8 ms·
QLB (قلب) - Program in Arabic, display algorithms as calligraphy
- munaf 14y agoFor the curious, Qlb means "Heart" in Arabic. Here's Conway's Game of Life: http://twitpic.com/bv2cra http://twitpic.com/bv2cra
- DanBC2 14y agoNice. Everyone knows about algorithm, right? From Wikipedia: > The word "Algorithm", or "Algorism" in some other writing versions, comes from the name al-Khwārizmī, pronounced in classical Arabic as Al-Khwarithmi. Al-Khwārizmī (Persian: الخوارزمي, c. 780-850) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, geographer and a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, whose name means "the native of Khwarezm", a city that was part of the Greater Iran during his era and now is in modern day Uzbekistan. He wrote a treatise in the Arabic language during the 9th century, which was translated into Latin in the 12th century under the title Algoritmi de numero Indorum. This title means "Algoritmi on the numbers of the Indians", where "Algoritmi" was the translator's Latinization of Al-Khwarizmi's name.
- madaxe 14y agoAnd algebra and alchemy (chemistry) and the list goes on. We have a lot to thank the Arabic world for.
- knv 14y agoAnd alcohol of course.
- contingencies 14y agoBut surely you jest! Of course, you allude to hashish and opium.
- shn 14y agoAnd for the modern day drug sold at every corner a.k.a. coffee
- madaxe 14y agoWhich contains the alkaloid, caffeine!
- madaxe 14y agoThe word, yes, but the etymology is more related to the idea of alcohol being an 'essence' of something.
- eli_gottlieb 14y agoActually, al-cohol roughly means "the blue", referring to the blue tint of many alcohol-based make-ups used in the Near East in ancient and medieval times.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- saljam 14y agoWhile on the subject of words with Arabic etymological roots, my personal favourite is Betelgeuse. The Arabic name of the star is يد الجوزاء (yad al-Jauzā) which means "the hand of the Jauzā". But after a few medieval translation it got morphed into it's current name. Which, unfortunately, ended up sounding like, and often back translated as, ابط الجوزاء -- literally "the armpit of the Jauzā"!
- teeboy 14y agoKhwarizmi was a great guy. But it will be nice to cite his influences as well - like he introduced Indian Numerals (Which the world wrongly calls Arabic Numerals).His work in Algebra is based on previous work from Indian and Greek sources. Surely that doesn't make him father of Algebra. However, his other controbutions are stupendous and one of the first treatise in Math worth recollecting. Persian history has indeed contributed many great things to the world (And please don't use it interchangeably with Arab or Arabic).
- jlgreco 14y agoSo are programs compiled into that rendered tile format? Is this using some existing standard for transcribing algorithms into this calligraphy? This looks very neat but I'm afraid I don't entirely understand it.
- munaf 14y agoJust realized the title was misleading so I removed the word "render." I don't think the calligraphy is rendered automatically at the moment. Looks like the author is doing it manually. I'm guessing automatic rendering is planned, but not sure of that.
- jlgreco 14y agoHmm, I see. Do you know if the calligraphy itself could be executed/interpreted? The idea of a visual representation of a program being art but also executable appeals to me.
- hypeibole 14y agoEver heard of Piet? http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_%28programming_language%29
- jlgreco 14y agoOh man, that is fantastic. Some of those example programs are really reminiscent of Wireworld. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld
- brendn 14y agoA friend of the author of QLB here, and I brought up the idea of a visual interpreter to parse the square kufic calligraphy. My understanding (limited as it is by my almost complete ignorance of Arabic) is that certain stackings of adjacent words would be ambiguous to the parser.
- leviathan 14y agoThis acts simply as a direct translation of what looks like some sort of lisp into Arabic symbols. I once did something similar with #define in C. The calligraphy bit is a side effect of using Arabic letters, which tend to be intrinsically good for calligraphy.
- christiangenco 14y agoThis makes me really appreciate non-english speaking programmers. They not only have to learn all the logic and syntax I do, they had to learn the symbols and what they meant and the english words.
- NelsonMinar 14y agoI was a little confused by the link; the main image is a screenshot of what looks like a fairly ordinary Arabic text editor. I think the calligraphy referenced here is the tile mosaic in the photograph. There's more photos of geometric / artistic typesetting of QLB code in Nasser's tweets and blog. Is this Kufic-like calligraphy being autogenerated from the source code? Or is it laid out by hand?
