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Aheui: Esoteric programming language designed for Hangul

155 points by networked 10y ago

aafffooo 10y ago
love it
keepper 10y ago
"about 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet, about 1.3 billion people (18%) use the Chinese script, about 1 billion people (14%) use the Devanagari script (India)"[1] It'll be interesting to see how the Latin alphabet preference in computer languages changes over time. I'm sure whole different paradigms may be possible in different scripts. And people complain about the differences between java and python now... Imagine python vs Aheui or similar lol [1]http://www.worldstandards.eu/alphabets/ http://www.worldstandards.eu/alphabets/
- chickenfries 10y ago
  > I'm sure whole different paradigms may be possible in different scripts. This is like Sapir–Whorf for programming languages. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity) I'm skeptical that programming languages in other scripts would "discover" new programming paradigms inaccessible to languages written with the latin alphabet. Programming languages hardly follow any rules of english grammar, despite most of them being in English.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    I'm also skeptical. The "strong" claims of Whorfianism, that testable things like color perception depend on ones language, have mostly been falsified. I see no reason why programming of computers would be different. Are some languages structured such that it's easier for its native speakers are better at certain programming tasks? Sure, that's plausible. I can imagine that e.g. German programmers would be better at keeping two-page goto-riddled DO loops in their heads. But would Spanish programmers find it impossible? Hardly.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >I'm also skeptical. The "strong" claims of Whorfianism, that testable things like color perception depend on ones language, have mostly been falsified. That's not entirely settled, but even so, those to me are the least interesting (and least expected to be true) aspects of Whorfianism. The social aspects of language influence are much more interesting. That said, I don't see programming languages in other, err, languages discovering any novel ways of programming. That's mostly because in the end they always should just translate to the underlying CPU model and CS concepts, and those are math, they don't change culturally.
      - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        > The social aspects of language influence are much more interesting. Sure, but it's pretty much impossible to make a falsifiable hypothesis in this area that can actually be (ethically) tested. Like, how do you separate the effect of having Japanese as your primary language from the effect of growing up in a Japanese culture (whether actually in Japan or not)? > [CS concepts] are math, they don't change culturally Agree.
        coldtea 10y ago
        >Like, how do you separate the effect of having Japanese as your primary language from the effect of growing up in a Japanese culture (whether actually in Japan or not)? I guess by using people from bilingual societies, who speak one or the other language within the same culture.
- seibelj 10y ago
  You can swap the latin characters for other symbols, but I'm not sure how it will fundamentally change anything. Advances come from thinking of how to formulate abstract concepts differently, like procedural vs. functional programming. The letters themselves are just part of the specification. Perhaps people whose language is radically different from romance languages will approach programming differently because of that, and invent something new.
- tornadoboy55 10y ago
  It won't change because of tremendous legacy inertia. Everything from assembly to scripting languages are in Latin-English. All kernels are Latin-English. CS is taught around the globe as a 100% English major usually. Our first humanoid AI will almost certainly think in 'English' and speak English.
  - aj7 10y ago
    Fat Freddy's cat to a friend cat, while they are watching the dog catcher round up dogs (headed for the gas chamber.) FFC: He does cats, too. Friend cat: That couldn't happen in America!
  - kazimuth 10y ago
    The language of science has shifted before; I don't think it's reasonable to assume it won't again. Then again, English might stay around as a, well, legacy language. I could imagine someone a few hundred years from now studying archaic english, in preparation for a dive into the kernel or whatever. Then again, computer translation will probably have gotten good enough that it won't be necessary.
    - Baeocystin 10y ago
      Honestly, I doubt that it will, barring some civilization-scale catastrophe that resets global progress. I'm not being hyperbolic. As the world has shrunk, and intercommunication has increased, the benefits of being able to access the dominant languages have increased dramatically, and part of that process is fixing what is dominant. English already has the unique distinction of having more ESL speakers than native ones, and has become the lingua franca of world commerce. (And let's pause for a minute to enjoy the incorporation of the phrase 'lingua franca' in to the English corpus, too. I do love how English is completely shameless about taking whatever it wants from other languages to add to itself.)
      - desdiv 10y ago
        >(And let's pause for a minute to enjoy the incorporation of the phrase 'lingua franca' in to the English corpus, too. I do love how English is completely shameless about taking whatever it wants from other languages to add to itself.) The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary. -James Nicoll
- lifthrasiir 10y ago
  For the case of Aheui, it is essentially a Hangul-branded version of Befunge [1] (or if you are interested in the history of esolangs, it is actually more like Orthogonal [2] but Aheui didn't really derive from it). Besides from the fact that Aheui's usage of Hangul is novel, I wouldn't consider it a fundamental paradigm shift. [1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge [2] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Orthogonal https://esolangs.org/wiki/Orthogonal
