Comment by andreasklinger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreasklinger | Hacker News Reader

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Awesome stuff - i think this kind of languages are more important than most people (esp with strong english school background assume). I could see this as educational language for kids.

Related to this: In the 80/90s i saw a German BASIC variant floating around. Unfortunately i couldnt find it online

But… if you are into alternative-language programming languages i highly recommend you reading up on Plankalkül[1] - written by Zuse (after whom SuseLinux is named) which inspired ALGOL

Also worth knowing about is obviously GERMAN[2] a programming language much like brainfuck that is redused to only the most important German words.

Example code

      SCHNITZEL BEER BEER BEER BEER BEER BEER BEER
      SCHNITZEL BEER SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL BEER SCHNITZEL BEER
      SCHNITZEL BEER SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL BEER BEER SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL
      SCHNITZEL BEER SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL SCHNITZEL BEER BEER SCHNITZEL

More links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

[2]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/German

Word Basic (this was around '96, '97) used to translate the tokens, and I can not express how much I hated it, probably because I spent far too much time dealing with a codebase that had been written in Danish Word Basic and had been transferred to Norwegian Word Basic by someone who seems to have cut and pasted the code, and so ensured that the "automagical" translation of the tokenized keywords didn't happen.

This was pretty much the worst combination of languages, because Norwegian and Danish is similar enough that the code looked completely sane - it read as pretty much as valid Norwegian in most instances, but the keywords and function names deviated in all kinds of subtle ways.

While I understand why some would like to code in their native language, the big persistent problem is that it is not clear that it is a net improvement in communication - so much of our communication about code is international, and as not nearly all of our tools are context sensitive enough to understand when we are talking about code that would need to be translated in a very specific, and (programming-)language specific way, we're creating some very tough challenges.

> I could see this as educational language for kids.

In Greece we had (and maybe still have, but it has been almost two decades since i was there) programming lessons in high school. For the most part it was laughable (and TBH almost everyone ignored them) but what i personally found interesting was that someone went and designed a Pascal+BASIC hybrid where everything is in Greek. There wasn't any official implementation since this was supposed to be theory only (one of the laughable parts - how are you going to learn programming without actually doing it in a computer?), but some people decided to make their own implementations. I was one of them, but mine never went beyond a simple command-line interpreter which i gave to some of my classmates.

However there was a professor who went the extra mile and built an entire interactive IDE with interpreter, debugger and a full reference (the name of the language is simply "LANGUAGE" and the Greek word for that is the same as for tongue so the icon is a tongue :-P). Apparently he even got some certification from the government about it as being usable for actual learning in schools. You can see screenshots from it at [1]. It is in Greek of course, but it has a fairly simple UI (it actually looks a bit how QBasic would look if it was a Windows program around the late 90s/early 2000s :-P). The main window is an editor, at the bottom there is an "Execution" panel where you see the program output and interact with it, a watches panel for the debugger and at the right you can see a panel with all available commands, a panel with the variables (when in the debugger) that you can inspect and edit and a panel with an input file (IIRC the language doesn't have I/O support beyond some predefined files - it wasn't needed for the educational purpose after all).

There was also a Greek compiler for another Pascal-like language during the late 80s or early 90s (this was unrelated to the "LANGUAGE" i mention above which AFAIK was designed in the very late 90s). It was made for DOS and it came with an IDE that looked a lot like a Turbo Pascal 5.x (but in monochrome UI). This one generated actual standalone executables. I found it on a coverdisk much later but i don't know what happened to that and i can't find it today (thanks to the "LANGUAGE" having such a generic name all searches in Google give me that instead of what i want :-P).

[1] http://alkisg.mysch.gr/screenshots/

I built http://www.pseudoglossa.gr/ (you need flash) a web interpreter, ide, debugger with cloud support around 10 years ago when such software was a rare commodity.

It contributed a lot in getting the students and the teachers in the lab to get some hands on experience with programming.

It also spawned the creation of other applications that embedded it and provided classroom management and automatic correction.

Although I am not a teacher anymore I keep it online and a lot of people still use it regularly. Even if you don't know english you can start programming in your native language at a young age.

Never got support from everyone though but it was fun and challenging to make it.

Everything from the editing component until the interpreter and the execution environment had to be made from scratch.

The code is in github https://github.com/sstergou/pseudoglossa.gr

It strikes me that in a language like Common Lisp, where the identifiers are not strings but symbols with a name, you could give the symbols a map from language->name and have the input language be nearly irrelevant: as long as it was standard practice to distribute source as serialized symbols rather than as text files.

Or, maybe, you could add another segment analogous to the package segment to each read symbol, e.g.:

    (defpackage :foo
      (:use :cl)
      (:source-language :en))
    (in-package :foo)

    (defun show (:translations :de schau) ()
      ...)

EDIT (forgot): and then, if you needed to access the symbol directly by some particular language's representation, do something like foo:en:show

Neat! Now I just need to develop an Ancient Greek dialect of this ΓΛΩΣΣΑ, and then maybe Italian Liceo Classico high schools will finally have some coding classes...

Someone made a pseudo-parser-thing of Perl in Latin: http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perligata-0.50...

Well, starting around grade 3 kids in the Philippines are taught primarily in English, so that's probably not the biggest hurdle there.

Thanks for the German link, made my morning :)

> written by Zuse (after whom SuseLinux is named)

I was under the impression that SuSE (now SUSE) stood for "Software und System Entwicklung" (Software and System Development, translated from German), are we referring to the same Linux distribution?

interesting - tried to look up if i am correct - couldnt find any result

i always assumed it to be named as a nod to zuse the famous german computer pioneer.

but you might be right - might just be coincidence

Perhaps it should have been "BIER" instead of "BEER".

It's a considerate effort to make the language more readable to foreigners

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