at all (for example 'DIM'). Turned out the whole localization was a horrible idea.

Here is a piece of code in German VBA for Excel 95: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications?...

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#14

Post by JBorrow »

Santosh83 wrote: post #5
Animats wrote: post #3

Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

A translator that takes say C code written in a non-English language and spits out ASCII C (except for variable/function names) ought to be simple.

Well, yeah. That already exists if you go to any non-english speaking country and look at the coursework of people doing introductory C classes...

#define pour for #define ent int etc...

I think these don't really capture the whole idea around creating a programming language in another language, though...

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#15

Post by wruza »

Animats wrote: post #3

Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

We have 1C here in Russia. It is not very advanced language-wise, but if you list COBOL as serious, well, it is.

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#16

Post by boudin »

Animats wrote: post #3

Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

There's also wlanguage that supports french, english and chinese https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLangage (in french)

It's part of the dev environment windev which is totally closed and (at least last time i had to use it) doesn't allow to use any tools like git (sources are encrypted). This and the fact that the whole environment was extremelly bugy (and even the language itself) makes it a real nightmare to work with. That's the only other example of non english programing language I can think of though

Edit: just found this article on wikipedia after writing this. There's quite a few languages:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programmin...

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#17

Post by jansan »

gedy wrote: post #12

I've always wondered why this is not more common. Is there a reason you can't just have localized keywords in each language that map to the same thing? Chinese JavaScript, etc?

Microsoft tried it for VBA in Office 95. It turned out to be a horrible idea. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21352796

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#18

Post by sqrt17 »

Animats wrote: post #3

Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

The Amstrad CPC (under CP/M I guess) had a French LOGO, where it wouldn't be "forward 10" but "avance 10".

I think what mostly kills the appeal is 1) The actual keywords in the language are not that many (<50) and have a technical meaning where knowing English is only of limited help. 2) Much of what we do today uses library of code from others, where either you limit your audience by using non-English function (and/or class) names or you use English function names and hope that everyone will understand them to the necessary degree.

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#19

Post by bestouff »

Animats wrote: post #3

Oh, it's just an art project. We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

There were other French programming languages, e.g. Logo in French which was used in schools along a physical turtle (see http://gautard.pierre.free.fr/la_tortue_jeulin_t2.htm for a picture) that you could pilot to draw on big sheet of papers, or WLangage from WinDev. But AFAIK all these were just translations of English programming languages, not original creations. And didn't really caught on.

Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic

#20

Post by ecmascript »

gedy wrote: post #12

I've always wondered why this is not more common. Is there a reason you can't just have localized keywords in each language that map to the same thing? Chinese JavaScript, etc?

That is a really great way of geofencing programming as a job where you can use the same knowledge basically everywhere. A really terrible idea imo.

But there are already (joke) projects that do this:

https://github.com/frozzare/fikascript

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