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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

#41

Post by grenoire »

springogeek wrote: post #24
guggle wrote: post #21

"All modern programming tools are based on the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin Characters and was originally based on the English Language. As a result, programming has become tied to a single written culture. " And that's good. That means "we" hackers/programmers/developers/coders/whatever share something in common, no matter our culture/country/religion/beliefs/whatever. Heck, I'd even go as far as saying…

It is beautiful, but it's a barrier also. I don't think you should be barred from learning to code because you don't speak a language which uses the Latin/ASCII character set.

I disagree. Calling English keywords in programming languages a barrier is the same as describing symbols in mathematics as a barrier. It doesn't matter which word signals an IF clause, the global uniformity is what is really important.

English has become the basis for the symbols of programming. You should not think of code as prose, it is simply code.

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

#42

Post by babuskov »

probably_wrong wrote: post #31
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.

> 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…

Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems.

Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.

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

#43

Post by jdnenej »

springogeek wrote: post #24
guggle wrote: post #21

"All modern programming tools are based on the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin Characters and was originally based on the English Language. As a result, programming has become tied to a single written culture. " And that's good. That means "we" hackers/programmers/developers/coders/whatever share something in common, no matter our culture/country/religion/beliefs/whatever. Heck, I'd even go as far as saying…

It is beautiful, but it's a barrier also. I don't think you should be barred from learning to code because you don't speak a language which uses the Latin/ASCII character set.

There is no alternative. Mountains of code, documentation, Q&A posts, tooling have all been created in English. Even if you use a programming language that supports your own language you will be crippling your ability. Learning enough English words to use pythonh would be much easier than having to reinvent the world in your own language.

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

#44

Post by probably_wrong »

jansan wrote: post #13
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.

There were localized versions of Visual Basic for Applications in Office 95, at least there was a German one. I had the "pleasure" to use it once, and I can tell you it was no pleasure at all. The first problem was that for some keywords there is no obvious translation (for example "if" can be translated to "falls" or "wenn"), so I had to look up the keywords again and again. Then of course it wasn't easily possible…

This is the bane of my existence when working with Excel. I'm spending too much time figuring out that "RAND" (which is what you'd find in search) is "ZUFALLSZAHL" in German Excel (which I use at work) and "ALEATORIO" in Spanish (which I use at home).

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

#45

Post by Baeocystin »

jrh206 wrote: post #35
guggle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing the point... Everyone has to jump that barrier so that there's no barrier between us, which is much more important.

Native English speakers don’t

English keywords often have only the most tenuous links to their vernacular meaning. It's an unavoidable side effect of how different spoken and programming languages are. Compared to the difficulty of learning programming itself, remembering particular keywords is a tiny fraction of the mental burden.

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

#46

Post by wruza »

guggle wrote: post #21

"All modern programming tools are based on the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin Characters and was originally based on the English Language. As a result, programming has become tied to a single written culture. " And that's good. That means "we" hackers/programmers/developers/coders/whatever share something in common, no matter our culture/country/religion/beliefs/whatever. Heck, I'd even go as far as saying…

That’s good if you write language-agnostic software and live in cool english low level or web bubble. If you take any local business-logic heavy software that uses a big set of terminology, you may regret that it wasn’t written at least by transliteration (better in native). This may be less of a problem for Latin-derived languages. I met this a lot, and it is a reverse problem of what jansan described about VB. You can read ifs and fors, but have no idea what is happening in the code, because names are completely google-translated with no context and then shortened or abbreviated. I highly doubt that non-native speakers could take jobs like that at all, as it is gibberish even for natives.

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

#47

Post by Majestic121 »

jrh206 wrote: post #35
guggle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing the point... Everyone has to jump that barrier so that there's no barrier between us, which is much more important.

Native English speakers don’t

Such is life, sometimes people have an unfair advantage.

But in this case, having a common language is still much more valuable than the unfairness that this common language is the mother tongue of some.

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

#48

Post by grenoire »

jrh206 wrote: post #35
guggle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing the point... Everyone has to jump that barrier so that there's no barrier between us, which is much more important.

Native English speakers don’t

This is such an odd exaggeration; the number of words you have to learn to type are just abysmally small. You don't have to know what the word 'integer' is to know how it works in your code.

I-N-T, three letters, this symbol means that the number does not have a fraction associated with it.

As for the code base and documentation? Well, wouldn't you rather a lingua franca as opposed to trying to Google Translate your way through comments?

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

#50

Post by jdnenej »

babuskov wrote: post #42
probably_wrong wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems. Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.

Native English speaker and I also don't really get what "for" was meant to mean. At this point it's probably just something that everyone has memorised and part of history.
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