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Non-English-based programming languages

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81–90 of 228 posts

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#81
post #24

Seeing a programming language in your native language after working with English ones, you discover that it looks and sounds pretty ridiculous. My belief is that the native language is ingrained on a low level in the brain, so it's decoded ‘in the hardware’ and directly invokes meanings and associations, whereas a second language goes through at least some level of conscious processing. The very same way, I'm physica…

Programming uses the same words as regular English, but it is a completely different linguistic register, so there is never any conflict. It’s like working in any field with its own jargon — you use the meaning that is relevant to the context. In linguistics this is called the Relevance theory of meaning and interpretion, which explains why we do this contextual interpretation easily and mostly without thinking about…

> Programming uses the same words as regular English, but it is a completely different linguistic register, so there is never any conflict.

Moreover, when you cross over those jargon terms into their regular meaning, hilarity ensues.

For example, you can easily prove that oaks are infinitely tall in winter. Start by observing that in winter, oaks don't have leaves. Then consider the graph-theory definition of "tree" and "leaf".

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#82
post #6
post #3

One of my favorite online April Fools' gags from recent years was when it was announced Scala would become Skala and all of the keywords would switch to German [0]. `val` `var` and `def` would all keep their uniform length by becoming `unveränderliche`, `opportunistisch` and `verfahrensweise` :-) [0] https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2017/04/01/announcing-skala....

I worked with a German version of VBA for a little while. MS soon gave up on this but it was a really weird experience.

I thought VBA was always in english (syntax & APIs). Only excel formulas are displayed translated in the regular Excel UI.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#83

D has support for Unicode characters in identifiers, pretty much the same as C does. But now I think that was probably a mistake. Some people use it, but nobody who wants their code to be editable by the larger community.

JavaScript has virtually always supported Unicode variable names (well, the basic multilingual plane).

https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-identifiers

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming uses the same words as regular English, but it is a completely different linguistic register, so there is never any conflict. It’s like working in any field with its own jargon — you use the meaning that is relevant to the context. In linguistics this is called the Relevance theory of meaning and interpretion, which explains why we do this contextual interpretation easily and mostly without thinking about…

> Programming uses the same words as regular English, but it is a completely different linguistic register, so there is never any conflict. That's debatable. It's impossible for me to say "if" in any context without thinking about programming now. I can't help it.

That's a good point: "never any conflict" describes the final state rather than the growth process.

When I was a younger programmer (as in, during the first few years), I discovered that assuming boolean / formal logic meanings for {if, or, else, and} in communication with my spouse (art + sales, and very smart, though not a programmer or trained in symbolic logic) resulted in, shall we say ... miscommunication. So I had some unintended help in building the separate registers of meaning / communication. :-)

Building separate meaning registers for communication does take some time.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#85
One really annoying thing about using an English-based UTF8-capable programming language with some types of non-English content (e.g. if it's in Serbian) is that you have to switch between keyboard layouts constantly. Sooner or later you end up forgetting to switch back and you start writing your code in say, Cyrillic. And let me tell you, Cyrillic letter A looks exactly the same as Latin alphabet letter A, but will happily break your javascript in the craziest possible ways, like 2 vars not being the same even though they look exactly the same.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#86
post #83

D has support for Unicode characters in identifiers, pretty much the same as C does. But now I think that was probably a mistake. Some people use it, but nobody who wants their code to be editable by the larger community.

JavaScript has virtually always supported Unicode variable names (well, the basic multilingual plane). https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-identifiers

Sure, but do people in general use them?

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#87
post #41

I've seen version of LOGO with all instructions translated into Polish used for education in 80s/90s. It was pretty OK but it wasn't really based on Polish, it wasn't using any features of Polish language, just translated the English commands to make it slightly easier for the kids. To make a programming language based on Polish that captures the core of the language would be pretty strange - variable names would nee…

we used that at school! i can't remember much though – i've used english Logo afterwards and it overwrote most of the polish commands in my memory. the only one i can remember is `np`, the polish equivalent of `fw` ("naprzód" and "forwards" respectively)

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#88
post #2

I used to think about this when I was a student. I could totally make a programming language in Thai. Surprisingly, one of the main issues that I thought of was a cultural one. Thais culturally don't use a single word to encapsulate complex meaning. We use a combination of words to capture that kind of meaning. Just to give an example: a taxi driver is 'human-drives-taxi' in Thai. A barber is 'tradeperson-cuts-hair'.…

>I've been programming for years, and I have no idea how to say 'software', 'hardware', 'class', 'inheritance', 'encapsulation', 'abstraction', 'refactoring' in Thai. I'd argue that if you said most of these words to non-programmer native english speaker, they'd have the wrong connotations anyway. Programming has become (is becoming?) an international language of its own (albeit with outsized influence from english).…

You're right. Native English speakers must have some sort of hard time with English words being repurposed.

I remember at work a colleague asked "how do I kill chubby slave?", which didn't sound strange at the time, since Chubby was an authentication system (IIRC).

But, when thinking about it, that's probably a very offensive sentence in English.

Re: Non-English-based programming languages

#89
post #13

I'd rather see a language with more math-like operator symbols (e.g. for-all, element-of, union, is-proper-subset, etc) and an accompanying keyboard.

i think Agda has a whole bunch of Unicode operators, and you can define your own. you can do that in Haskell as well, but it's pretty uncommon. Perl 6 has some Unicode stuff too
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