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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

#561

Post by oefrha »

michaelmrose wrote: post #552
oefrha wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that one in five person on the planet speaks Chinese as their first language, lack of “foreign” contribution will probably work out okay for them. Global contribution is nice but certainly not necessary. Whoever started the communities have the right to set the rules, using Chinese for (primary) documentation and discussion being one of them. If you don’t like it you can start your own.

Pure numbers mean nothing. Neither a farmer with no internet nor an urban Chinese citizen with a mobile internet but no actual computer is liable to contribute much. There are 800 million Chinese internet users almost all are mobile only. Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much time for public works after 9 to 9 6 days a week.

> There are 800 million Chinese internet users almost all are mobile only.

What's that supposed to imply? Just Googled "number of software developers in China" and "number of software developers in the world". Got 5.79 mil (2017) and 23 mil (2018) as answers. Not sure how accurate but can't be that far off.

> Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much time for public works after 9 to 9 6 days a week.

I didn't pay too much attention to that story, but having talked to a few software developer friends in China myself, I'm inclined to say it may be a widespread problem but probably not universal. Whether that's true or not, I certainly see a fair share of popular open source projects coming from China these days, not one in five of course, but given their relative isolation and my inherent U.S./Western bias the number that caught my eyes are still quite impressive.

Not to mention there are a lot of corporate open source in China as well. In fact, just like in the U.S., a good chunk of high profile open source projects are corporate-developed or corporate-backed.

Moreover, whether one in five is accurate wasn't even the point of my post.

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

#562

Post by oarabbus_ »

Iv wrote: post #86
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.

Honestly I am pretty sure there must be Japanese ones. Seeing how little of English Japanese programmers speak, there must surely be one. EDIT: Of course there is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolittle_(programming_language...

They exist, but it seems the vast majority of japanese programmers are using english-based languages.

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

#564

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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…

Kind of remarkable that when I first read this comment thread, this was the top-rated comment, but while I was posting a short agreement with someone in this reply thread who noted that HN has a collective problem with snark and satire, pgcj_poster's comment was downvoted by people who apparently have a problem with snark and satire.

I would put "/s" here, but when I say there are HN readers who really need to lighten the hell up sometimes, I am not remotely being sarcastic.

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

#565

Post by alexis_fr »

runxel wrote: post #312
fxj wrote: post #229

Visual Basic for Applications has localized Versions. Here is an Example in german, so why not in arabic? Funktion VorherigerGeschaeftstag(dt Als Datum) Als Datum Dim wd as integer wd = Wochentag(dt) ' Wochentag liefert 1 für Sonntag, 2 für Montag usw. Prüfe Fall wd Fall 1 ' Auf Sonntag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zurückgegeben VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 2 Fall 2 ' Auf Montag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zur…

Thanks, I hate it! It's like how every function in Excel is translated as well. `=SUMMEWENNS(…` Complete nonsense, it makes my eyes bleed.

Keyword translation poses MAJOR problems when you open the Excel file on another computer, indeed.

Unfortunately, Excel files were more often opened on other computers than Java files...

To be inclusive is hard. Even if we imagine one Excel version per continent, all Latin-based people would be ok, it would also suit countries that can be globalized under the Chinese or Arabic areas. But the offshore situations with 2 different continents wouldn’t work well.

And sooner or later you end up with one Excel version per alphabet. Russian, Tamil, Farsi, etc.

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

#566

Post by xrd »

romwell wrote: post #108
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.

>We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language Who is "we"? 1C is a Russian-based domain-specific language that dominates accounting in Russia and neighboring ex-USSR countries[1]. It competes with SAP, and made its founder a billionaire[2]. [1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/1С:Предприятие [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/a-russian...

Neither of these two links seem to go into much depth about the language itself. I'm very excited to read more. Do you know if there is a summary in English that explains how it works, and how Russian influenced the language?

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

#568

Post by therealcamino »

shantly wrote: post #428
journalctl wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s fair to assume that there’s a higher incidence of autism on HN than elsewhere (bad social skills can also occur in neurotypical people), but hot damn does it really bug me that HN has such a hard time with snark.

It's not just snark—try dropping a colloquial "all" or "none" in a context where that's clearly what it is, and watch ten people rush to correct you that "well, technically..." Or even carefully qualified statements! I think folks here drop "most" and "typically" and similar words as they read. You have to write poorly , qualifying everything three times and disavowing a bunch of stuff you obviously aren't saying or…

Technically correct is the best kind of correct!

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

#569

Post by mirimir »

knodi123 wrote: post #432
big_chungus wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an obvious difference; English is still the lingua franca. If you're dealing with anything international, you use it because everyone has a decent shot of knowing it; assuming most oss isn't confined to a single nation, english is still the best choice. Plus, for this reason, other nations are usually much better than America about teaching a foreign language.

> English is still the lingua franca Ironic that in order to say this, you used a latin phrase that translates to "language of the Frankish people".

Except that it doesn't mean what you imply.

> The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca, the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from late medieval times, especially during the Renaissance era, to the 18th century. At that time, Italian-speakers dominated seaborne commerce in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire and a simplified version of Italian, including many loan words from Greek, Old French, Portuguese, Occitan, and Spanish as well as Arabic and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" (in the generic sense) of the region.

> In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua means a language, as in Portuguese and Italian, and franca is related to phrankoi in Greek and faranji in Arabic as well as the equivalent Italian. In all three cases, the literal sense is "Frankish", leading to the direct translation: "language of the Franks". During the late Byzantine Empire, "Franks" was a term that applied to all Western Europeans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

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

#570

Post by jiofih »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #527
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly (at least to me) when I had this discussion online in the past the biggest pushback I got against using another language in code was from non-native speakers. They all were highly comfortable, and preferred, that their "work language" was English. For better or for worse, the world has settled on English as the lingua franca for business.

I imagine, however, that you don't hear much from the people who didn't become programmers because their English wasn't good enough.

Because they don’t exist? You can definitely learn programming following local language tutorials. It does not require learning English grammar or a large vocabulary. But you might need to communicate witn other people, especially if you’re doing open source.

I feel there is a point you want to make, but am not sure what it is.

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