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Non-English-based programming languages

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Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#31

Post by FpUser »

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…

Couple of times I saw programs written in Russian versions of Basic and some other, forgot which one. Never mind programming even trying to understand it blew my brains out. Russian being my native language I could never imagine writing software in it. I also have the same feelings about the songs as you just described. So all in all completely agree with you.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#32

Post by asveikau »

qznc wrote: post #21

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…

> We could use this to have three possible namespaces, so "der Foo", "die Foo", and "das Foo" would refer to three different things.

You're reminding me of perl, where $foo, %foo, and @foo can coexist.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#33

Post by jnurmine »

The Wikipedia list does not mention Tampio, an OO language where programs are written in proper Finnish: https://github.com/fergusq/tampio

As an example, here is kertoma.itp (an example routine to calculate a factorial):

  Pienen luvun kertoma on
      riippuen siitä, onko se pienempi tai yhtä suuri kuin yksi,
      joko yksi
      tai pieni luku kerrottuna pienen luvun edeltäjän kertomalla.
  
  Luvun edeltäjä on se vähennettynä yhdellä.
  
  Olkoon pieni muuttuja uusi muuttuja, jonka arvo on nolla.
  
  Kun nykyinen sivu avautuu,
      pieneen muuttujaan luetaan luku
      ja nykyinen sivu näyttää pienen muuttujan arvon kertoman.
It sounds basically like a small part of a mathematics lecture.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#34

Post by nneonneo »

qznc wrote: post #21

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…

Oddly, all three examples have analogues in real programming languages already:

- in many C-derived languages, a “list of objects” is spelt “object[]” as a type, with the “list” (array) specifier postfixed. (Functions declared to return arrays take this syntax to quite an interesting extreme.)

- in Perl and some derivative languages, sigils serve as a prefix to denote context of use or type; $var is different than %var or @var, for example.

- In Ruby, a leading uppercase character defines a constant, and some aspects of the language are sensitive to the case of the identifiers used.

Of course, it’d be super interesting to put many of these ideas into a single language, as it could well be quite different (and refreshing!) than many of the languages we use today.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#35

Post by malodyets »

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…

Programming uses the same words as regular English, but it is a completely different linguistic register, so there is never any conflict. It’s like working in any field with its own jargon — you use the meaning that is relevant to the context. In linguistics this is called the Relevance theory of meaning and interpretion, which explains why we do this contextual interpretation easily and mostly without thinking about it.

I am a native English speaker and former ESL teacher with a masters degree in applied linguistics, as well as veteran developer.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#36

Post by mauvehaus »

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…

Many years ago, in elementary/primary school I went to a computer camp when I was living in Belgium. We used Logo in French on Macs. I don't remember much, but the keyword for random was 'hazard'.

My experience was actually not bad; I didn't have any trouble associating the words with the abstract concepts involved in sending the turtle around the screen. I was doing fairly simplistic stuff though, I'll concede.

I wonder if instead of decoding words when programming "in the hardware", we form new associations for the (relatively) limited set of keywords languages provide? I mean, in most code, the words provided by the language make up maybe 5%-10% of the code. The names we give things seem much more important.

To your point of not being able to tune out inane heard content in my native language I agree. I'm not proficient enough in any others to have tried it, sadly.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#38

Post by pasabagi »

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 remember the english associations of programming words being pretty confusing, to be honest. Generic, for instance, means a standard or non-descript object. Abstract, for another, means something without concrete existence. Static means something that doesn't move, or electrostatic charge. Void is a pretty archaic/unusual word for a space. All these things are a little bit like how they are used in programming languages, but I imagined it would have been easier for me if I'd started out knowing I don't know, rather than trying to figure out how stillness, motion, concrete and abstract, relate to functions.

As english, I think programming language mostly comes somewhere between willful butchery and deep elegance. Some words are like a weird riff off newspeak (grep, troff, etc), some words are obvious cultural artefacts of people trying to show how pragmatic and unpretentious they are (Factory, Object, Bash, etc), while others are trying to show some kind of inculcation, like maths terms, or stuff from electronics, but all of it has this great feeling of cultural-technical history. Some are these weird mysteries, like, why did early teletype use allcaps? Isn't lower case more legible? Did the entire early history of programming get written in shouts because the earliest users were military guys that liked shouting?

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#39

Post by jmull »

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…

> the thought that native-English speakers probably have a rather different experience with programming languages

I know what you mean, but I think you get over it quickly. There's a switch in mental context as you start to code and the fact that certain keywords mean something in your native language just doesn't matter.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#40

Post by komali2 »

mauvehaus wrote: post #36
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…

Many years ago, in elementary/primary school I went to a computer camp when I was living in Belgium. We used Logo in French on Macs. I don't remember much, but the keyword for random was 'hazard'. My experience was actually not bad; I didn't have any trouble associating the words with the abstract concepts involved in sending the turtle around the screen. I was doing fairly simplistic stuff though, I'll concede. I wo…

Interesting, I hadn't thought about"random" much, but hazard kinda makes sense even in English. Like "allow me to hazard a guess."
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