fohara 10y ago
"This code prints 'Hello, world!' 밤밣따빠밣밟따뿌 빠맣파빨받밤뚜뭏 돋밬탕빠맣붏두붇 볻뫃박발뚷투뭏붖 뫃도뫃희멓뭏뭏붘 뫃봌토범더벌뿌뚜 뽑뽀멓멓더벓뻐뚠 뽀덩벐멓뻐덕더벅 "
- particles_ 10y ago
  As a Korean, I found this hilarious because it's complete gibberish yet you can totally read it out loud.
  - sho_hn 10y ago
    They used to sell a t-shirt with it which I'd love to own.
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    It sounds like the Korean equivalent of Charlie Brown adultspeak.
lifthrasiir 10y ago
I'm one of the initial contributors to the language and went too far with a self-interpreter for Aheui [1] recently. This one is quite old, we have actually had the 10th anniversary event [2] in 2015 (with more than 30 participants)! It surely is a kind of Brainfuck [3] for Koreans. [1] https://github.com/aheui/aheui.aheui/ https://github.com/aheui/aheui.aheui/ [2] https://aheui.github.io/aheuicon https://aheui.github.io/aheuicon [3] I'm of course referring to https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck
memming 10y ago
There are several programming languages using Hangul which are way more readable (hence not esoteric): 씨앗 (1993), 약속, etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...
- memming 10y ago
  According to [2], there was 한베(Hanbae) which was developed in 1991. [2] http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=axes2024&logNo=110120684979 http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=axes2024&logNo=110... (in Korean)
kerkeslager 10y ago
What makes it "esoteric"? It doesn't seem esoteric to want to program in your own language. I'm not saying it's not esoteric, I'm just curious what makes it so. I've strongly considered writing a Spanish-based programming language--Spanish is spoken by more people than English, and Spanish is a first language a larger percentage of Spanish speakers, while for many English speakers it is their second language. It seems like a Spanish-based programming language could reduce cognitive barriers to entry to programming for a large portion of the world. Of course, if the tool chain isn't up to par it will eventually hold users back, but it's at least worth investigating.
- lifthrasiir 10y ago
  Because no Korean would expect a two-dimensional language with the only storage being stacks and queues of integers.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    Wait, that's not how Koreans think? Then explain how they're good at math.
- titanix2 10y ago
  It's esoteric in the way languages listed on this wiki are esoteric: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page It not a programming language where keyword are in Korean but one based on non mainstream concepts like brainfuck.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  Is there any reason you couldn't simply make a Spanish language by taking a well-established English one, e.g. Java, and simply translating the keywords individually using a syntax-aware translator? This transpilation approach is used by lots of esoteric programming languages, and since you wouldn't even be changing the syntax, this would be simpler than most. I suspect the reason this hasn't caught on is that there just aren't that many keywords to learn, and that paying the ongoing tax of having to translate every code example on the web is worse than the one-time cost of just learning the keywords in English. This is for "real" programming use cases anyway; it might be a different consideration for educational languages.
yannis 10y ago
Looking at the github repository there is nothing fundamentally earth shuttering here. It is mostly the normal way of interpreters/compilers representing everything with number codes and then mapping to characters. For example: case 0: //ㄱ case 1: //ㄲ case 11: //ㅇ case 13: //ㅉ case 15: //ㅋ If one goes back a good three decades plus and studies the source of Knuth's TeX, everything was represented by numbers and then all strings, even error messages resided in a TeX.Pool file.
adamnemecek 10y ago
I feel like the HN audience would really appreciate Korean and it's script, as it's said to be one of the most logical languages. You can read more about it here http://asiasociety.org/education/world%E2%80%99s-most-incredible-alphabet http://asiasociety.org/education/world%E2%80%99s-most-incred...
- lifthrasiir 10y ago
  Well, Korean the language is, like most other natural languages, horrible. Hangul is quite neat though.
  - bojl 10y ago
    Why is Korean horrible?
    - adamnemecek 10y ago
      Most languages because they are evolved, not designed.
    - lifthrasiir 10y ago
      In general natural languages are horrible but nevertheless working messes. They always change and each language is subtly different from each others, if not massively different. For example: Korean verb conjugations are massive [1] mainly because conjugations themselves are morphemes (or semi-words, if you don't know what it is) and not mutations or transformations thus the set of conjugations is essentially open. Native Korean speakers can probably easily list hundreds of different conjugations with different meanings. [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXakcsoUkAEMPaj.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXakcsoUkAEMPaj.jpg for example.
      - JoelSanchez 10y ago
        How does it compare to Spanish? We don't have few conjugations either. "To be": http://www.conjugacion.es/del/verbo/haber.php http://www.conjugacion.es/del/verbo/haber.php
palgraham 10y ago
why did I just read this? what am I doing with my life?
pagnol 10y ago
> Hangul is truly an alphabetic system, in which each symbol represents separate phoneme, or sound. Is this true, though? As far as I know ㅔ and ㅐ represent the same sounds.
- DonaldPShimoda 10y ago
