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First: That is culturally a very important project I really like. As a German, English was a barrier for me as well (imagine a 15 yo with little English profici

by oaiey 7y ago

First: That is culturally a very important project I really like. As a German, English was a barrier for me as well (imagine a 15 yo with little English proficiency). But it was just the language, not the letters and symbols. I think the interesting question would be if you could build an IDE replacing keywords, interpunctation, writing order etc on the fly while emitting in the end "standardized" output (aka. English). If we do not like English for whatever reasons (let us say: bias to the western world), I think the only real deal are Emojis. Replacing all keywords with Emojis is pretty universal (until it comes to color ... red/green has very different meaning around the world) and using some standardized/auto-translatable naming of variables and functions. Could be tons of IDE support. Anyway. Nice inspiration.

vanderZwan 7y ago
I think what you want is something similar to Scratch or Snap!, but with keyboard input support[0][1]. Because the programming structure of these languages is not based on text input, that makes it independent of the language it is presented in.The result is that can change the language it is presented in on the fly: > Scratch, albeit visual, is still a language built around sentence fragments. Instead of using punctuation and assorted ascii art to enchant text into code, the structure and action of a Scratch program is almost as clear as prose. By using natural language fragments instead of magic identifiers in text, Scratch is unique in another aspect — Internationalization — Scratch programs can be built up out of German, French, Chinese, Japanese fragments too.[2] The main downside to Scratch as a language is having to drag our mouse for many kilometers for complex programs. It is a... well, drag (also more complex data types and such, but Snap! addresses that fairly well). [0] https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ [1] https://snap.berkeley.edu/ https://snap.berkeley.edu/ [2] https://programmingisterrible.com/post/76953953784/programming-with-building-blocks https://programmingisterrible.com/post/76953953784/programmi...
qubex 7y ago
I did what you mention 22 years ago when I was 16, to create an “Italian version” of BASIC. I just chose suitable analogues in Italian for all the various keywords and fed it through a glorified Find/Replace script before handing off to the QBASIC interpreter. Of course Italian’s pretty strict word order helped a bit.

by oaiey 7y ago

vanderZwan 7y ago

I think what you want is something similar to Scratch or Snap!, but with keyboard input support[0][1]. Because the programming structure of these languages is not based on text input, that makes it independent of the language it is presented in.The result is that can change the language it is presented in on the fly: > Scratch, albeit visual, is still a language built around sentence fragments. Instead of using punctuation and assorted ascii art to enchant text into code, the structure and action of a Scratch program is almost as clear as prose. By using natural language fragments instead of magic identifiers in text, Scratch is unique in another aspect — Internationalization — Scratch programs can be built up out of German, French, Chinese, Japanese fragments too.[2] The main downside to Scratch as a language is having to drag our mouse for many kilometers for complex programs. It is a... well, drag (also more complex data types and such, but Snap! addresses that fairly well). [0] https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ [1] https://snap.berkeley.edu/ https://snap.berkeley.edu/ [2] https://programmingisterrible.com/post/76953953784/programming-with-building-blocks https://programmingisterrible.com/post/76953953784/programmi...

qubex 7y ago

I did what you mention 22 years ago when I was 16, to create an “Italian version” of BASIC. I just chose suitable analogues in Italian for all the various keywords and fed it through a glorified Find/Replace script before handing off to the QBASIC interpreter. Of course Italian’s pretty strict word order helped a bit.