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Non-English-based programming languages

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Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#21

Post by qznc »

It is a fun exercise to take a non-english language, look at its idiosyncrasies, and design a programming language with that.

My native language is German. Some ideas:

* We can take nouns and combine them to longer nouns. A "list of objects" is "Objektliste". Parsing will be a challenge but it makes the language more terse and auto-completion is faster.

* We also have gender specific articles. It is "das Objekt" and "die Liste". We could use this to have three possible namespaces, so "der Foo", "die Foo", and "das Foo" would refer to three different things.

* All nouns start with an uppercase letter, so your loop index must be "I" or "J". We could have user-defined qualifiers (like const) which are distinct from variables because they start lowercase. So where you have to use @ in Python, we just use lowercase.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#22

Post by croisillon »

maxxxxx wrote: post #6
kevsim wrote: post #3

One of my favorite online April Fools' gags from recent years was when it was announced Scala would become Skala and all of the keywords would switch to German [0]. `val` `var` and `def` would all keep their uniform length by becoming `unveränderliche`, `opportunistisch` and `verfahrensweise` :-) [0] https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2017/04/01/announcing-skala....

I worked with a German version of VBA for a little while. MS soon gave up on this but it was a really weird experience.

having learned Excel functions in English and having to use them at work in German makes me always nervous

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#23

Post by nickpeterson »

jhrmnn wrote: post #10
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'.…

“class” and “inheritance” are just abstractions of the very traditional meanings of these two words. I’m sure Thai has to have equivalents for those?

That's a bit specific since OO is just used for reasons of history and inertia. I'm sure Thai has true/false and other mathematical terms, that's probably all that's needed.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#24

Post by aasasd »

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 physically unable to shut off the brain's frantic search for meaning when I hear some inane song lyrics or advertisement in my native language—which causes suffering whenever I get near television. Meanwhile, I'm completely comfortable reading or hearing total drivel in English until I consciously try to interpret it. Similarly, I can't skim in English as fast as I do in my language.

This all brings me to the thought that native-English speakers probably have a rather different experience with programming languages, since the keywords must constantly invoke deeply ingrained associations but that's in turn modified by regularly seeing and thinking of them in the programming context.

КОНЕЦ ЕСЛИ

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#25

Post by noonespecial »

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'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). I think eventually it will be much like the latin used in science and medicine today.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#26

Post by Swizec »

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…

Seeing anything in computers using my native language feels wrong. I think it’s because I learned how to use computers before I learned English well.

For example I learned that to print a line in Pascal you use writeln() at 12 or so. It didn’t occur to me until 10+ years later that writeln is shorthand for “write line”. To me it’s just a symbol with no meaning outside that particular context.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#27

Post by zzzcpan »

interfixus wrote: post #16

Having something like a global standard, inter-intelligibility between languages etc. is an unmitigated Good Thing, and may it never change. Apparently, my English-as-a-second-language compatriots Bjarne Stroustrup, Anders Hejlsberg, and Rasmus Lerdorf agree with me.

And it's not even about English, but about a subset of ASCII on a QWERTY layout - symbols that are inputtable and explicitly marked on pretty much any keyboard. Whether most keywords in a programming language are in English or not is not even relevant. I mean if all keyboards had Greek symbols on them we would have an article about non-Greek-based programming languages.

It's a good thing, I agree. There is no reason to worry either, as uncommon hard to input unicode symbols in the core language is such a huge usability failure, that those languages simply have no chance of gaining any significant mind share.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#28

Post by tomcam »

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…

This is irrelevant to your point, but mad props. Your written English is superb-I would absolutely assume you’re a native speaker.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#29

Post by WalterBright »

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'.…

Back in the 80's, when C++ first became a thing, we tried to find Japanese words for the concepts. Destructors became "Death Tractors", which I always thought was awesome.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#30

Post by dooglius »

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…

As a native-English speaker, when I compare e.g. python's "x and not y" to a more formulaic "x && !y", it really doesn't seem to make much of a difference. I'm curious if you were using a syntax highlighter, that may affect your experience.
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