  Even if these letters represented the exact same sound, Hangul would still be an alphabetic system, wouldn't it? There are plenty of combinations of glyphs which map to the same sounds in English, e.g. "ay" in "play" and "eigh" in "sleigh" or "weigh". (Although if you're making a point about only the second part of the quote — "each symbol represents separate phoneme" — then I apologize.) I think the author was trying to distinguish between Hangul and, say, written Chinese or Japanese Kanji which are logographic. I've known lots of people in the US who assume the Korean written language functions similarly because "all Asian languages are like that".
  - pagnol 10y ago
    Yes, my question was actually aimed at the second part of the sentence which seemed to suggest that there was a bijection between sounds and symbols. Either way, I can see how what you're saying makes sense.
- otoburb 10y ago
  Similar, but not quite the same if you learned Korean more than 20 years ago. Evidently younger Koreans do not distinguish much between the two sounds.[1] [1] http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2619/how-to-distinguish-korean-ㅔ-e-and-ㅐ-ɛ http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2619/how-to-d...
- shagie 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#/media/File:Hangeul_letter_order.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#/media/File:Hangeul_let... suggests that ㅔ represents 'e' and 'ㅐ' represents 'ae'. The differences between these sounds may be difficult for someone who isn't accustom to the sounds to distinguish. Compare the Japanese with the difficulty of 'l' vs 'r'. And an obligatory Babylon 5 scene with Zathras - https://youtu.be/1j-76eLz1hc?t=1m40s https://youtu.be/1j-76eLz1hc?t=1m40s
mrcactu5 10y ago
this isn't esoteric at all. We are discriminating against Korea when we do not accommodate their alphabet. China and Japan obviously have to accommodate themselves as there is no possibility of having one key for each Kanji (or Chinese character). There was a nice documentary showing arcane Chinese characters or different descendants of the same Chinese characters. Does this encode the font or merely the character (as an entity)?
- lifthrasiir 10y ago
  As mentioned in sibling threads, it is esoteric in terms of programming languages. It's in the same page as Brainfuck and Befunge and the name "esoteric programming language" is well-established [1]. [1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page
- lacampbell 10y ago
  Huh? It's very easy to input Han Characters on modern systems. Most people type it a phonetic alphabet (eg, romanizations like Hanyu Pinyin, or indigenous phonetic alphabets like Zhuyin) and a little program pops up, giving you a list of matching characters, and you select them. Googles ones are very good (they even know regional varions in mandarin pronunciation). It's entirely conceivable for a programming language to be made with Han Characters - because it's a solved problem to input Han Characters on keyboards. Or Have I missed the point of what you wrote entirely?
  - asaibx 10y ago
    > It's entirely conceivable for a programming language to be made with Han Characters Not only is it conceivable, it has already been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_programming_la...
- PeCaN 10y ago
  I'd appreciate if you didn't start getting offended for other people when you clearly didn't read about the language (it's obviously esoteric¹), and also imply that somehow China, Taiwan, and Japan haven't figured out how to use their languages on computers. Also, what does this sentence even mean? > Does this encode the font or merely the character (as an entity)? 1. Unless you happen to regularly use a grid-based Brainfuck.
songzme 10y ago
I'm very curious about this but I cannot seem to figure out how it works (perhaps a little hungover?) Could someone please explain how this prints 'Hello, world!' Is there a mapping from Hangul to latin alphabets that I missed out on in the doc? " 밤밣따빠밣밟따뿌 빠맣파빨받밤뚜뭏 돋밬탕빠맣붏두붇 볻뫃박발뚷투뭏붖 뫃도뫃희멓뭏뭏붘 뫃봌토범더벌뿌뚜 뽑뽀멓멓더벓뻐뚠 뽀덩벐멓뻐덕더벅 "
- rspeer 10y ago
  The Hangul characters are the instructions, not string literals; in fact, the language has no string literals. The code is building up the Unicode codepoints for "Hello, world!" as numbers in memory, and running instructions to print them.
  - songzme 10y ago
    thank you
lacampbell 10y ago
If our field had settled on miminal syntaxes - such as the styles used by Forth, Lisp or even Smalltalk - it would be trivial to make programming languages for an audience that can't read or write English. Can't rename "if" or "foreach" in C#, however.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
This is cool but I feel like it would have been even more awesome if it actually used korean language as keywords (which would have made the code actually readable and usable) instead of just mixing together characters. I realize this is just for fun but I hope someone builds a completely functional language written in their own language. That would be really cool to see where that goes. That would be not just a technological innovation but interesting socially.
kowdermeister 10y ago
You'll love this. I pasted the hello world text to google translate and it did translate it to something VERY WEIRD :) "I'm not sure what to do, but I do not know what to do. I do not know what to do." Sounds like the AI behind the translate engine[1] got a bit depressed :) [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awa...
youknowone 10y ago
Aheui even has a JIT compiler implementation. I wrote it :D https://github.com/aheui/rpaheui https://github.com/aheui/rpaheui
jlebrech 10y ago
I like the idea of using non-latin programming languages for latin based programs, you have a clearer picture of what is data and what is code. assuming you can differentiate the non-latin characters.
andrewshadura 10y ago
It would be interesting to see a programming language based on Hungarian or Finnish. With myriads of suffices which change the ways verbs apply to nouns, it'd be quite a challenge to program in it for anyone not familiar with agglutinative languages :)

