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Oh, it's just an art project.

We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language. One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now. There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

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> it never caught on, even in Francophone countries

I started programming at least 4 years before I started learning English. In my experience, not knowing what "if" means doesn't change anything because I never thought of code as prose. Whether it's called "if", "si", or "wenn", all that changes in my head is "what's the magic word that I have to insert before I can branch my code?".

This, I believe, it's why localized programming languages never catch on: because it solves a problem I don't have while bringing a new problem I do have, namely, not being able to find support for my niche programming language.

Variable names and comments? Sure, those are definitely prose. But I doubt anyone suffered too much when Python chose "elif" instead of "else if" (other than developers trying to remember whether a particular script should use "else if", "elsif", "elif", or "|").

Agreed. I started to program in BASIC some 7 years before I started to learn English. I had no idea what PRINT or LET meant and was able to program without any problems.

Hm, even today, I have not idea why "for" is used for loops (?) and I'm using it without any problems.

Native English speaker and I also don't really get what "for" was meant to mean. At this point it's probably just something that everyone has memorised and part of history.

I'm not a native speaker, but "perform this task, for i in {1,2,3}" seems to make sense as a prose. At least it does in French, when translated literally.

The same in Polish.

personally as a native speaker it has alwaus made sense to me in the sense of saying "for these given constraints, loop while they are maintained" for the arithmetic style for loop, and "for each of these elements" for the more iterator based style.

In python it makes sense but when you have `for(let i=0; I<length; I++)` it makes less sense

"for all i smaller than length, starting at 0". It doesn't really map perfectly because in math you usually don't care about the order, so a for loop actually contains more information than the statement it's trying to mimic.

Also native English: For me it's always made sense only with the loop body, as "for these do that"

Or more straightforwardly, in a way that can be applied to other English constructs, "do that for this group"

It's the same "for" in my head in both those versions.

Huh? It's pretty common even in basic college math courses to use language like "for every p in Q". It's not like programming invented this usage.

My high school teacher had a very legit explanation for the meaning of “for” in that context. But I can’t remember it now. Nowadays I write it because it’s expected, not because there’s a hidden deeper meaning.

Hmm, never thought about it either. I'd guess a contraction of "for each value..."

Could it really be anything else? I always assumed that was the obvious intention there. Never crossed my mind that it could mean anything too different.

Originally it was a Anglicization of "für" in German first used in a programming language called Superplan which was then picked up upon by FORTRAN and then it just stuck

Well, that doesn't really solve the mystery. The German "für" doesn't have any closer connection with loops than English "for".

e.g. in Sums or Products, with

$$ Σ_(i=0)^(20) x² $$

you'd actually pronounce that as "summe für i = 0 bis 20 von x²", which is a good argument for where it might be from.

Yes, though isn't that the same when pronouncing math in English? (So it's a good explanation, but doing the detour via German doesn't give us any extra enlightenment?)

Well I don't know how it's pronounced in English, so I didn't know that, good to know though:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Rutishauser

I don't think it's much more intuitive in German than in English, probably goes back to the "for each" quantor.

The for loop is the most unintuitive variant of the possible looping constructs. The others (while do/do while/endless loop) are much more straightforward. We could easily have ended up with another version.

I always read it as inspired by "for values of" which at least in German is a common phrase heard in mathematical courses.

Fortran has «do» loops, no «for» loops (to my knowledge). do i = 1, N ...

I always translate “for” in my head to: for each item x in...

In python is pretty direct: “for x in a” translates for for every x in the collection a, do this code...

In C it’s a bit more abstract: “for (i=0; i<10; ++i)” for every i in the range starting at i=0, while it’s less than 10, incrementing... Basically the body establishes a set or collection and the for loop executed the loop body “for” every item in the collection.

Modern languages often use foreach or some other slightly more descriptive name.

I would guess it comes from calling the universal quantifier ”for all” in logic

You have high hopes!

When I was 10, the Dutch language manual for the Commodore 64 explained the pronunciation of "input#", but not that of just "input". So I (unfamiliar with foreign languages) thought that "input" was pronounced as we would in Dutch, while "input#" sounded like what I now know is English.