- killahpriest 14y agoTry this if you're stuck: (قول "مرحبا يا عالم!") قول = say مرحبا = hello/welcome يا = oh عالم = world
- vorg 14y agoThis displays better: (قول "مرحبا يا عالم!")) You need to put a 0x200F (Unicode's right-to-left-mark) both before and after the text, so the neutrally-directed characters ( ) and " will inherit the directionality of the Arabic text, instead of the top-level left-to-right context.
- philhippus 14y agoProbably about as easy to learn as brainfuck for Western progammers. Interestingly shows the extra hurdle to be overcome for programmers who do not natively use the romanic alphabet, with the more mainstream languages.
- jlgreco 14y agoYeah, it's interesting. I think with a large and less subtle font (perhaps the sort that would be used in an Arabic child's book?) I could learn to read code written like this without necessarily having knowledge of Arabic beyond some fundamentals and the vocab needed for the few keywords. The best bet in the long run, if my career depended on it, would undoubtedly be to buckle down and learn Arabic though, and being mono-lingual that seems like an absolutely insurmountable task. Input would be a whole other story, I wouldn't even know where to start.
- contingencies 14y agoInput's not that hard. I typed this out from a few days' study and a bit of playing around a few years (10 or so?) back: http://pratyeka.org/arabic/ http://pratyeka.org/arabic/ (I was somewhat disgusted to see vast quantities of US military domain based visitors as the wars scaled up) Arabic is kind of like the Roman family of scripts or the Abugidas of India/Southeast Asia in that there are actually many related scripts with mostly common symbols and a common heritage. Case in point: (Chagatai) Uighur. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/uyghur.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/uyghur.htm ... or Farsi ... ie. definitely worth investing some time in to this script family, or teaching children a little about, certainly if you travel, or study history or art at all.
- msoad 14y agoMy native language is Farsi which it's alphabet is very similar to Arabic. First problem is when we work on projects that need to output RTL text. We have to program LTR with RTL string. No editor or IDE can handle it. Specially command line tools. When a string contains both LTR and RTL text then it will be a headache to maintain. You never know where is the ending quotation sign. The other fun fact is, for us non English speakers who started programming from early years of our life, some English words doesn't mean what they actually mean. For example I didn't know what `inheritance` means in real life but I was writing hierarchy in programs for a while!
- pointernil 14y agoSome years ago I asked: what would "programming" look like if it was not "invented"/"dominated" by the western culture? It's not only about the symbols ... how about f.e. a more holistic approach to problem solving instead the dominating "commanding" approach used to "control" a machine ...
- saidajigumi 14y agoGreat! Next step, programming in the Diwali style of Arabic script[1]. This is one of the amazing forms of Arabic calligraphy that often graces classical Arabic architecture and other works of art. Because really, don't we all want software that looks like this[2]? ;-) Unfortunately, I understand that Diwali takes sufficient liberties with the forms of written Arabic that it's often very hard to comprehend even for those highly literate in Arabic. [1] http://islamic-arts.org/2012/arabic-calligraphy-and-type-design/ http://islamic-arts.org/2012/arabic-calligraphy-and-type-des... [2] http://www.typotheque.com/images/articles/thuraya/02.jpg http://www.typotheque.com/images/articles/thuraya/02.jpg
- mulligan 14y agoCool project, one nit in the description: "The name قلب is pronounced 'alb " in standard arabic, it is actually "qalb", some dialects happen to drop the q sound
- cup 14y agoNot to be confused with It's phonetically similiar 'kalb' which means dog. The different pressure points that the q/k sound arise from can be difficult for non arabs to seperate sometimes. Just in case you want to tell your partner "my dog is bursting with love for you"!
- ramseynasser 14y agoSpoiler Alert: I'm Lebanese ;-)
- tzury 14y agoEither Qalb, Alb or Galb. Depends on the origin.
- bamdadd 14y agoWhy its not right to left and aligned to left ? https://github.com/nasser/---/blob/master/public/lib/amthila/konway.qlb https://github.com/nasser/---/blob/master/public/lib/amthila...
- bamakhrama 14y agoThis is because github does not yet support right-to-left (RTL) programming languages ;-) To display the text RTL, you need to specify the direction attribute ("dir") in HTML.
- ramseynasser 14y agoExactly. Although @jorendorff on GitHub turned me on to a great Unicode feature that might help: https://github.com/nasser/---/pull/4 https://github.com/nasser/---/pull/4
- hfahim 14y agoThats artistic.. how did you overcome RTL support ?