155 points by networked 10y ago

love it

"about 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet, about 1.3 billion people (18%) use the Chinese script, about 1 billion people (14%) use the Devanagari script (India)"[1] It'll be interesting to see how the Latin alphabet preference in computer languages changes over time. I'm sure whole different paradigms may be possible in different scripts. And people complain about the differences between java and python now... Imagine python vs Aheui or similar lol [1]http://www.worldstandards.eu/alphabets/ http://www.worldstandards.eu/alphabets/

chickenfries 10y ago
> I'm sure whole different paradigms may be possible in different scripts. This is like Sapir–Whorf for programming languages. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity) I'm skeptical that programming languages in other scripts would "discover" new programming paradigms inaccessible to languages written with the latin alphabet. Programming languages hardly follow any rules of english grammar, despite most of them being in English.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  I'm also skeptical. The "strong" claims of Whorfianism, that testable things like color perception depend on ones language, have mostly been falsified. I see no reason why programming of computers would be different. Are some languages structured such that it's easier for its native speakers are better at certain programming tasks? Sure, that's plausible. I can imagine that e.g. German programmers would be better at keeping two-page goto-riddled DO loops in their heads. But would Spanish programmers find it impossible? Hardly.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >I'm also skeptical. The "strong" claims of Whorfianism, that testable things like color perception depend on ones language, have mostly been falsified. That's not entirely settled, but even so, those to me are the least interesting (and least expected to be true) aspects of Whorfianism. The social aspects of language influence are much more interesting. That said, I don't see programming languages in other, err, languages discovering any novel ways of programming. That's mostly because in the end they always should just translate to the underlying CPU model and CS concepts, and those are math, they don't change culturally.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      > The social aspects of language influence are much more interesting. Sure, but it's pretty much impossible to make a falsifiable hypothesis in this area that can actually be (ethically) tested. Like, how do you separate the effect of having Japanese as your primary language from the effect of growing up in a Japanese culture (whether actually in Japan or not)? > [CS concepts] are math, they don't change culturally Agree.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >Like, how do you separate the effect of having Japanese as your primary language from the effect of growing up in a Japanese culture (whether actually in Japan or not)? I guess by using people from bilingual societies, who speak one or the other language within the same culture.
seibelj 10y ago
You can swap the latin characters for other symbols, but I'm not sure how it will fundamentally change anything. Advances come from thinking of how to formulate abstract concepts differently, like procedural vs. functional programming. The letters themselves are just part of the specification. Perhaps people whose language is radically different from romance languages will approach programming differently because of that, and invent something new.
tornadoboy55 10y ago
It won't change because of tremendous legacy inertia. Everything from assembly to scripting languages are in Latin-English. All kernels are Latin-English. CS is taught around the globe as a 100% English major usually. Our first humanoid AI will almost certainly think in 'English' and speak English.
- aj7 10y ago
  Fat Freddy's cat to a friend cat, while they are watching the dog catcher round up dogs (headed for the gas chamber.) FFC: He does cats, too. Friend cat: That couldn't happen in America!
- kazimuth 10y ago