A class mate said his father said they were both pronounced as in English.

We had a fight over this in the playground, and I beat him. So I was right. "input" on the Commodore 64 is pronounced like in Dutch.

My brain is parsing how a Dutch input would sound different in Dutch? "in de put" vs "input" sounds the same, no? What is different?

There is definitely a difference. If you don't hear it, you might be saying one of them incorrectly? Wiktionary has audio files for input (English) and put (Dutch) if you need a comparison. In IPA the difference is ʊ vs ʏ. In terms of describing it to a Dutch person I would say the English u is somewhere between the Dutch u and the Dutch oe sounds.

That's how I pronounced it. English input sounds more like Dutch "inpoet", the manual said input# was pronounced "inpoet-nummer".

(edit: long live the Internet, it's on page 135 of the manual here: https://docplayer.nl/11208014-Gebruikershandleiding-nederlan... . Nostalgia).

In-poot vs in-puht, roughly.

A long time ago I did some VBA work without any real understanding of the underlying language and even though I had no idea that "Sub" or "Dim" was supposed mean "Subroutine" or "Dimension" my brain just approximately mapped it to "function" and "var" without ever needing to spend time trying to decode the "English" meaning.

Oh so that's what Dim meant :D

Yes, it's only like 20 keywords to learn.

I wish people who come up with all these inscrutable icons would realize that.

Why is learning 20 inscrutable icons harder?

You're wording is interesting and has me thinking. Why think of these words individually, with their individual characters, as a burden of the English lexicon, and instead think of the words as an image in their entirety. So thats it's almost programming by picture.

Because they are tiny and can be unreadable at perfectly normal font sizes.

It's hard to reason and talk about something until you name it. With named keywords, you already have a name for it, even if you say it different than the English pronunciation.

Unless the script is so foreign to you (ex. Latin vs Arabic) that the keywords look like inscrutable symbols anyway.

For a perfect example, try learning APL without having any background or reference names for its symbols: http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_APL_symbols.html

1. cannot look up an icon in a dictionary

2. cannot google an icon

3. icons are not standardized - companies copyright their icons and sue anyone else who uses them

4. icons do not have a sort order

5. cannot type an icon into a text editor /word processor

6. fonts don't support icons

Could a localization be implemented in a header file with #defines to turn the localized keyword to the real one?

Very good point. While non-english programming languages haven't caught on I have experienced German documentation, comments and variable names in a codebase.

One of the more well-known examples, and one that made me double-take when I saw it - from PHP 3 onwards, when a pair of Israelis rewrote the parser, a common and confusing syntax error was "unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM". Which is Hebrew for T_DOUBLE_COLON.

In PHP 5.4, they helped the situation somewhat by changing the error message to "unexpected '::' (T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM)" - I suspect national pride was involved in their refusal to completely remove the internal token name from the error message.

This choice is also good for search optimization.

This rings true, but I imagine the difference is higher if you can't read the Latin script or if your keyboard doesn't have Latin characters.

>We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language

Who is "we"?

1C is a Russian-based domain-specific language that dominates accounting in Russia and neighboring ex-USSR countries[1]. It competes with SAP, and made its founder a billionaire[2].

[1]https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/1С:Предприятие

[2]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/a-russian...

Neither of these two links seem to go into much depth about the language itself. I'm very excited to read more. Do you know if there is a summary in English that explains how it works, and how Russian influenced the language?

I don't know of good English reference off the bat of my head, for obvious reasons.

I'll try to find some, but in the meantime check out these code samples:

https://gist.github.com/alexaandrov/739e16e1786ab2b3d6bc

https://guesto.ru/1c-razrabotka-konfiguratsii-menedzher-zada...

Etc

Thanks. I like this comment in the gist:

Сообщить("Hello Wold");

There's also yoptascript: https://yopta.space

Back in the 1980s, I thought it would be great to add German, French, and Japanese error messages to the compiler. I hired native speakers to do the translations.

But nobody cared. Programmers program in English.

