Non-English-based programming languages
en.wikipedia.org
Non-English-based programming languages
1–10 of 228 posts
Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#2I 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'. So, the programming language would be really verbose.
Also, since programming originates from the western world, we never really have Thai words for many concepts in programming. I've been programming for years, and I have no idea how to say 'software', 'hardware', 'class', 'inheritance', 'encapsulation', 'abstraction', 'refactoring' in Thai.
Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#3One 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....
Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#4Perl in Latin: https://metacpan.org/pod/Lingua::Romana::Perligata
Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#5Programming languages and human languages are really not the same thing at all, unless maybe you consider some extreme outliers like AppleScript[1]. It seems like the choice of character set would make a bigger difference. Most of the today's popular languages would seem to be strongly impacted by making them compatible with code that is entirely in 7-bit ASCII. I don't know enough about other character encodings to try to imagine how they might make for a very different programming language design. What would a Chinese-influenced programming language look like if its designer(s) had never had any exposure to alphabetic or syllabic writing systems?
Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#6One 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.
Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#7I 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'.…
You should just make Thai Objective-C. Their method style is to write things verbosely like “didFinishLoading” or “willAppearInBackground”.
Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#8Many languages these days support Unicode, so you could technically write them in whatever you want. I think it's great that the world has settled on a popular, relatively easy to learn language. It helps immensely with sharing open source libraries worldwide. However it would be nice if doc formats ala Javadoc had provisions for translation.
Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#9Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#10I 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'.…
“class” and “inheritance” are just abstractions of the very traditional meanings of these two words. I’m sure Thai has to have equivalents for those?