Talk:Non-English-based programming languages
To-do list for explanatory intro text
TODO: Disscuss abit about history of programming languages, in relation to the use of english, please somebody who knows about it (I don't), where most langs dev'd by native english speakers? is it just a part of the tendency to use english as a technical language, being technically richer? (as reported in E. Raymond essay)
APL ?
Surely APL should be in this list?
'Created in a different language'
the 'created in a diffrent language' category, I've heard of one such language based on Russian, I forgot the name, nor did I have any reliable info.
Reported 'Translated languages'
in the 'translated ' category:
- I've heard of a version of WISDOM-prolog from the Weizmann-Institude-of-Science-Department-Of-Mathematics, with hebrew keywords, directed at school-children.
- I've seen a korean version of H-forth
Punctuation as language?
That's an interesting question: does punctuation count as natural language?
- No, it's just part of a natural language. 81.101.101.229 09:44, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
Category:Programming languages
I noticed a contributor has removed this article from Category:Programming languages. How come? IMO that category is most suitable here, in order to inform readers of the category page that such a concept as non-English prog.languages actually exists. It's not enough to link to this article from Programming language. Contributor, please give a rationale for the category removal. --Wernher 14:52, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- Hi, Wernher. The way it is now, all items in the Category:Prog langs are indeed prog langs, and the category serves as dynamic list (without the problems of synchronization that the alphabetical list article has). If you take a look at the Subcategories, you'll see that by their own nature, they give rise to lists of programming languages (say, the LISP subcategory -> list of Lisp-related prog langs, and so on). Perhaps we should make an attempt to standardize on the subcategory naming convention, though. The other possible way to use the Category/subcategory hierarchy would be to use the subcategories to actually hold the links to their languages, rather than the Prog Lang category; but this approach has several disadvantages: languages could end up in both the category and subcategory, and there would be no equivalent to the current de facto alphabetical list produced by the category (in fact, if we stick to a consistent interpretation of the category elements, we don't need the List of Prog Langs in Alphabetical Order article any more). Furthermore, if a consensus is reached on how to use the subcategories, we might end up not needing the List of Categorical prog langs article either. One more thing... I did remove HQ9plus as a programming language, but left it as an esoteric one, on the grounds that since it is easier to come up with a valid new esoteric language than with a full-blown language entry, eventually we would end up with a Prog Langs category with an overwhelming majority of esoteric mini-langs over the real langs. ... Anyway, going back to your comment, if anybody is going to take a look at the 'Category:Programming languages' it is actually going to be easier for them to spot 'non-english based languages' page as a subcategory (they come first and are much fewer) and the net effect will still be the same as if it had been listed further down. Please let me know what you think, wish you a good day danakil
- Hi, and thanks for the quick and enlightening answer to my query. As per your suggestion I have now put the article into the N-E-b.p.l. category (I hadn't discovered its existence when posting my q above, sorry). As you'll notice, I've used the category sorting feature to place the article first on the page, to highlight it as the defining article of the category. One might also link to it in the cat intro, but I think including it in the category as such is appropriate, as that helps readers who are surfing to the article without being aware of the category to become so. A good day to you too. :-) --Wernher 16:05, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- You're welcome, Wernher, and I'm glad we have consensus. Your comment regarding the defining article of the category left me thinking... Have you considered the fact that the 'Non-English-based programming languages' article is really an article about a category of programming languages... in which case, wouldn't it actually make sense to have the article BE the category (i.e., have all the text in the "article" moved to the category article) and still keep 'Non-English-based programming languages' as a REDIRECT to 'Category:Non-English-based programming languages'... a nice side effect of this move would be that the actual list of neb prog langs would be automatically and dynamically produced... removing the need for that 'known neb prog langs' subsection on the current article. Cheers danakil
- Hi, and thanks for the quick and enlightening answer to my query. As per your suggestion I have now put the article into the N-E-b.p.l. category (I hadn't discovered its existence when posting my q above, sorry). As you'll notice, I've used the category sorting feature to place the article first on the page, to highlight it as the defining article of the category. One might also link to it in the cat intro, but I think including it in the category as such is appropriate, as that helps readers who are surfing to the article without being aware of the category to become so. A good day to you too. :-) --Wernher 16:05, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)
ChinesePython
This is probably not quite the right place for it, but oh well. There is a stub on ChinesePython at zh:中蟒. Unfortunately my Chinese is not good enough to translate it (without a few spare hours).
Also... from zh:Category:中文編程語言 (translation: Chinese programming languages), it looks like these may be worth mentioning:
- zh:PerlYuYan
- zh:丙正正 (based on C++)
- zh:易语言 E-yu-yan - couldn't find any info about this in English, but it certainly gets a tonne of Google hits. perhaps it was natively written in Chinese?
pfctdayelise 08:22, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
Non-english assembly langs relevant?
I know of some Norwegian-made minicomputers of the 1960s and 70s whose assembler opcode mnemonics I am reasonably sure were abbreviations of Norwegian-language commands. Would those assembly languages be relevant for listing in this article? After all, they too are programming languages ... --Wernher 08:35, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
Transparent two-way translation?
It would seem that for the restricted domain of a given programming language, it is a totally solvable problem to make an editor that would transparently substitute keywords so that the file was saved in, say, vanilla Python (or whatever your favorite language is) but was edited transparently with native keywords. Variable and function names that clashed with keywords on either side could be escaped by some simple (text-only) convention on the other side. This would be a great boon, particularly to educators in other languages - rudimentary if-then-else English can be a job requirement for pro programmers, but not so much for elementary and middle school pre-programming classes.
Obviously, existing codebase would not be translated - just the basic keywords of the language. A right-click facility could show the original keyword in case you needed to search documentation or whatever.
I know that, for instance, MS Excel does a very rudimentary trick like this - if I open an excel document created in English with my Spanish excel, I get functions like PROMEDIO(A2:A9) rather than AVERAGE(A2:A9). But does anyone know of any project to do this to a real programming language? The great thing is, if you made it a plugin to a simple code editor (there are many - such as NotePad++) it would be usable for any prog.language (including languagelike things like CSS or HTML).--72.252.71.56 21:02, 7 May 2007 (UTC)