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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

#511

Post by pgcj_poster »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #239
j-pb wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good point. There's just one problem: any moron can still be able to become a programmer if they come from an anglophone country. Therefore, I propose that all companies in English-speaking countries switch to using Linotte[1], which is based on French. I'm also going to submit a patch to GCC that will require the user to solve a differential equation before their code will compile. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

> any moron can still be able to

Whoops, proved my own point.

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

#512

Post by cesarb »

jackjeff wrote: post #478
goatinaboat wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml is French but mysteriously it is neither in French nor particularly popular in France. France could be a global powerhouse of programming if only they could see what’s right under their noses.

Frenchman expat here. I do recall OCaml being somewhat popular among teachers and professors some 20 years ago. All the coding I learned in high school and then the first years of college was in either Basic, Pascal, OCaml or Matlab. I did not touch C or Java which were a lot more popular in the late 1990s until I started a my Softare Engineering degree. As for French not being used in keywords, I found that state of…

> For example, an accessor would be named `getUtilisateur()` instead of `getUser()`, simply because all the equivalents for `get` and `set` are super long and fastidious to type.

If that's Java, there's more to it than simply being "short". Since Java (unlike C#) doesn't have native properties, methods following that JavaBeans naming convention are treated as property getters and setters (often using reflection). That is, the methods "String getUtilisateur()" and "void setUtilisateur(String value)" are treated as if the object had a property named "utilisateur". Any other naming convention won't work, since everything that wants to access an object's "properties" will be looking for them only with the JavaBeans naming convention.

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

#513

Post by t0mek »

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…

Since there's a lot of effort in this thread to deconstruct the joke, I just want to add that FORTRAN is probably reference to the classic "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" [1]. In fact, the whole comment would fit there nicely.

> If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.

[1] https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

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

#514

Post by knolax »

coldtea wrote: post #152

> Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. There are lots of "cultural biases in computer science" -- in UI, neural network training, encodings, terms of service, etc. Of all of them, this is the least helpful, and the least important. It's like doing math in local notation, or translating latin/greek terms doctors…

> or translating latin/greek terms doctors all over the world are trained and understand

A cursory glance at a glossary of Japanese medical terms suggests otherwise[0]. The thing about biases is that usually you don't notice them.

Language is completely othogonal to most tasks. If you live in Japan you would probably prefer your GP focus on studying medicine in school instead of Greek/Latin on the off hand chance a foreigner asks them "why his primaris longus hurts". The same with programming, I'm pretty sure most programmers are interested in computers first and foremost, not learning about English subject verb agreement so they can read documentation.

[0] https://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/n5_04_10.html

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

#515

Post by OptionX »

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…

Ikr? I mean since when does having a lingua franca ever helped any kind of scientific or technical progress? All those people writing in latin and greek despite not being their native language were just sheep trying to fit in. Like that Newton guy, just your typical apple-hipster trying to be one of the "cool kids".

I think of myself as eclectic taster of the many fine cultures worldwide and since I just got python to print Hello World in the console I'm moving on to learning Swahili. It should take about a week. It's all just different languages anyway.

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

#516

Post by codetrotter »

CodeCube wrote: post #404
skykooler wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think it would be --lang=deutsch. Gotta internationalize the command-line flags too!

I think you mean, --sprache=deutsch

You are all being silly.

Obviously we would translate the name of the command itself, and the language would be implied

  riesenschlange main.py

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

#517

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

acdha wrote: post #417
falcolas wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, most non-English countries teach children English in their version of middle school. And most English speakers aren’t like the stereotypical French; English speakers are quite tolerant of both sentence structure mistakes and extreme dialects. They’re not really at that great of a disadvantage.

That's a cascade of unsupported assumptions: have you really never heard someone complaining about non-native speaker's use of English, using it to say they aren't qualified for a job, etc.? “most non-English countries teach children English in their version of middle school” in particular is really dubious unless you're cherry-picking a handful of small, affluent countries. I've known a number of people who moved to…

> have you really never heard someone complaining about non-native speaker's use of English, using it to say they aren't qualified for a job, etc.?

Yes, that's true, but I think it's important to make a distinction.

What you are referring to is, more often than not, just plain racism. It's sad, and unfortunately (at least in the US) more people are feeling emboldened to spout their racist views.

However, that shouldn't cloud the fact that in general English speakers are much more able to understand sentences with tons of grammatical or structural errors if the gist is right. I contrast that with French - when I was in France and would make a small error in verb conjugation or intonation people would just respond with blank stares. And they weren't looking down on me, they just really didn't understand what I was saying.

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

#519

Post by timerol »

yorwba wrote: post #412
AimHere wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if it's not such a huge barrier for a foreign programmer to program in an English-centric computer programming language, surely the same can be said about non-Arabic speakers who might want, or have to deal with this language?

The problem is not so much non-Arabic speakers having difficulty dealing with the language, since they're not really the target audience. But if an Arabic speaker tries to use this language to write a program for some specific use case they have, they'll have to work around the complete lack of ecosystem that comes with a novel language in a tiny niche. It's the same reason why Chinese developers haven't banded toget…

As mentioned in the top comment on this article, this is why the software community avoids fractures by programming entirely in FORTRAN. /s

Your comment is an argument against any new programming language.

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

#520

Post by aezakmi »

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…

Another episode of hackernews is socially inept.

Good work!

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