5 ms·

Probably 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

Probably 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 ago
Yeah, 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 ago
  Input'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 ago
My 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!
- graue 14y ago
  I'm a native English speaker, yet there were several words I knew the computer meaning of before I knew the normal meaning. For example: icon and palette. When people used the word "icon", but didn't mean the thing you click on to start a program, I was confused.
- politician 14y ago
  Wouldn't you use external string tables to load RTL strings?
graue 14y ago
For that reason I think it would be very cool if there were a thorough tutorial for this language aimed at English speakers. We could begin to understand the difficulty that speakers of non-Latin languages face learning English-based programming languages.

jlgreco 14y ago

Yeah, 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 ago
Input'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 ago

My 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!

graue 14y ago
I'm a native English speaker, yet there were several words I knew the computer meaning of before I knew the normal meaning. For example: icon and palette. When people used the word "icon", but didn't mean the thing you click on to start a program, I was confused.
politician 14y ago
Wouldn't you use external string tables to load RTL strings?

graue 14y ago

For that reason I think it would be very cool if there were a thorough tutorial for this language aimed at English speakers. We could begin to understand the difficulty that speakers of non-Latin languages face learning English-based programming languages.