NAR 2: Serbian Assembly Language | Hacker News Reader

NAR 2: Serbian Assembly Language

en.wikipedia.org

25 pointsvmorgulis5 comments

It's kinda refreshing to see a assembly(/ programming) language which isn't based on English for once. Personally as a non-native speaker, writing code in anything else than English seems unnatural. But that probably just have to do with the culture and environment in which I've learned to program. I started out self-taught, which meant all my sources were in English. Here in Denmark, the first introduction to programming my class-mates got was through Gymnasium (HTX), where when talking about programming concepts they would be translated to their Danish equivalent. It just sounded to wrong to me, but there's nothing that dictates that English should be the standard, other than that's the current spoken international language in the Western world, which has been more or less the forefront in this field so far.

And it might not be so far fetched that in the future significant programming languages might use another natural languages. I wouldn't see surprised to see engineers from China to develop programming languages for example that have a chance to be in Chinese.

Well much of the 20th century computing research was done in the UK and the US.

Since the 1930's English has replaced German as the common language for exact science if you were studying engineering upto the end of the 1920's you would pretty much have had to learn German at the time to be able to read textbooks and cutting edge papers.

And while we might get natural language programming (even tho I think that the recent advancement in visual assisted programming kinda makes that irrelevant) English would most likely still remain the standard at least as far as the actual ASCII alphabet.

When BASIC (and the likes) was popular there were quite a few localized versions of it including Russian, Chinese (which mostly simply mapped simplified Chinese to it's English counterparts on the keyboard which created a language that made very little sense) as well many European languages (German, Italian, French). But considering that for the most part programming languages are now consolidated there is very little chance that localized languages would become popular, sure you can localize pretty much any language since you only need to modify the compiler/interpreter but it just doesn't makes sense.

English as being one of the most simplest languages (fairly simple grammatical rule set, low word count etc.) as well as the fact that for better or worse pretty much every term in computer science originated in English just means we'll have to stick to it.

And while China does like localizing most things considering they've added English to their national curriculum now you'll have more English speakers in China within a decade than the rest of the world combined. India already has the 2nd most English speakers in the world and is expected to pass the US within the next decade to become the country with most English speakers.

When I did my degree in the 90's, German was still pretty common for graphics research.

Is there anything interesting other that it is a Serbian X? In my opinion, and I am from Serbia, no. Please, keep in mind that NAR WAS a Serbian Assembly Language.

It was created a long time ago. At that time, most students in Serbia did not speak English sufficiently well, foreign books were very expensive and very difficult to acquire, and the requirements were for all courses to be taught in Serbian.

In that context, a theoretical assembly such as NAR totally made sense. Hats down to the creators.

Today, Serbian kids interested in computers have so much English exposure on the Internet, that it is not that hard for them to use English technical literature. They are so few, Serbia being a small country, that it does not make sense economically to publish technical books in Serbian, let alone create Serbian programming languages.

That is better for the kids, since they will get the jobs in companies working for foreign markets anyway, so English is unavoidable.

Very interesting reminds me of Karel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_(programming_language)

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