  The language of science has shifted before; I don't think it's reasonable to assume it won't again. Then again, English might stay around as a, well, legacy language. I could imagine someone a few hundred years from now studying archaic english, in preparation for a dive into the kernel or whatever. Then again, computer translation will probably have gotten good enough that it won't be necessary.
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    Honestly, I doubt that it will, barring some civilization-scale catastrophe that resets global progress. I'm not being hyperbolic. As the world has shrunk, and intercommunication has increased, the benefits of being able to access the dominant languages have increased dramatically, and part of that process is fixing what is dominant. English already has the unique distinction of having more ESL speakers than native ones, and has become the lingua franca of world commerce. (And let's pause for a minute to enjoy the incorporation of the phrase 'lingua franca' in to the English corpus, too. I do love how English is completely shameless about taking whatever it wants from other languages to add to itself.)
    - desdiv 10y ago
      >(And let's pause for a minute to enjoy the incorporation of the phrase 'lingua franca' in to the English corpus, too. I do love how English is completely shameless about taking whatever it wants from other languages to add to itself.) The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary. -James Nicoll
lifthrasiir 10y ago
For the case of Aheui, it is essentially a Hangul-branded version of Befunge [1] (or if you are interested in the history of esolangs, it is actually more like Orthogonal [2] but Aheui didn't really derive from it). Besides from the fact that Aheui's usage of Hangul is novel, I wouldn't consider it a fundamental paradigm shift. [1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge [2] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Orthogonal https://esolangs.org/wiki/Orthogonal

fohara 10y ago

"This code prints 'Hello, world!' 밤밣따빠밣밟따뿌 빠맣파빨받밤뚜뭏 돋밬탕빠맣붏두붇 볻뫃박발뚷투뭏붖 뫃도뫃희멓뭏뭏붘 뫃봌토범더벌뿌뚜 뽑뽀멓멓더벓뻐뚠 뽀덩벐멓뻐덕더벅 "

particles_ 10y ago
As a Korean, I found this hilarious because it's complete gibberish yet you can totally read it out loud.
- sho_hn 10y ago
  They used to sell a t-shirt with it which I'd love to own.
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  It sounds like the Korean equivalent of Charlie Brown adultspeak.

lifthrasiir 10y ago

I'm one of the initial contributors to the language and went too far with a self-interpreter for Aheui [1] recently. This one is quite old, we have actually had the 10th anniversary event [2] in 2015 (with more than 30 participants)! It surely is a kind of Brainfuck [3] for Koreans. [1] https://github.com/aheui/aheui.aheui/ https://github.com/aheui/aheui.aheui/ [2] https://aheui.github.io/aheuicon https://aheui.github.io/aheuicon [3] I'm of course referring to https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck

memming 10y ago

There are several programming languages using Hangul which are way more readable (hence not esoteric): 씨앗 (1993), 약속, etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

memming 10y ago
According to [2], there was 한베(Hanbae) which was developed in 1991. [2] http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=axes2024&logNo=110120684979 http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=axes2024&logNo=110... (in Korean)

kerkeslager 10y ago

What makes it "esoteric"? It doesn't seem esoteric to want to program in your own language. I'm not saying it's not esoteric, I'm just curious what makes it so. I've strongly considered writing a Spanish-based programming language--Spanish is spoken by more people than English, and Spanish is a first language a larger percentage of Spanish speakers, while for many English speakers it is their second language. It seems like a Spanish-based programming language could reduce cognitive barriers to entry to programming for a large portion of the world. Of course, if the tool chain isn't up to par it will eventually hold users back, but it's at least worth investigating.

