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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

#121

Post by usrusr »

globuous wrote: post #88
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 open office calc (and ms excel i guess) !! Its a huge pain for me actually. Once my grandpa needed help with an OOo calc sheet because his bank csv exports were super dumb and listed price columns as strings with the unit symbol as opposed to just the number. So i split the string and casted to number on my ooo calc (in english), but the casting didnt work on his french ooo calc. I spend the next 40 minutes t…

One of the early sins of office file formats, translating formula symbols not just in presentation but right down in the persistent form.

If memory serves me right, back when MS Office macro viruses were the threat du jour, there was already a bit of a remedy in place for those formats that would translate the formulas and macros of incoming files from a different language version of the same software. This caused secondary waves of "mutated" viruses that had crossed multiple language barriers and came back slightly different but still working, foiling the efforts of checksum based virus scanners.

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

#122

Post by tom_mellior »

throwaway_bad wrote: post #51
lifthrasiir wrote: post #6

Retrofitting an existing language with flexible syntax (in this case, LISP) to non-English languages is relatively easy. They are not necessarily bad and can be useful for learners and casual users, but deviating from ASCII alone doesn't remove a cultural bias as the OP states. Programming languages have to be developed from scratch to fit to other spoken languages and cultures in my opinion. I'm aware of multiple (n…

Now that I think about it, languages that aren't subject-verb-object probably find OOP insane. I tried to find an example of this and found a somewhat related article about how Japanese grammar maps nicely onto ruby: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/learning-japanese-the-rubyist-wa...

> Now that I think about it, languages that aren't subject-verb-object probably find OOP insane.

I'm not sure if that's true in this generality. After all, "agent.doSomeThingWith(object)" is not a declarative sentence, it's a command. So you'd have to look for languages where imperatives don't have subject-verb-object (as an acceptable) order.

I'm sure there exist some, but at least I would expect them to start with the agent you are commanding.

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

#123

Post by jdnenej »

yodsanklai wrote: post #67
jdnenej wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native English speaker and I also don't really get what "for" was meant to mean. At this point it's probably just something that everyone has memorised and part of history.

I'm not a native speaker, but "perform this task, for i in {1,2,3}" seems to make sense as a prose. At least it does in French, when translated literally.

In python it makes sense but when you have `for(let i=0; I<length; I++)` it makes less sense

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

#124

Post by mhd »

mschuetz wrote: post #28
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?

Excel seems to be localized and I absolutely hate it. A german version of excel expected me to write WENN instead of IF, or SUMME instead of SUM. It's dumb. Especially since if you're trying to look up code snippets or how to do something in excel, you'll find one in english and then have to find the corresponding german commands.

Yeah, the pain whenever I have to remember what HLOOKUP is in German.

And a similar feature made CSV even worse.

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

#125

Post by makapuf »

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.

maybe not serious, but excel functions are translated I think ?

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

#126

Post by dukoid »

Fordec wrote: post #69
babuskov wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems. Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.

Originally it was a Anglicization of "für" in German first used in a programming language called Superplan which was then picked up upon by FORTRAN and then it just stuck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Rutishauser

I don't think it's much more intuitive in German than in English, probably goes back to the "for each" quantor.

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

#127

Post by jdironman »

eru wrote: post #116
WalterBright wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's only like 20 keywords to learn. I wish people who come up with all these inscrutable icons would realize that.

Why is learning 20 inscrutable icons harder?

You're wording is interesting and has me thinking. Why think of these words individually, with their individual characters, as a burden of the English lexicon, and instead think of the words as an image in their entirety. So thats it's almost programming by picture.

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

#128

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

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.

IDK if Excel functions can be called a "serious programming language", but their local names are driving me nuts.

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

#129

Post by darkwater »

eru wrote: post #116
WalterBright wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's only like 20 keywords to learn. I wish people who come up with all these inscrutable icons would realize that.

Why is learning 20 inscrutable icons harder?

Because they are tiny and can be unreadable at perfectly normal font sizes.

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

#130

Post by jaclaz »

probably_wrong wrote: post #44
jansan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the bane of my existence when working with Excel. I'm spending too much time figuring out that "RAND" (which is what you'd find in search) is "ZUFALLSZAHL" in German Excel (which I use at work) and "ALEATORIO" in Spanish (which I use at home).

JFYI, what I often do for those functions I am not already familiar with both in Italian and English (it doesn't work for really all functions) is to use the English original I find in (the English version of) Spread32 (an extremely small Excel compatible program):

http://www.byedesign.co.uk/

then save the worksheet and re-open it with the Italian Excel, since the functions are actually saved internally as an "ordinal" (or whatever) and interpreted by Excel in its "local" language.

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