Wow, GitHub is not handling that RTL text well. (Or FF on Android is to blame, can't compare at the moment)
English is not my first language and I have recently thought a lot about the impact of language in other fields. Programming is one, but to be fair the number of keywords is very limited and not too hard to learn. We had programming in school and while we already had English as well, I don't think it's a hard requirement.
Science is also very heavily impacted. The primary language is English, so if you are good at physics and suck at language learning - well tough luck because you can't do science without knowing English first. The number of people who's scientific progress and subsequent beneficial impact on the world is stunted, just because they did not learn English...
Your programming language will probably not take off, but I like the idea behind it.
I'm not the creator fyi.
I don't think it was meant to be actually used, it's more an experiment, art piece and passion project
dope, but why?
قلب is a programming language exploring the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming.
It is an exploration of the impact of human culture on computer science, the role of tradition in software engineering, and the connection between natural and computer language
Excel would like to know your location
Jokes aside, alternative command words for different languages make it harder, not easier, to teach programming. I run some excel labs at the start of my course, and trying to troubleshoot students using their own devices set to their mother tongue is pain.
So putting aside the fact that this language is not supposed to be a practical endeavor, I don't think that issue would apply. قلب does not have alternative, localized names, it only exists in Arabic script
True, but I think the principle still holds.
When I talk about a "print", "if", "for" or "while" I am universally understood by the majority of coders. This means, someone with those concepts can use any logic flow making use of those terms with a minimum of learning.
However, if I speak of "gable", "gyr" or "wabbajack", then trouble begins, for now I have no tutorials nor guides. Let us say these are not merely localisations, but new concepts, then the question comes of completeness and how it is proved.
In essence, one either recreates Babel, where no two people can understand one another, and collaboration quickly slips away. Or, one builds a tower upon the sand, that has no logical foundation to anchor it, this rendering it worse than useless to those who learn it.
love this. fantastic work, my friend.
To be clear, I'm not the creator, just sharing it
a great share. thanks.
Sweet, we need more non-English programming languages. I'm surprised that existing programming languages haven't been translated yet.
There are a fair number of them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages
But arguably, as long as the compiler supports unicode, it shouldn't matter that much what language the keywords are in. There are other more important issues impacting how easy it is to program in non-English languages:
- availability of documentation and tutorials
- English comments and API names in common libraries, especially the standard library
- tooling for handling unicode, especially BiDi (which is part of why Arabic is especially tricky) - Vim, for instance, has had an open issue about this for almost a decade: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/204
it shouldn't matter that much what language the keywords are in
Another problem is that the grammars of many well-supported programming languages also mirror English/Romance language grammars. Unfortunately, dealing with that is more than just a matter of swapping out keywords.
EDIT: I may have been unclear; I wasn't trying to imply that this problem is greater than or even equal to the lack of documentation, tutorials, libraries, etc. Just that it's another issue, aside from the individual words themselves, which is often overlooked by monolingual people.
The main issue is programming in a specific language limit who can contribute to those who speaks that language. In that sense English makes sense as it is already a widely used language in a work context. It would probably limit those who are willing to use the software as it makes auditing harder.
well there's Logo which is translated to many languages - e.g. Hungarian in Comenius Logo, so great chance you can instruct at max 4000 turtles on your screen.
also, Excel functions are too localized and using them feels somewhat surreal 😆