I once traveled to Finland to visit a customer. Everyone in the office spoke in English. I asked if they were just being polite because I was there. They said nope, their staff was from all over Europe and the only language they had in common was English.

As discussed elsewhere in the thread, the few dozen keywords are a different matter (and are just memorized to mean "make the computer do ..."), but having useful error messages from your compiler helps get stuff sorted out more quickly.

There are, to this day, people who get in trouble when their computers reply to them in English, including coding folks. I bet they were (and are) thankful for initiatives like yours, but they won't have the vocabulary to tell you.

The tech community greatly benefits from settling on a lingua franca. Imagine if everyone posted on StackExchange using their native tongue.

> The tech community greatly benefits from settling on a lingua franca

Maybe we see that in a few years, with everything moving to Chinese.

> Imagine if everyone posted on StackExchange using their native tongue.

Imagine users going to forums in their own language. People actually do that.

People have been talking about "everything will be moving to Chinese in the next few years" for the last ~20 years.

I'm well aware. But China is also the only country (or even bloc) in the world that's aiming for a fully internal supply chain for high tech. Not sure you can transform basic materials into a laptop (to pick one simple example) at scale without China anymore, but China is on a pretty successful track to do that without anybody else.

Once they get there, I'm not sure they have a lot of motivation left to do high-tech on foreigners' terms and in foreign languages.

While it doesn't follow that "we" need to learn Chinese then, whatever they'll use instead of StackExchange will simply outnumber the English version.

For hardware, perhaps, but the Chinese have no realistic way to replace the rest of the world for software. If they want to sell their hardware to the rest of the world, English is the only realistic language to use for that. I see no evidence of mass learning of Chinese anywhere.

The replacement for StackExchange already exists, on WeChat. More for hardware than for software.

Probably the Chinese will embrace and extend the English language, the way the US did.

The US did not embrace english, the US were a set of english colonists who managed to absorb lots of foreigners with the clear contract that not adapting to their culture/language would result in bad outcomes.

> having useful error messages from your compiler helps get stuff sorted out more quickly.

The definition of useful varies though. Many people starting out don't have the ability to understand some error messages, so being able to search for the error message is most useful. If everyone in the world has the same error message, finding an explanation for the error is a lot easier.

> finding an explanation for the error is a lot easier.

Two options:

1. LC_ALL=C $command to get the universal version of the error to search/report

2. Add a numerical error code that remains stable across locales

LC_ALL=C changes all the locale-related behaviors. I would try LC_MESSAGES first.

Localized error messages are detrimental to solving the problem as googling the error message in a different language will prevent you from finding a solution in the main language.

In compilers it's not uncommon to output an error code in addition to the human readable message. That allows you to google independent of language.

Of course if you turn on localized error messages you might actually prefer results in your own language.

This sounds like it's coming from someone who has never had to help relatives fix their broken Windows PCs localized in a language spoken by only a few million people.

> having useful error messages from your compiler helps get stuff sorted out more quickly.

We're still struggling with this in english. Think about how often the default reaction still is to google a compiler error, unless it's one of a handful of common ones you see often. Compiler errors are often opaque, even to the best programmers that speak english natively. A significant base of software emits error numbers with thin descriptions at best, which then have to be looked up in a manual anyway.

Europe is to some extent a special case - even outside of software, English is the pan-European lingua franca; lots of college-educated people know a lot of it even before getting into tech. In places like China, or Central Asia, or the Middle East, this is not as much the case, and so picking up English skills add a further barrier to entry to the field.

(Europe is only a special case "to some extent" because English also competes for lingua franca status with Hindi in India; in Japan it's taught (badly) as a result of connections with the US; and in countries as varied as Israel and Singapore it has a foothold.)

If you're starting from first principles, and are willing to go with that common-second-language threshold instead of insisting on people's first languages, English is still definitely a clear first choice - it barely edges out Chinese for total L1 + L2 speakers, and those speakers are concentrated in the centers of software development.

After that you have Chinese and Hindi (both fairly restricted in geographical reach, but involving lots of people), then Spanish (most of Latin America) and French (spoken in a dizzying array of cultures as L2, because of colonial history in Africa and the Middle East).

