3 ms·

It seems rather limiting to make a single language in a different script. Instead, would it make sense to have a language transpiler to convert the Arabic into

It seems rather limiting to make a single language in a different script. Instead, would it make sense to have a language transpiler to convert the Arabic into Latin (primarily English) for all modern languages? For instance, write your Rust code in native Arabic using native keywords, run the transpiler, and you get regular English-anchored Rust code? This would be far less limiting than using a single language.

cyberax 3y ago
Right-to-left switching is a problem, because your eyes will have to jump all the time.
- illusive4080 3y ago
  Right, but my point is that with transpilers, you rarely look at the transpiled code, only the original code. All original code would be in native tongue.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Getting PTSD from looking at code written by a former employer's Israeli and Indian dev teams at the same time. We'd have comments in Hebrew, Indian English, and American English all over the place.
- nelblu 3y ago
  I don't know about Arabic but in Urdu the numbers are still written left to right. I found that extremely annoying when I was studying Urdu.
  - lolc 3y ago
    Urdu uses the original digit writing direction. Numbers are written little-endian in Arabic, and when Latin adopted the Arabic digits the direction of the digits was kept which made the numbers big-endian in Latin. The users of Latin scripts are used to big-endian numbers and think this is the natural order. But historically numbers are actually little-endian with the writing direction changed around them in Latin scripts. Now I want a snippet that flips numbers to little-endian and uses direction markers to show them the "right" way visually. This would only be a little confusing :-) Update: My LLM got it right on the first try: function reverseDigitsAndCorrectDirection(inputString) { const regex = /-?\d+(\.\d+)?/g; const reverseString = str => str.split('').reverse().join(''); return inputString.replace(regex, match => '\u202E' + reverseString(match) + '\u202C'); }
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
      wow i've never thought of endianness as handedness, it's less esoteric that way.
WorldMaker 3y ago
Depends on what your goals are: collaborating in a multi-lingual environment or exploring the abstractions that might feel more "native" to the language (or languages) in the new script. Natural languages are abstractions in both similar ways and distinct ones that programming languages are. There are probably interesting programming languages to be discovered by developers whose first language is something other than English working on programming languages closer to their native language's abstractions. I don't have specifics to offer, just a general academic sense that diversity of thought/models is interesting and can produce interesting results given a chance.
littlekey 3y ago
I think this misses the point. Having a different language be just glorified syntactic sugar on top of "regular English code" is exactly what they're advocating against. Qalb seems to be more of an art piece anyway, asking us to consider how it would feel to be English speakers interfacing with a paradigm built from the ground up in a different script or cultural tradition.

cyberax 3y ago

Right-to-left switching is a problem, because your eyes will have to jump all the time.

illusive4080 3y ago
Right, but my point is that with transpilers, you rarely look at the transpiled code, only the original code. All original code would be in native tongue.
alephnerd 3y ago
Getting PTSD from looking at code written by a former employer's Israeli and Indian dev teams at the same time. We'd have comments in Hebrew, Indian English, and American English all over the place.
nelblu 3y ago
I don't know about Arabic but in Urdu the numbers are still written left to right. I found that extremely annoying when I was studying Urdu.
- lolc 3y ago
  Urdu uses the original digit writing direction. Numbers are written little-endian in Arabic, and when Latin adopted the Arabic digits the direction of the digits was kept which made the numbers big-endian in Latin. The users of Latin scripts are used to big-endian numbers and think this is the natural order. But historically numbers are actually little-endian with the writing direction changed around them in Latin scripts. Now I want a snippet that flips numbers to little-endian and uses direction markers to show them the "right" way visually. This would only be a little confusing :-) Update: My LLM got it right on the first try: function reverseDigitsAndCorrectDirection(inputString) { const regex = /-?\d+(\.\d+)?/g; const reverseString = str => str.split('').reverse().join(''); return inputString.replace(regex, match => '\u202E' + reverseString(match) + '\u202C'); }
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    wow i've never thought of endianness as handedness, it's less esoteric that way.

WorldMaker 3y ago

Depends on what your goals are: collaborating in a multi-lingual environment or exploring the abstractions that might feel more "native" to the language (or languages) in the new script. Natural languages are abstractions in both similar ways and distinct ones that programming languages are. There are probably interesting programming languages to be discovered by developers whose first language is something other than English working on programming languages closer to their native language's abstractions. I don't have specifics to offer, just a general academic sense that diversity of thought/models is interesting and can produce interesting results given a chance.

littlekey 3y ago

I think this misses the point. Having a different language be just glorified syntactic sugar on top of "regular English code" is exactly what they're advocating against. Qalb seems to be more of an art piece anyway, asking us to consider how it would feel to be English speakers interfacing with a paradigm built from the ground up in a different script or cultural tradition.