lifthrasiir 10y ago
Because no Korean would expect a two-dimensional language with the only storage being stacks and queues of integers.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Wait, that's not how Koreans think? Then explain how they're good at math.
titanix2 10y ago
It's esoteric in the way languages listed on this wiki are esoteric: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page It not a programming language where keyword are in Korean but one based on non mainstream concepts like brainfuck.
CydeWeys 10y ago
Is there any reason you couldn't simply make a Spanish language by taking a well-established English one, e.g. Java, and simply translating the keywords individually using a syntax-aware translator? This transpilation approach is used by lots of esoteric programming languages, and since you wouldn't even be changing the syntax, this would be simpler than most. I suspect the reason this hasn't caught on is that there just aren't that many keywords to learn, and that paying the ongoing tax of having to translate every code example on the web is worse than the one-time cost of just learning the keywords in English. This is for "real" programming use cases anyway; it might be a different consideration for educational languages.

yannis 10y ago

Looking at the github repository there is nothing fundamentally earth shuttering here. It is mostly the normal way of interpreters/compilers representing everything with number codes and then mapping to characters. For example: case 0: //ㄱ case 1: //ㄲ case 11: //ㅇ case 13: //ㅉ case 15: //ㅋ If one goes back a good three decades plus and studies the source of Knuth's TeX, everything was represented by numbers and then all strings, even error messages resided in a TeX.Pool file.

adamnemecek 10y ago

I feel like the HN audience would really appreciate Korean and it's script, as it's said to be one of the most logical languages. You can read more about it here http://asiasociety.org/education/world%E2%80%99s-most-incredible-alphabet http://asiasociety.org/education/world%E2%80%99s-most-incred...

lifthrasiir 10y ago
Well, Korean the language is, like most other natural languages, horrible. Hangul is quite neat though.
- bojl 10y ago
  Why is Korean horrible?
  - adamnemecek 10y ago
    Most languages because they are evolved, not designed.
  - lifthrasiir 10y ago
    In general natural languages are horrible but nevertheless working messes. They always change and each language is subtly different from each others, if not massively different. For example: Korean verb conjugations are massive [1] mainly because conjugations themselves are morphemes (or semi-words, if you don't know what it is) and not mutations or transformations thus the set of conjugations is essentially open. Native Korean speakers can probably easily list hundreds of different conjugations with different meanings. [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXakcsoUkAEMPaj.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXakcsoUkAEMPaj.jpg for example.
    - JoelSanchez 10y ago
      How does it compare to Spanish? We don't have few conjugations either. "To be": http://www.conjugacion.es/del/verbo/haber.php http://www.conjugacion.es/del/verbo/haber.php

palgraham 10y ago

why did I just read this? what am I doing with my life?

pagnol 10y ago

> Hangul is truly an alphabetic system, in which each symbol represents separate phoneme, or sound. Is this true, though? As far as I know ㅔ and ㅐ represent the same sounds.

DonaldPShimoda 10y ago
Even if these letters represented the exact same sound, Hangul would still be an alphabetic system, wouldn't it? There are plenty of combinations of glyphs which map to the same sounds in English, e.g. "ay" in "play" and "eigh" in "sleigh" or "weigh". (Although if you're making a point about only the second part of the quote — "each symbol represents separate phoneme" — then I apologize.) I think the author was trying to distinguish between Hangul and, say, written Chinese or Japanese Kanji which are logographic. I've known lots of people in the US who assume the Korean written language functions similarly because "all Asian languages are like that".
- pagnol 10y ago
  Yes, my question was actually aimed at the second part of the sentence which seemed to suggest that there was a bijection between sounds and symbols. Either way, I can see how what you're saying makes sense.
otoburb 10y ago
Similar, but not quite the same if you learned Korean more than 20 years ago. Evidently younger Koreans do not distinguish much between the two sounds.[1] [1] http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2619/how-to-distinguish-korean-ㅔ-e-and-ㅐ-ɛ http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2619/how-to-d...
shagie 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#/media/File:Hangeul_letter_order.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#/media/File:Hangeul_let... suggests that ㅔ represents 'e' and 'ㅐ' represents 'ae'. The differences between these sounds may be difficult for someone who isn't accustom to the sounds to distinguish. Compare the Japanese with the difficulty of 'l' vs 'r'. And an obligatory Babylon 5 scene with Zathras - https://youtu.be/1j-76eLz1hc?t=1m40s https://youtu.be/1j-76eLz1hc?t=1m40s