And then you finally get to Arabic :-P

I'd love to code in an all Swedish environment. But when the I18n is incomplete or poorly done, all English wins out. Better if 100% of the compiler messages are in English than a 50/50 mix of Swedish and English messages because then you have to context switch between the languages all the time.

As many other said, with the usual amount of keywords it's really not worth it. It's a bit like Italian words for musical theory. International communication beats the slight learning curve by far.

Now, if the natural language has some influence on the semantics of the programming language, it might be useful enough. Doubt it, as most natural languages' grammar is way harder than either English or your average programming language. The only attempt that comes to mind right now would be Lingua::Romana::Perligata[1] and that's just an esolang layer.

Now, for political or philosophical reasons an artificial language might be considered. Like Esperanto or Lojban, but I haven't seen something like this, either (I'm not counting Klingon).

[1]: http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html

Speaking of Klingon and natural language influencing programming language semantics, I believe var'aq[0] is said to be structured the way it is to better follow the Klingon grammar. It also supports both English and Klingon keywords, which I think is an important compromise.

We already know that powerful programming languages can be built with non-ASCII characters in mind -- see APL, for example.

However, we also know that the difficulties of typing these languages without special keyboard support have led to a variety of more English in ASCII language successors such as J/K/L.

[0] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Var%27aq

> However, we also know that the difficulties of typing these languages without special keyboard support have led to a variety of more English in ASCII language successors such as J/K/L.

The input language has nothing to do with the keyboard. How do you think people type foreign natural languages? This comes up again and again in programming-related online discussions - why is it so hard for people who program software every day to imagine that keyboard input is also mapped by software?

The real reason Iverson used ASCII for J is that in the early 1980s, you had to get an APL character video ROM (code page 907) for your terminal or PC (exactly the same case as for foreign languages). Obviously not a problem at the time for Macs or other computers that use bit-mapped fonts, and has not been a problem for PCs for the past 30 years.

There’s open office calc (and ms excel i guess) !! Its a huge pain for me actually. Once my grandpa needed help with an OOo calc sheet because his bank csv exports were super dumb and listed price columns as strings with the unit symbol as opposed to just the number. So i split the string and casted to number on my ooo calc (in english), but the casting didnt work on his french ooo calc. I spend the next 40 minutes trying to find the god damn function in french. It was surprisingly hard !! But eventually we figured it out (was and i forgot the casting function both in french and english as i never use calc/excel).

So ooo calc vba equivalent is translated in various languages ;p

Yes, that has been a constant confusion for me since they started translating office. Why would you translate commands to another language?

I think it's supposed to be more like a DSL, aimed at non-programmers. So it may make sense to translate something like "Average", if you don't expect your target users to know english.

Not as stupid as translating low level error messages.

But it should be a presentation thing. The formulas stored in the file should be the same regardless of language. There's no good reason not to.

Yep, same in Excel. And as a Spanish Excel user, I can attest it's a pain. If you find a solution for a nontrivial Excel problem online, chances are it will be in English. Then, you need to manually translate function names to Spanish to make it work in Spanish Excel. Translations are often non-obvious (average is PROMEDIO, not MEDIA? really?).

While I understand localization can be useful for a subset of users, at least they could have made the English function names also work, or have a suggestion mechanism to suggest the Spanish translation if you type an English function name. I don't understand why they don't do this.

Anyway, the problems of name localization are nothing compared to the problems of using commas as decimal separator. People from English-speaking countries will never know how many extra hours of life they have from not fiddling with decimal separators, text encoding programming issues, etc.

I would hope Excel could convert all the built in functions by changing a language setting somewhere. The problem you describe should have been the first thing to come up when they decided to localize it.

One of the early sins of office file formats, translating formula symbols not just in presentation but right down in the persistent form.

If memory serves me right, back when MS Office macro viruses were the threat du jour, there was already a bit of a remedy in place for those formats that would translate the formulas and macros of incoming files from a different language version of the same software. This caused secondary waves of "mutated" viruses that had crossed multiple language barriers and came back slightly different but still working, foiling the efforts of checksum based virus scanners.

