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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

#571

Post by pgcj_poster »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #528
pgcj_poster wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that I accept the distinction between technical issues and accessibility issues in the case of programming languages. Any Turing-complete language, given the right tooling, can be used to solve any software problem. Ultimately, we only use languages other than FORTRAN (or even assembly, for that matter) because it's easier.

A grid of rocks in a desert is turing complete. It's not a useful concept for discussing the differences between programming languages, precisely because it's such a low bar. "Any software problem" includes these two extremely common problems, neither of which has anything to do with Turing completeness: * It needs to do something fast * It needs to be written quickly

I wasn't suggesting that Turing completeness means that all languages are somehow the same. To the contrary, I was arguing that languages are differentiated primarily by how easy they are to use for a particular task—in other words, their accessibility.

Execution speed is clearly not the reason why multiple programming languages exist, because assembly is as fast or faster than high-level languages. Rather we use programming languages because they are easy to understand and reason about, allowing us to work quickly, among other things. The usability of a language is impacted by things like whether it has automatic memory management, or whether it uses functions instead of gotos, but also by the vocabulary it uses. Consequently, I see the vocabulary of a language as not particularly different from those other attributes.

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

#572

Post by ripdog »

pgeorgi wrote: post #530
astura wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been talking about "everything will be moving to Chinese in the next few years" for the last ~20 years.

I'm well aware. But China is also the only country (or even bloc) in the world that's aiming for a fully internal supply chain for high tech. Not sure you can transform basic materials into a laptop (to pick one simple example) at scale without China anymore, but China is on a pretty successful track to do that without anybody else. Once they get there, I'm not sure they have a lot of motivation left to do high-tech…

For hardware, perhaps, but the Chinese have no realistic way to replace the rest of the world for software. If they want to sell their hardware to the rest of the world, English is the only realistic language to use for that. I see no evidence of mass learning of Chinese anywhere.

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

#573

Post by microtherion »

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…

German manuals can be weird enough. I still remember one that explains the DEC(x) function as "erniedrigt eine Variable" (It's true that "erniedrigen" can sort of mean "decrement", but it mainly means "degrade").

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

#574

Post by throwaway87378 »

merlincorey wrote: post #502
mhd wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As many other said, with the usual amount of keywords it's really not worth it. It's a bit like Italian words for musical theory. International communication beats the slight learning curve by far. Now, if the natural language has some influence on the semantics of the programming language, it might be useful enough. Doubt it, as most natural languages' grammar is way harder than either English or your average progra…

Speaking of Klingon and natural language influencing programming language semantics, I believe var'aq[0] is said to be structured the way it is to better follow the Klingon grammar. It also supports both English and Klingon keywords, which I think is an important compromise. We already know that powerful programming languages can be built with non-ASCII characters in mind -- see APL, for example. However, we also kno…

> However, we also know that the difficulties of typing these languages without special keyboard support have led to a variety of more English in ASCII language successors such as J/K/L.

The input language has nothing to do with the keyboard. How do you think people type foreign natural languages? This comes up again and again in programming-related online discussions - why is it so hard for people who program software every day to imagine that keyboard input is also mapped by software?

The real reason Iverson used ASCII for J is that in the early 1980s, you had to get an APL character video ROM (code page 907) for your terminal or PC (exactly the same case as for foreign languages). Obviously not a problem at the time for Macs or other computers that use bit-mapped fonts, and has not been a problem for PCs for the past 30 years.

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

#575

Post by Ensorceled »

namelosw wrote: post #431

I'm so surprised so many people think localized programming languages are useless. Let's not forget there are still a lot of people don't speak English. I live in China, and I have seen a lot of kids with great talent in mathematical thinking -- needless to say, they have a great chance to have great computational thinking if they have proper environment. However, there are a lot of kids either having no multilinguis…

I think you are expressing the actual disconnect: "Everybody should program" means we need localized languages, "Programming is a Difficult Profession" means programmers really want to learn English to have access to StackOverflow and many other English only resources anyway so localized languages are not necessary.

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

#576

Post by bdcravens »

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…

Feels close enough that I was able to read it. By context, I think I could learn a few German words this way.

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

#577

Post by rytis »

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.

Not sure if can be considered "serious", but one example could be ЭЛЬ-76 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Эль-76). Sample code: https://ramlamyammambam.livejournal.com/211315.html, and some lecture notes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2e6QHbfGLLMZ094QTZwVmJxMlE... (Russian)

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

#579

Post by codesforhugs »

SamBam wrote: post #476

I was interested in hearing what using Arabic as a scripting language might do to change how code might be written -- not just a translation of words, but are there features of a language that are distinct from English that it would actually change our assumptions about a scripting language? The video mentioned how the ligatures of Arabic can stretch, to allow fixed-width justification, which was neat, although it do…

While originally created for a very different purpose, I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan and other logical languages would be a great basis for computer code.

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

#580

Post by tuukkah »

jacquesm wrote: post #557
gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #500

The negative reactions here claiming that everyone should use English are really disappointing, on hacker news of all places. Nobody is saying we need to rewrite the Linux kernel in Arabic. But a language such as this could be a great tool to introduce programming to people who would otherwise be turned away by the language barrier. What is important is not the keywords for, if else, etc but the concepts of logic and…

I'm wondering how many people would be outright afraid of installing and running a program in a language that they have no chance of reading. This is the rough equivalent that all non-programmers have to deal with everyday.

At least not those people who install proprietary software on their systems.

Also, non-ASCII or non-Latin is just a step on a continuum: obfuscated code, machine language, spaghetti code, non-documented code... Actually, it may be perfectly workable to run the Arabic code through Google Translate and understand the result.

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