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Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?
I am a native English speaker and have always taken for granted that programming languages were in English. I was curious if people had built languages in other languages besides english and what they might look like? Are there any popular ones? Have any taken a drastically different path than the English ones?
- digitalWestie 14y agoI'm pretty sure there's one in French. Can't remember what it is off the top of my head. On a sort of related note, anybody know what software was used for the early Minitels? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
- gizmo686 14y agoI've also never seen non-english languages, but I imagine porting a programming language would be a simple matter of replace code words with their corresponding code word. This seems like a much simpler possess then porting most applications to other languages. (Of course, the apis of common librarys would also need a port for this to be useful.) I would also imagine that if something interesting happened in such a language, it would be ported to english even quicker.
- audreyr 14y agoThere is ChinesePython http://www.chinesepython.org/english/english.html http://www.chinesepython.org/english/english.html
- paperwork 14y agoHere is one in Urdu [PDF]: http://init.org.pk/papersandpublications/P5.pdf http://init.org.pk/papersandpublications/P5.pdf The last few pages have some sample code. Clearly this is just an academic exercise. Non one would actually use this.
- jfaucett 14y agobrainfuck (sort of, its symbol based i.e. '>' means ++pointer, the while loop is [ ... ], etc). I like the Perl latin module, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata...., I'm pretty sure there's not a practical non-english lang though...
- ohashi 14y agoI saw that listed on the wikipedia page. It looked hilarious. But none of the languages listed looked 'practical' other than simply ports/translations of existing languages. I was really curious to see if there were popular and different languages being used in other countries. To me that would be fascinating.
- kroger 14y agoThere is Portugol, a programming language in Portuguese used for teaching. This is what it looks like: http://gpt.berlios.de/manual_big/manual.html#programa_exemplo_condicional http://gpt.berlios.de/manual_big/manual.html#programa_exempl... If I remember correctly, you could write visual basic in other languages as well.
- adamnemecek 14y agoThere is actually a wikipedia article dedicated to this topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...
- ohashi 14y agoThanks, I took a lot at that before posting. Most seemed to fit into the categories of: old, for teaching/proof of concept, ports of other languages. None really stood out as in-use and actually different from english programming languages. Was wondering if someone knew more or could offer some insight. I was thinking there are probably a few candidate countries/languages: Japan, China, Russia. Each would have enough technical people and an economy that might really be able to support something.
- viraptor 14y agoLogo existed in many languages, although I think it started in English. Falls into the educational category.
- mdelvaux 14y agoAnd then there is APL, that barely uses any letters at all and so can even be seen as natural language neutral.
- yossilac 14y agohttp://he.eytam.com/yi/mama/scripting http://he.eytam.com/yi/mama/scripting "Yiddishe Mama" - a Python-like language in Yiddish, mainly for teaching programming concepts to Ultra-Orthodox jews in Israel.
- mathijs 14y agoWhen I was young my dad's computer had Office with a localized version of VBA, in Dutch. If I'm correct it was Office 95. I've tried to use it for a while but it was horrible; even as a non-native English speaker I couldn't get used to the translated statements and kept mistakenly typing their English counterparts. Here's what it looked like. If regular Visual Basic looked like this: IF x == 1 THEN '... ELSE '... END IF the Dutch version would be: INDIEN x == 1 DAN '... ANDERS '... EINDE INDIEN Odd thing that 'indien' is a rather formal and slightly archaic version of the (much shorter) equivalent 'als'. I don't even remember how FOR, WHILE, and all the other statements were translated.
- Iceland_jack 14y agoFjölnir[1] is an Icelandic programming language from the 80's. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_%28programming_lan...