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Non-English-based programming languages

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Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#111

Post by gugagore »

Thorrez wrote: post #105
narag wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way... has or in English a different meaning than in code? I cringe every time I hear the and/or thing translated to Spanish, usually several times in a row. Not sure if it's the usual mistranslation or it's also idiotic in the original text.

Yes, "or" in English often is more similar to xor in code. For example if someone says "I want pizza or a burger", that person probably does not want both pizza and a burger for the same meal, whereas in programming an equivalent expression would be satisfied if both are true simultaneously. But "or" in English doesn't always mean xor in code. Sometimes it is the same as or in code.

There's another way that or_English is different, as illustrated by this frustrating "joke":

1: do you think it's A or do you think it's not A? 2: yes (assigning a truth value to the or expression rather than indicating which or operand is true.)

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#113

Post by andrewshadura »

aasasd wrote: post #55
tanin wrote: post #2

I used to think about this when I was a student. I could totally make a programming language in Thai. Surprisingly, one of the main issues that I thought of was a cultural one. Thais culturally don't use a single word to encapsulate complex meaning. We use a combination of words to capture that kind of meaning. Just to give an example: a taxi driver is 'human-drives-taxi' in Thai. A barber is 'tradeperson-cuts-hair'.…

I guess Russian is in a better position because it doesn't use compounds so much—but it made the borrowed programming terms into Russian words by freely inflecting them, which is a very Russian trait. Whenever an imported word doesn't sound quite right for Russian, it gets adjusted fast, similarly to how this occurs in Japanese. We now have a set of programming terms that are a mix of: borrowings which already existe…

Interestingly Slovak and Czech have no problems whatsoever to use native Slavic words for technical terms, e.g. súbor for file (literally a collection of data, think сбор/собор in Russian), snímač for sensor (lit. taking off something, similar to the Russian съёмник), obrazovka for screen (place for images; compare to the Russian образ (image) and экран (screen, from the French écran)). There are more but I can't think of any right now :)

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#114

Post by jacobolus »

Stratoscope wrote: post #62
jacobolus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all somewhat sloppy versions of the definitions of these words in common use. “Generic”, “general”, “generalize” and “specific”, “special”, “specify”, etc. all come from the relation between “species” and “genus”, where genus is a larger category containing a species. The use of these in a programming context is not too far removed from the same usage in non-technical conversation or in (non-biology) techni…

> Morse code, which has no lower case. Sure, but Morse code doesn't have upper case either. It doesn't have case ! It just has one set of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, it doesn't specify what case the letters should be represented in when they are not written in Morse code. In my own case (pun intended) I used to copy Morse code by writing it down in my own weird mix of lowercase letters and semi-cursive…

I’m not sure if the early TTY codes, punch card codes, etc. should be considered to have a case either.

It was just the convention to transcribe them using all upper case.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#115

Post by Latty »

tanin wrote: post #88
noonespecial wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've been programming for years, and I have no idea how to say 'software', 'hardware', 'class', 'inheritance', 'encapsulation', 'abstraction', 'refactoring' in Thai. I'd argue that if you said most of these words to non-programmer native english speaker, they'd have the wrong connotations anyway. Programming has become (is becoming?) an international language of its own (albeit with outsized influence from english).…

You're right. Native English speakers must have some sort of hard time with English words being repurposed. I remember at work a colleague asked "how do I kill chubby slave?", which didn't sound strange at the time, since Chubby was an authentication system (IIRC). But, when thinking about it, that's probably a very offensive sentence in English.

There has been a move recently away from the "master/slave" analogy in a lot of projects for a number of reasons including that one, which personally I think is a sensible choice.

Of course, you get plenty of people saying that we should all not care about the origin or other meanings of words in programming, and yet they tend to care deeply about maintaining the status-quo.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#117

Post by walshemj »

ksaj wrote: post #102
jpindar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capital letters didn't mean shouting until after the internet - or at least texting, BBSs and such - became popular.

I think the same for programming languages. For example, all old LISP programs were capitalized. Nowadays we call it lisp and everything is primarily lowercase (Not Even CamelCase). It's pretty rare to see capitalized lisp code these days. Here's a bit of parody code I wrote on the subject. https://github.com/ksaj/Capitalize.Lisp (protip: It doesn't do anything the comments say it does, even though the results appear…

Older versions of FORTRAN where upper case though you could use Mixed case for Hollerith statements (used for Mixed case output)

It was considered a bit flash to use this but for interactive programs input prompts looked a lot nicer.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#118

Post by ocschwar »

zeristor wrote: post #67

What features in a human language would make it the optimal basis for a computer language?

The degree to which words are inflected by context. In English, it's almost nil. In Chinese, it's nil. Lingua Romana Perligata is an amusing example of how to use a heavily inflected language for programming, but it shows why you don't really want to do that.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#119

Post by russellbeattie »

aasasd wrote: post #24

Seeing a programming language in your native language after working with English ones, you discover that it looks and sounds pretty ridiculous. My belief is that the native language is ingrained on a low level in the brain, so it's decoded ‘in the hardware’ and directly invokes meanings and associations, whereas a second language goes through at least some level of conscious processing. The very same way, I'm physica…

I think you're completely right, though I see from the comments that others have different experiences. But to me, the "language" of programming can drive me crazy.

Currently in JavaScript the various forms of "var" and "for" makes me cringe involuntarily when I'm mentally parsing code. "for let foo of bars"?? Gah!

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#120

Post by gizmoduck »

I didn't know about Enkelt[0,1] but I guess this changes things:

```

Enkelt >> var första = "Nej! Jag ville inte att skriver detta!"

Enkelt >> skriv($första)

Nej! Jag ville inte att skriver detta!

```

Pro-tip: You can use LLVM for non-ASCII naming, if you don't want to stick to Enlish-only letters.

[0] - https://enkelt.ml/index.html

[1] - https://trinket.io/embed/python/10bb0ea708?outputOnly=true&r...

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