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Non-English-based programming languages

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Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#41

Post by ajuc »

I've seen version of LOGO with all instructions translated into Polish used for education in 80s/90s. It was pretty OK but it wasn't really based on Polish, it wasn't using any features of Polish language, just translated the English commands to make it slightly easier for the kids.

To make a programming language based on Polish that captures the core of the language would be pretty strange - variable names would need to change depending on the role of the variable in the expression, and the order of the subexpressions in an expression shouldn't matter.

Function names should change too depending on which subject they are called, and most of the time subject name should be skipped :)

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#43

Post by dmitriid »

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…

Note: I'm not a native speaker.

English doesn't have genders and cases [1] so grammatical constructs such as if/then/else, case of, unless etc. suffer much less than when you have gender and case. Oh, god, and plural forms of those.

For a Russian speaker using a PL in Russian is constant pain as your brain tries to add all the missing parts to the words:

   if(count(letters) > limit){
       words.append(word)
   }
etc.

[1] Well, it does have those, but not in the same capacity as other languages.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#44

Post by Kiro »

I don't get all the explanation going on in "Prevalence of English-based programming languages". English is the lingua franca of programming so origin is almost irrelevant. I'm Swedish but if I would develop a programming language I would do it in English, even if it was only for myself so I don't believe the "used English to appeal to an international audience" argument.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#45

Post by ajross »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #37

There are only a few reserved (English) words, most of which are shared among different programming languages. Why is this any more of an issue than all the Italian words used in musical notation?

It's not, it's just fun to think about. Likewise french dominance of culinary terms, etc..

What I find more interesting is actually how removed from spoken English most programming language reserved words are.

Taking C and derivatives: "if" is pretty close, and "while" captures the meaning of the word but not its typical usage. The meaning of "return" is correct, but jargon (yes, you're "going back" to where you were called from, but that's not what people mean when they use the word normally). But from there it gets weird fast: "else" reflects a somewhat odd sense of the word that sounds archaic and stilted in human communication; "for" and "break" have little to no connection to spoken language at all.

As far as type names: "int" makes sense if you took high school math, and "char" abbreviates a real word that no one uses ("letter" is the one we get taught in school). But no amount of literacy is going to tell you what "short", "long", "double" or (weirdest of all) "float" mean, those are all terms of art you need to learn from scratch regardless of what language you speak.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#46

Post by a-saleh »

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'.…

Maybe look at a different programming paradigm then? :)

I remember trying to learn APL and then watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7Mt0GYHU9A and was amused that there is this world where programming is just symbols :D

So maybe look at i.e. something apl-like, or maybe ml or haskell or erlang, where so many things you can do with functions and composing them, or even Prolog, where everything could be thought of as a set of rules/constraints to be solved (I think? haven't programmed in Prolog since uni :) )

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#48

Post by tanin »

WalterBright wrote: post #29
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.

From your 'death tractors' example, now I understand why people are debating changing 'master-slaves' to 'leader-followers'.

Thais wouldn't want to call their machines (or anything or anyone) 'slave' with serious tone. It sounds offensive.

Thinking about it, native English speakers might have internal struggle about many programming words.

As a non-native english speaker, rude/strange/crude/offensive words don't really cause me emotional impact.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#49

Post by c3534l »

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…

> 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.

Yeah, but i and j come from math. I've never seen a math paper where people summed a variable using a capital subscript.

I think it might be more interesting to think about how you write a German version of a language that is meant to be English-like. Something like SQL or Cobol.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#50

Post by jacobolus »

pasabagi wrote: post #38
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 lang…

These are all somewhat sloppy versions of the definitions of these words in common use.

“Generic”, “general”, “generalize” and “specific”, “special”, “specify”, etc. all come from the relation between “species” and “genus”, where genus is a larger category containing a species. The use of these in a programming context is not too far removed from the same usage in non-technical conversation or in (non-biology) technical contexts like philosophy or mathematics.

Similarly for “abstract” (meaning idealized or separated from particular cases) and “concrete”, which have been used in logic/philosophy for a long time.

Static means unchanging.

Void means “empty”, or in a legal context invalid.

> why did early teletype use allcaps

Because it replaced humans listening to Morse code, which has no lower case. Also, the first primitive keyboards from the mid 19th century used something like piano keys, which take up a ton of space, and even still up through the 1960s data transmission was expensive so people wanted to save every possible bit.

You can read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33, etc.

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