It is still amazing how much computing is still based in the english language. It's hard for me to even think about how an assembler language would be made using non-english or at the very least non-germanic language. Would the assembler have to understand UTF-8? I guess though when it comes down to it, you're just moving registers/pointers so there must be some layer of abstraction between the object code and the translation no matter what.
Exactly. I think this is a misstep because it ironically introduces another language barrier to programming. The message is clear and it's good, but it deters away from all of us being united by code.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages There are a good few there listed under
"Based on non-English langauges" if you're interested in more. Also, I think Ruby was designed to be programmed in Japanese, but the guy making it decided it was not a great idea and switched to English, interestingly.
Would a programming language inspired by a constructed 'natural' language be so contrived as to be indistinguishable from any other sort of programming language? I wonder if any international organisations insist on using Esperanto or Interlingua to name their variables... Come to think about it, what about a Toki Pona or Ithkuil language?
This is amazing. I've spent a couple of years trying to learn arabic, I'm a programmer by trade, and have always thought of code as art. This article is a great expression of that and really interests me. I'll have to check out that repo.
Why not just use actual lisp. Make a package containing translations of the symbols in the COMMON-LISP package, and a heart-user equivalent of cl-user that uses it. You would probably want to translate docstrings and as well. LOOP might not translate properly, but then LOOP is gibberish in English too.
Perhaps part of Nasser's objective was to make a parser for Arabic, and not so much that it uses Arabic keywords? Note that in Arabic script, you can stretch words out, and that's not something you'd really be able to do in some simple translation of symbols CL package.
What's somewhat annoying is that, as an English speaker, when you try to use http://qlb-repl.herokuapp.com/, it's non-obvious what any of the keywords mean despite using Google Translate because even with Google Translate, without context clues, it's still really hard. Then again, Alb wasn't made for people like me anyway. A couple months ago, I figured out how to change my keyboard to Arabic and tried to use Alb's REPL in Arabic, which was neat.