There's also wlanguage that supports french, english and chinese https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLangage (in french)

It's part of the dev environment windev which is totally closed and (at least last time i had to use it) doesn't allow to use any tools like git (sources are encrypted). This and the fact that the whole environment was extremelly bugy (and even the language itself) makes it a real nightmare to work with. That's the only other example of non english programing language I can think of though

Edit: just found this article on wikipedia after writing this. There's quite a few languages:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programmin...

> binary source format

Easily the single most diabolical thing I've heard all week.

Not even sure it's actually encrypted as much as it's a memory dump, old skool .doc style.

> diabolical

You have no idea.

I've worked with devs using it (and had to debug their code more often than not): the thing is hell, through and through, from the stdlib itself (buggy as fsck[0], terribly leaky abstractions[1], ridiculously contrived[2]) to the IDE to the concepts (worse than VB, you store procedures in windows so changing the UI ever so slightly has dramatic effect on your whole codebase and since it's half static half dynamic you catch that only at runtime) to the source control (worse than VSS, and that's telling[3]) to the database (worse than your random toy-weekend-project database[4]) to the devious marketing ploys[5].

(some links in FR but you can toggle to English)

[0]: JSON parsing and generation is non-conformant, e.g translates null to empty strings. There is basically no memory management and the thing leaks like a sieve. This one can only do GET and POST "automatically", adds a topmost "Accept: * ", and actually only sends credentials on non-HTTPS: on HTTPS they're outright dropped because of a bug, so you have to implement HTTP basic yourself with the hack below! https://doc.pcsoft.fr/fr-FR/?3043007&name=HTTPRequete

[1]: Same proc as above, the overall thing and additional header field is actually a string concat, so if you want multiple ones you pass a string with those separated by \r\n, but god forbid you omit the last CRLF as the headers and body won't have the required CRLF and be right next to each other.

[2]: dict-like stuff (mem leaks included): https://doc.pcsoft.fr/fr-FR/?1514057&name=Tableaux_dynamique...

[3]: http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/windev/sourcesafe.html

[4]: For network access they actually recommended you share a database via SMB shares before they had a "server mode", and still do for "small loads". The indexes get borked once in a while for random reasons so you have to rebuild them regularly. Their main API is something resembling low-level ISAM but with shared global state, and while they introduced a SQL implementation atop of that, it's downright terrible, severely lacking, and has zero query optimisation plan, throw in a HAVING and you can lock a 10000 records table for minutes.

[5]: Car seller tactics like "Buy a license, get a top of the line iphone/ipad for 1€", goodies strategy dialled to 11, heavily sexualised material (down to the IDE splash screen), with scantily clothed women in luscious poses, high heels, leather, you name it, full of bullet-point buzzwords, actual tagline is "develop 10 times faster" and literally "1000+ new features" for each version, dev conventions are cult-like, Stockholm syndrome is pervasive. License for a given version is lifetime (controlled by a hardware dongle labeled with legal threats) but any support is dropped the minute the next release is out (which is every year). Not that it matters, as bugs stay largely unfixed. Wikipedia page is heavily edited by their marketing team (from their own IPs to boot), forums are heavily moderated against any critical post, who get censored, to the point that one of the devs I mentioned was threatened (on the phone, they called him) of legal action for libel because he publicly reported and discussed a bug.

It's so bad that to fix bugs I implemented drop-in replacements for part of that stdlib and software code in C# (they have a .Net bridge which, quite surprisingly, works well, even dynamically generating WinDev proxy stubs from the C# classes) in well under half a day of work (which also had the benefit of moving some things to git and have actual unit testing), and had plans to port wlanguage to the CLR to help people get out of this hole. Guess what, the plan was rejected (even for bug fixing) because of purely irrational cultish reasons and I had to put intricate workarounds in my Ruby code to massage my way out of the endless brokenness, costing me overall months of work and terrible customer impact.

If it feels like I was on some sort of mission, then it's partly true, as the people I worked with were really nice folks I had real bonds with, and witnessing the brainwashing they were victim of, destroying the very real potential they had, was truly disheartening.