mrcactu5 10y ago

this isn't esoteric at all. We are discriminating against Korea when we do not accommodate their alphabet. China and Japan obviously have to accommodate themselves as there is no possibility of having one key for each Kanji (or Chinese character). There was a nice documentary showing arcane Chinese characters or different descendants of the same Chinese characters. Does this encode the font or merely the character (as an entity)?

lifthrasiir 10y ago
As mentioned in sibling threads, it is esoteric in terms of programming languages. It's in the same page as Brainfuck and Befunge and the name "esoteric programming language" is well-established [1]. [1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page
lacampbell 10y ago
Huh? It's very easy to input Han Characters on modern systems. Most people type it a phonetic alphabet (eg, romanizations like Hanyu Pinyin, or indigenous phonetic alphabets like Zhuyin) and a little program pops up, giving you a list of matching characters, and you select them. Googles ones are very good (they even know regional varions in mandarin pronunciation). It's entirely conceivable for a programming language to be made with Han Characters - because it's a solved problem to input Han Characters on keyboards. Or Have I missed the point of what you wrote entirely?
- asaibx 10y ago
  > It's entirely conceivable for a programming language to be made with Han Characters Not only is it conceivable, it has already been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_programming_la...
PeCaN 10y ago
I'd appreciate if you didn't start getting offended for other people when you clearly didn't read about the language (it's obviously esoteric¹), and also imply that somehow China, Taiwan, and Japan haven't figured out how to use their languages on computers. Also, what does this sentence even mean? > Does this encode the font or merely the character (as an entity)? 1. Unless you happen to regularly use a grid-based Brainfuck.

songzme 10y ago

I'm very curious about this but I cannot seem to figure out how it works (perhaps a little hungover?) Could someone please explain how this prints 'Hello, world!' Is there a mapping from Hangul to latin alphabets that I missed out on in the doc? " 밤밣따빠밣밟따뿌 빠맣파빨받밤뚜뭏 돋밬탕빠맣붏두붇 볻뫃박발뚷투뭏붖 뫃도뫃희멓뭏뭏붘 뫃봌토범더벌뿌뚜 뽑뽀멓멓더벓뻐뚠 뽀덩벐멓뻐덕더벅 "

rspeer 10y ago
The Hangul characters are the instructions, not string literals; in fact, the language has no string literals. The code is building up the Unicode codepoints for "Hello, world!" as numbers in memory, and running instructions to print them.
- songzme 10y ago
  thank you

lacampbell 10y ago

If our field had settled on miminal syntaxes - such as the styles used by Forth, Lisp or even Smalltalk - it would be trivial to make programming languages for an audience that can't read or write English. Can't rename "if" or "foreach" in C#, however.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

This is cool but I feel like it would have been even more awesome if it actually used korean language as keywords (which would have made the code actually readable and usable) instead of just mixing together characters. I realize this is just for fun but I hope someone builds a completely functional language written in their own language. That would be really cool to see where that goes. That would be not just a technological innovation but interesting socially.

kowdermeister 10y ago

You'll love this. I pasted the hello world text to google translate and it did translate it to something VERY WEIRD :) "I'm not sure what to do, but I do not know what to do. I do not know what to do." Sounds like the AI behind the translate engine[1] got a bit depressed :) [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awa...

youknowone 10y ago

Aheui even has a JIT compiler implementation. I wrote it :D https://github.com/aheui/rpaheui https://github.com/aheui/rpaheui

jlebrech 10y ago

I like the idea of using non-latin programming languages for latin based programs, you have a clearer picture of what is data and what is code. assuming you can differentiate the non-latin characters.

andrewshadura 10y ago

It would be interesting to see a programming language based on Hungarian or Finnish. With myriads of suffices which change the ways verbs apply to nouns, it'd be quite a challenge to program in it for anyone not familiar with agglutinative languages :)