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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

#611

Post by michaelmrose »

egypturnash wrote: post #497
jiofih wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it’s a good joke, in reality it does not compute. “Learning a new language” as in programming language, sits in the days-to-months range, while “learning a new language” as in Arabic takes months-to-years, so you’re building a much, much deeper chasm for others to cross and contribute, even though the source code remains English-based. You can already see this happening with some open source libraries coming fr…

How large is the chasm for a new programmer whose native language is Arabic?

It's pretty high. We could make it lower by helping people learn English but tools to program in their existing language so they don't have to learn English first make sense too.

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

#612

Post by pyrale »

azernik wrote: post #180
jamil7 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good point. While non-english programming languages haven't caught on I have experienced German documentation, comments and variable names in a codebase.

One of the more well-known examples, and one that made me double-take when I saw it - from PHP 3 onwards, when a pair of Israelis rewrote the parser, a common and confusing syntax error was "unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM". Which is Hebrew for T_DOUBLE_COLON. In PHP 5.4, they helped the situation somewhat by changing the error message to "unexpected '::' (T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM)" - I suspect national pride was inv…

This choice is also good for search optimization.

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

#613

Post by kazinator »

p_l wrote: post #479
wostusername wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conditionals are not functions in Lisp. They are 'special forms' since they have to control the evaluation of their arguments and functions always evaluate all their arguments. So, if you want to translate a lisp into another language you have to resort to macros.

None and none, as what you need is to alias the symbols for most lisps.

Yes; alias the symbols that are macro operators or special operators via macros, and alias other kinds of symbols in their respective namespaces.

Variables may also have to be done with macros, because you want an assignment to a translated variable name to appear in the original variable. Some Lisp dialects perhaps allow a variable cell to have a binding to two or more symbols which could do the same thing.

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

#614

Post by xrd »

romwell wrote: post #609
xrd wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know of good English reference off the bat of my head, for obvious reasons. I'll try to find some, but in the meantime check out these code samples: https://gist.github.com/alexaandrov/739e16e1786ab2b3d6bc https://guesto.ru/1c-razrabotka-konfiguratsii-menedzher-zada... Etc

Thanks. I like this comment in the gist:

Сообщить("Hello Wold");

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

#615

Post by johnisgood »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #560
johnisgood wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry, what? I do not dismiss my own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries. Not at all.

Clearly you dismiss other cultures as inferior to your own, though.

No, I clearly do not dismiss other cultures as inferior to my own, though.

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

#616

Post by pyrale »

marcoseliziario wrote: post #605
pgeorgi wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tech community greatly benefits from settling on a lingua franca Maybe we see that in a few years, with everything moving to Chinese. > Imagine if everyone posted on StackExchange using their native tongue. Imagine users going to forums in their own language. People actually do that.

Probably the Chinese will embrace and extend the English language, the way the US did.

The US did not embrace english, the US were a set of english colonists who managed to absorb lots of foreigners with the clear contract that not adapting to their culture/language would result in bad outcomes.

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

#617

Post by watersb »

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…

Thank you. Exactly.

A world of seven billion people, many opportunities for genius.

I have been surprised that non-English programming languages have not become even more common.

In my father's time, a university student of engineering or chemistry was strongly encouraged to learn basic German, in order to keep up with the state of art as published in leading professional journals.

Maths students would still do well to learn to read Russian.

English need not be forever.

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

#618

Post by guggle »

fastball wrote: post #485
guggle wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, but I don't get your point.

Your underlying point seems to be that the world would be better if we all spoke one language. I disagree, and to my mind programming is no different than linguistics in this regard.

Sorry, there is no underlying point.

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

#619

Post by musicale »

I've also been puzzled for a long time about the seeming shortage of computer languages that don't use English/ASCII keywords, though probably there are more of them than I am familiar with.

Lisp has some strange keywords (CAR, CDR) that are ASCII but not exactly English. APL relies more on non-ASCII symbols.

AppleScript is one programming language that at one point had at least 3 customized dialects (English, French, Japanese.) For example:

"the first character of every word whose style is bold" "le premier caractère de tous les mots dont style est gras"[1]

Sadly modern macOS AppleScript seems to omit the non-English dialects (although the "professional" computer language-like syntax is now available via OSA, JavaScript, etc..)

[1] Cook et al., Applescript, HOPL III, 2006

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

#620

Post by ChuckMcM »

This was fascinating for me. I had an experience early in my career where I was given some code written by a Spanish engineer to port, and the Spanish comments and variable names kept interfering with my ability to see the code structure. I ended up converting all the variables to simple letter/number sequences and removing all the comments in order to get past that.

Years later I read papers by linguists which described concepts in one language that were no expressible in another language. That too seemed pretty amazing to me since something like snow is snow right? But English typically has adjectives doing the heavy lifting to distinguish different kinds, but the Inuit people had even more words[1].

The idea that it might be possible to express computation differently in different languages, or perhaps even more effectively, seems really intriguing.

[1] "Yet Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Washington, believes that Boas was careful to include only words representing meaningful distinctions. Taking the same care with their own work, Krupnik and others charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and concluded that they indeed have many more words for snow than English does." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there...

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