So much memory... My first dev experience was with windev, I never mentioned it on my resume. Like you said, everything was really bad, from their aggressive sexist marketing to every single part of their product.

This reminds me of a friend of mine, who used to work at a company that supplied financial analytics software.

The "software" was MS Excel workbooks. C-level execs love Excel, and they love interactive worksheets even more. The workbooks my friend made were huge, and had immense amounts of functionality. And this was all done without using VBA. It all had to be done in pure Excel functions. This guy had obvious programming talent as he rose through the ranks very quickly, but he never was allowed to program in anything outside of Excel, anything that resembled an actual programming language. He eventually left that career (and the very good money he made in it) for an entirely different calling. He's now finally experimenting with more normal languages, like Java, in his free time.

More on-topic, I feel so sorry for the French developer scene that you've got a monster like windev holding down an entire generation of what could be promising devs.

> One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now.

We do have one in Mainland China, popular in the last decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Programming_Language

It's somewhat of a disaster, though: its author probably caught up with the idea of "Language = IDE" & "selling the language for profit" so it's really not that suitable for "real" serious uses.

There were localized versions of Visual Basic for Applications in Office 95, at least there was a German one. I had the "pleasure" to use it once, and I can tell you it was no pleasure at all. The first problem was that for some keywords there is no obvious translation (for example "if" can be translated to "falls" or "wenn"), so I had to look up the keywords again and again. Then of course it wasn't easily possible to transfer code snippets from English VBA projects, so everything had to be converted (by hand at that time). And for some reason certain keywords were not localized at all (for example 'DIM'). Turned out the whole localization was a horrible idea.

Here is a piece of code in German VBA for Excel 95: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications?...

Yeah, the translated VB functions in Excel are a nightmare, especially when one works in a multi-lingual workplace. If you haven't heard finns complain about things being in Swedish before, then I can recommend handing them an excel-sheet with the VB code in Swedish and watch the chaos unfold. :D

Not function related but I work in a very international org and when excel traverses international boundaries you get strange effects.

Changing some accented characters in a well known brand name into strange ones used in "obscure Serb Croat religious documents

This is the bane of my existence when working with Excel. I'm spending too much time figuring out that "RAND" (which is what you'd find in search) is "ZUFALLSZAHL" in German Excel (which I use at work) and "ALEATORIO" in Spanish (which I use at home).

Is this on VBA or for formulas too?

It is for spreadsheet functions, VBA is English only, but there are anyway some quirks, as an example inside VBA the decimal point (separator) is actually a point whilst /as an example in Italian) the decimal separator is a comma, and this creates often the need to convert back and forth the numbers.

JFYI, what I often do for those functions I am not already familiar with both in Italian and English (it doesn't work for really all functions) is to use the English original I find in (the English version of) Spread32 (an extremely small Excel compatible program):

http://www.byedesign.co.uk/

then save the worksheet and re-open it with the Italian Excel, since the functions are actually saved internally as an "ordinal" (or whatever) and interpreted by Excel in its "local" language.

As I remember, they had also localised symbolic "constants" so a format spec fed to (some date function) was 'dd/mm/yyyy' for english locale, but 'gg/mm/aaaa' for the italian one . God help you if you had (I did) some combination of - say - English Excel and italian OS (as I remember you got english function names but italian 'constants' as in DATEFORMAT('gg/mm/aaaa'...) with nonsens errors if you used 'dd/mm/yyyy').

An asinine idea indeed.

Honestly I am pretty sure there must be Japanese ones. Seeing how little of English Japanese programmers speak, there must surely be one.

EDIT: Of course there is!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolittle_(programming_language...

Actually, a whole bunch of them.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%B4%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%E5...

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%AA%E3%81%A7%E3%81%97%E3...

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%B2%E3%81%BE%E3%82%8F%E3...

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_(%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%82...

They exist, but it seems the vast majority of japanese programmers are using english-based languages.

As far as I know, Ruby seems like a favorite for the Japanese. [Ruby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)), which is of Japanese origin and is English based.