- ramseynasser 14y agoGlad you like it! RTL was overcome by using the latest CodeMirror and this https://github.com/marijnh/CodeMirror/pull/1103 https://github.com/marijnh/CodeMirror/pull/1103
- mahmud 14y agoNeat. I also wrote a bunch of Arabic Lisps, most toys that went nowhere :-) My biggest obstacle has so far been language itself: I think I'm too much of an Arabic snob to settle for simple, dictionary translation of some technical terms. I also hate transliterating, so I got distracted by months long process of compiling a dictionary. To give you an example, Qlb replies with "letter is unexpected" when it really means "symbol". حرف vs رمز. A Lisp evaluator operates on expressions, of which symbols are a subset. Even within technical English, words like letter and character do NOT mean the same thing, though they are similar. Most of computational concepts one wants to expound either exist or have strong counterparts in the classical Arabic linguistic, rhetoric and logical traditions. Though not a strict requirement, the Arabic PL designer would benefit greatly from familiarity with the Classical, very abstract and deductive, byt often non-secular, works. One of my favorite games is to read a passage out, say, a type-theoretic paper and try to translate it to Arabic :-) [Edit: It is an excellent hack this, but Arabic side of things could use more polishing. قول is not a verb, but قُل is. قول or مقولة means "utterance", not the very "say" as you might intend. لقوله، قم الليل الا قليلا ]
- btilly 14y agoI'm reminded of Damian Conway's module to allow people to program in Latin. One Latin expert that he knew had trouble learning because she kept trying to "correct" the grammar. (He'd found a combination of tenses and genders that was never ambiguous - which was a great help to his parser - but was in many cases not what would really be used in Latin.)
- mahmud 14y agoExcept Arabic is a living language and has 300 "expert" speakers :-P
- ramseynasser 14y agoInteresting, where do you get that number?
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- shaunxcode 14y agothis is amazing, I created a similar hack for the "deseret" language. There is a running repl at http://deseretpl.org http://deseretpl.org It has multiple levels of authentication - highest is: user: elohim pass: melk It is essentially a port of a toy lisp (soy) I wrote a while back so deseret keys map straight to their ascii equivalent (as that is what deseret itself really did). QLB is much cooler in that it seems to be make semantic sense.
- il_demente 14y agoIf you are interested in Arabic programming languages then this will be a treat ;) Kalimat كلمات –meaning Words translated from Arabic– was designed and built as a programming language that teaches children programming in Arabic as a part of facilitating the process of bringing Computational Thinking to schools in Egypt and allowing children to practice what the've learnt using a powerful programming language. With children on the mind of the language designer, he made sure that every feature to be added won't add complexity to learning the language but rather empower children to explore more about programming languages. Kalimat is written in C++ using the QT Framework, and it runs on a virtual machine written by the author of this programming language called SmallVM (proving names can be deceiving :D). Both Kalimat and SmallVM are open source, you can checkout the code repository here: https://code.google.com/p/kalimat/source/checkout https://code.google.com/p/kalimat/source/checkout Although Kalimat is written for children, that doesn't mean that it is weak or to be considered as a toy language, it's quite the contrary actually. Under this seemingly cuddly language, there's a small beast growing as the author packs the language with features that appear in professional languages. I am not the author of the language, so I am not familiar with all features of this language, for more details you can: 1. Checkout the language's website http://www.kalimat-lang.com http://www.kalimat-lang.com. 2. Usage guide http://www.kalimat-lang.com/wiki/%D8%AF%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84_%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%AE%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%85_%D9%83%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA http://www.kalimat-lang.com/wiki/%D8%AF%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84_%D... 3. The author's blog under label Kalimat http://iamsamy.blogspot.com/search/label/kalimat http://iamsamy.blogspot.com/search/label/kalimat 4. To begin learning the language, you can check Kalimat By Example tutorial here: http://www.kalimat-lang.com/wiki/%D9%83%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA_%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%85%D8%AB%D9%84%D8%A9 http://www.kalimat-lang.com/wiki/%D9%83%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8... Side Note: Unfortunately the language website, usage guide and the blog are written in Arabic. However, these are some of the features I'm aware of: - Destructuring - Tail Call Elimination - Lambda Expression - Parallel Procedures - Green Threads - CSP Channels - Callbacks in FFI (similar to Java's JNI, Python's ctypes and C#'s P/Invoke') which enables using external libraries and frameworks like OpenGL http://iamsamy.blogspot.com/2012/12/opengl-in-kalimat.html http://iamsamy.blogspot.com/2012/12/opengl-in-kalimat.html Along with primitive features like - Events - Defining classes with fields, Signals and Slots - Defining Modules
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- Issam 14y agointeresting experiment! but I think we should benefit from other cultures experiments also; I mean, is there any similar (Chinese,Japanese, ...etc) programming language? and what are the benefits or experience they got from these languages?