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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

#201

Post by bayesian_horse »

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.

Wikipedia has a list of similar projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

It's really not easy to create a programming language that "catches" on, as readers of hackernews are probably aware. There are a lot of brilliant languages, based on English, wich didn't.

I suspect those international programming languages are not failing because of the language barrier, but rather because they don't add enough value and/or fail to attract a community.

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

#202

Post by C1sc0cat »

Someone wrote: post #82
bloak wrote: post #39

A technical problem with localising a programming language is reserved words: either you decide in advance which localised variants will exist and you can't add any later, or the variants are potentially incompatible and to combine code written for different variants you would need to do some translation that involves changing identifiers, and I can't immediately imagine how that would work with libraries and so on.…

PL/I. The argument there was that one cannot assume anybody to remember all the keywords (over 300 in some implementations. See https://www.cs.vu.nl/grammarware/browsable/os-pli-v2r3/ ), so they weren’t any reserved words, allowing, for example IF IF = ELSE THEN IF = ELSE - 1; ELSE ELSE = IF + 1; Writing a compiler for that must be fun, especially if one wants to produce useful error messages.

On of the reasons that PL/1 didn't take of I believe, a pity as it was very advanced (for its time) and nice to work with.

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

#203

Post by j-pb »

varelaz wrote: post #184
pgcj_poster wrote: post #135

This 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…

A lot of people don't speak English and I think it's main barrier to become a programmer or QA engineer.

Good! We need less shitty software, the fewer people that write it the better.

I don't get why you have to be a certified engineer to build a bridge, but you can be some bloke with a 2 weekend course in python to program medical computers, avionics, train scheduling systems and other stuff that kills people when it breaks.

Non native speaker btw.

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

#204

Post by al_form2000 »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #185
al_form2000 wrote: post #175

Assuming 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…

Maybe one shouldn't take the "unfairness" aspect too far. This project seems to be more about recognizing cultural differences in thought patterns and how they permeate today's computing world. It doesn't seem to be geared towards teaching programming to students who only know Arabic so far. And English is being taught and used extensively in the Indian education system and society in general.

That (cultural differences in thought patterns) is indeed an interesting take (I'd like to hear what Larry Wall has to say about it). I do think it would be best addressed at the background level (say predicate logic or somesuch) than at a programming language level (which is more of a consequence).

Unfortunately, the "unfairness" thing has hijacked many subthreads and it takes the proposal at face value (as in "Wouldn't it be cool if any programming language was available in localized form, charset, keywords and kaboodle?" - no it wouldn't) .

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

#205

Post by pritambaral »

jankotek wrote: post #142
filleokus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't almost all major "modern" languages support that? The list is quite long: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Unicode_variable_names

Scala supports not just variables, but operators. * or + are not part of language, but methods in library.

In symbolic programming languages (like Lisp), very few characters are "part of language", as you say. In fact, some lisps (at least the ones I use: Common Lisp, and Racket) even support reprogramming the reader.

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

#206

Post by EugeneOZ »

varelaz wrote: post #184
pgcj_poster wrote: post #135

This 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…

A lot of people don't speak English and I think it's main barrier to become a programmer or QA engineer.

You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).

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

#207

Post by bayesian_horse »

Yuval_Halevi wrote: post #110

It's actually never come to my mind that there are only English programming languages So programmers in China and Russia also using only English programming language?

There are multiple such languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

And yes, most of the time, Chinese and Russian programmers use the same languages as the rest of the world...

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

#208

Post by TheCycoONE »

al_form2000 wrote: post #175

Assuming 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…

So APL?

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

#209

Post by mattigames »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #192
mattigames wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...said someone in English because saying it on any other language would have stopped him from being understood at all.

And your point is?

Yeah, you seem to be just trolling at this point if you pretend to not understand the huge irony in saying homogeneity is bad in plain English in order from someone from Colombia to understand what your are saying.

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

#210

Post by al_form2000 »

TheCycoONE wrote: post #208
al_form2000 wrote: post #175

Assuming 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…

So APL?

That was what came to my mind, actually.
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