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Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

lindbakk.com

1–10 of 75 posts

Re: Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

#2
Funny :) but I think it would work better if the language not only required Nynorsk, but used Nynorsk and not Bokmål for all keywords:

https://ordbokene.no/nob/nn/ellers

I think I also saw "ikke" in there.

And https://ordbokene.no/nob/nn/endreleg isn't a word in any language? The Nynorsk word for it is sadly just "variabel". To make it more interesting, you could require agreement, and instead of "endreleg fart", how about just using the indefinite article for things that are changeable since things that are changeable seem kind of indefinite:

    ei fart = 70
    eit smell = "bang"
    eit fag = "naturfag"
    ein slutt = "."
And of course

    forKvar fart
    forKvar slutt
but

    forKvart smell
    forKvart fag
And if you mess up the agreement you get a red squiggly line, and for every such your grade goes down from 6 and if it's less than 2 your program fails.

Re: Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

#3
What the devil kind of "Nynorsk" allows "kalkuler" in place of "beregn"? And as the other poster pointed out, 'endre' does not actually take the '-leg' ending to make an adjective; not in the written language at least. Your dialect may allow it but that hardly matters. Try 'foranderlig', although I do like the idea of using articles. However, as we have three articles but variability is binary, I suggest we assign 'en' (masculine, firm, rigid) to constants, 'et' (neuter, indecisive, wibbly-wobbly) to variables, and of course 'ei' (feminine) as referring only to collections, into which things may be inserted. That does leave us with the difficulty of how to declare a collection as constant; I suggest

`ei fylke er alltid ["Vestland", "Rogaland", "Troms", "Finnmark"]`

which on second thought suggests that we can just have `alltid` as a const-modifier on `er`. Simpler.

Another point to note is that Norwegian does not allow the Oxford comma; correct grammar is "Johan, Fredrik og Martin". To follow this rule you should require the last separator of a list to be 'og':

`ei fylke er alltid ["Vestland", "Rogaland", "Troms" og "Finnmark"]`

Re: Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

#6

What the devil kind of "Nynorsk" allows "kalkuler" in place of "beregn"? And as the other poster pointed out, 'endre' does not actually take the '-leg' ending to make an adjective; not in the written language at least. Your dialect may allow it but that hardly matters. Try 'foranderlig', although I do like the idea of using articles. However, as we have three articles but variability is binary, I suggest we assign 'e…

This is the kind of quality response that makes HN great.

Re: Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

#8
One of these years I'm going to make a Finnish programming language that enforces the correct case in arguments. And I don't mean silly arguments like camelCase vs kebab-case, I mean grammar.

Some examples to illustrate:

  tiedosto on "foo.txt" avattuna
  tulostin on PRN1
  kirjoita(tiedostoon, "a")
  kirjoita(tulostimelle, "b")
Job security for DECADES.

Re: Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

#9
post #5

After spending way too much time thinking about how I would program in a language I never heard about I realized that as a native Dutch speaker Nynorsk is fairly readable. I'm sold.

As a Norwegian with passable German, written Dutch feels almost like just jumbling some letters around and adding unnecessary consonants... (Spoken Dutch, though, is entirely incomprehensible to me) The language continuum around the North Sea is fairly tight (more so if you consider Low German instead of standard German so you don't need to deal with the effects of the annoying High German consonant shift (think Dag -> Tag, Schip -> Schiff etc.))

Re: Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

#10
> One can make similar arguments about Bokmål and Sami, but people speak Sami. And I would argue that a lot more people speak "pure Bokmål" than Nynorsk.

Very, very few. I used to, as a side effect of being quite asocial and reading a lot as a child, and reinforced by my dads very conservative dialect for western Oslo despite where we were living (half an hour drive out the other side of Oslo; dialects in Norway are very local - in that span you pass through at least one other dialect area). The dialect differences were significant enough that an exchange student in high school who was speaking close to perfect Norwegian toward the end of the year still struggled to understand me.

But even then, I adopted more and more of the regional dialect over time. Unless you're a hermit it's hard not to. And there are basically no place in Norway where the local dialect is pure Bokmål.

There might well be more people who can switch to speak pure Bokmål than Nynorsk, though, because it is the primary written language of far more people, and so its the easiest to slip into if you want to speak "formal" Norwegian. This was more pronounced before, when there was a tendency to see the written languages, and especially Bokmål, as more prestigious, and so you might hold a speech in Bokmål instead of your own dialect, TV presenters favoured "pure" Bokmål or Nynorsk instead of their dielcts etc. That's thankfully changed

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