Imagine thinking cultural hegemony is good.
قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
171–180 of 657 posts
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#172Oh, 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 haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language
There are such languages. Mostly DSLs, but here[0] is a general language from a Russian ERP system. Every keyword has both English and Russian equivalents. There are tons of maintained code written entirely in Russian, including business-critical.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#173First time I've seen non-ASCII language around 7-10 years ago. It was 1C language, it's very alike to Visual Basic but all in Russian. I think it was very good idea to use Russian for that, it's embed language for platform developed for local market. So to start you don't need to know English, which is probably the main barrier in former USSR to become a programmer.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#174This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does. This is the same reason…
At worst it's about as "useless" as other niche programming languages like Brainf* and the like.
While this language doesn't seem to be geared towards introducing people to computer science, all the languages based on English require someone to learn that script, that language and some of its culture first before being able to use it.
And in much of the world people don't regularly start learning English (or a latin script for that matter) in elementary school. A language based on Arabic (or Chinese, Korean, etc) could help with introducing computer science in school before the students master English at the necessary level...
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#175Assuming there is merit to the idea that the Latin charset gives unfair disadvantage for people from other cultures (I think not(1)), then a language should be formed from a culture neutral alphabet - say, klingon. It better have a number of glyphs in the vicinity or 30 or so (for typing ease) no funky char combining rules (for reading ease) etc. And it would still need guidelines for naming functions, variables, not to mention pronouncing them (these could of course be localized rules) etc. My guess is that it would be a Latin like script, only with different glyphs. And of course, all var and function names would be hopeless gibberish, unless we all decide to become klingon/whatever fluent.
(1) At the very least, someone should explain why the rise of - say - the russian and indian programmers, given the unfair barrier.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#176It would be more ironic if integer constants had to be written as Roman numerals.
Brilliant.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this is an ironic post, hats off to you.
Dear tsanummy, help us to find the irony in my post or better the message in your post. So, what's your point? I'd love to know what you are talking about. Just to give another example: Imagine all countries in the world had the same language and people could move freely: You had massive and full competition between all nations/cities/economies for the best people and competition is good. Nobody is locked-in because…
As an addition to the question about where you are from that was already asked, how many languages do you speak?
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#178This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does. This is the same reason…
This comment is a good way to see all the HN users who go off of a comment without reading it fully.
Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#179This is at best useless, and at worst harmful. If we start using languages other than English for code, then we'll end up balkanizing the software world. People in humanities departments can talk about things like "Chinese Poetry" and "Continental Philosophy," but in STEM, we should be above that nonsense. I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does. This is the same reason…
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Re: قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it never caught on, even in Francophone countries I started programming at least 4 years before I started learning English. In my experience, not knowing what "if" means doesn't change anything because I never thought of code as prose. Whether it's called "if", "si", or "wenn", all that changes in my head is "what's the magic word that I have to insert before I can branch my code?". This, I believe, it's why locali…
Very good point. While non-english programming languages haven't caught on I have experienced German documentation, comments and variable names in a codebase.
One of the more well-known examples, and one that made me double-take when I saw it - from PHP 3 onwards, when a pair of Israelis rewrote the parser, a common and confusing syntax error was "unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM". Which is Hebrew for T_DOUBLE_COLON.
In PHP 5.4, they helped the situation somewhat by changing the error message to "unexpected '::' (T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM)" - I suspect national pride was involved in their refusal to completely remove the internal token name from the error message.