We have 1C here in Russia. It is not very advanced language-wise, but if you list COBOL as serious, well, it is.

> One would have expected one in Chinese or Japanese by now.

I don't know... is it even meaningful to call a Programming language as being in some other language ? The "language" in the CS sense remains essentially the same, and all you end up doing is substituting the alphabet.

This situates the problem in an entirely modest light, and makes it obvious as to why any new "nativist" programming language is not worth the trouble - the alphabet, in this case the terms, is rarely ever the hardest part of learning a language. Indeed, if you're a lisper, the triviality of the change would become instantly obvious to you.

Now that I think about it, Excel has regional translations for functions. In my experience that makes it difficult to search for documentation, but I’ve seen business people really enjoying it.

My SO works on a project with leeeeeegacy software that still uses an RDBMS/OS combination (yes, it's one product. don't remember the name) in French.

`SELECTIONNER * DE clients TRIER PAR ...`

So, an SMBDR/SO? ;)

(sorry for the bad joke, I'm just kind of fond of French acronym mangling. The vocabulary is similar enough to English to to keep the letters the same in many cases, only the order is off. It's bit like verlan for the rest of the world)

Yeah it's amazing. My favorite is maybe "UTC" [1] in which case the French and English versions clashed so hard that they formed a full new acronym that makes no sense in either language. :D

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#Ety...

I had to work with WinDEV for some time, in a French speaking environment, with every single keyword and library API translated. That was a terrible experience (I’m native French speaker).

OCaml is French but mysteriously it is neither in French nor particularly popular in France. France could be a global powerhouse of programming if only they could see what’s right under their noses.

Frenchman expat here. I do recall OCaml being somewhat popular among teachers and professors some 20 years ago. All the coding I learned in high school and then the first years of college was in either Basic, Pascal, OCaml or Matlab. I did not touch C or Java which were a lot more popular in the late 1990s until I started a my Softare Engineering degree.

As for French not being used in keywords, I found that state of affair somewhat liberating. I learned some LOGO with French keywords in primary school, then moved on to BASIC with English keywords long before I learned English. The fact that the keywords are in a foreign language somehow helped. I was not randomly trying French words hoping that it would do something. Either I knew the "computer" word (aka English) or I did not.

I find programming using French keywords somewhat distasteful. French does feel ill suited for this kind of endeavor with its complex grammar rules and conjugation. It's also very verbose. When I was in college my friends used to name things in a mixture of French and English. Yes, even native speakers that wanted to use French for variables would invariably use English keywords.

For example, an accessor would be named `getUtilisateur()` instead of `getUser()`, simply because all the equivalents for `get` and `set` are super long and fastidious to type. Also everyone would be super confused if a different convention than `get` or `set` was being used in this context. But often enough the reason was that the English word was so much shorter, and as easily understood.

> For example, an accessor would be named `getUtilisateur()` instead of `getUser()`, simply because all the equivalents for `get` and `set` are super long and fastidious to type.

If that's Java, there's more to it than simply being "short". Since Java (unlike C#) doesn't have native properties, methods following that JavaBeans naming convention are treated as property getters and setters (often using reflection). That is, the methods "String getUtilisateur()" and "void setUtilisateur(String value)" are treated as if the object had a property named "utilisateur". Any other naming convention won't work, since everything that wants to access an object's "properties" will be looking for them only with the JavaBeans naming convention.

> There was COBOL in French, once, with French words and word order, but it never caught on, even in Francophone countries.

LSE [1] was more-or-less BASIC with French keywords. From what I've heard (I'm not French so have no first-hand experience with this), for a time (primarily in the 1980s) it was actually heavily used in the French education system, due to the backing the French government gave to it. Over time, the French government lost interest in the project, and use of the language has declined as a result. (The decline in interest in BASIC dialects in general has probably contributed.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE_(programming_language)

Not sure if can be considered "serious", but one example could be ЭЛЬ-76 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Эль-76). Sample code: https://ramlamyammambam.livejournal.com/211315.html, and some lecture notes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2e6QHbfGLLMZ094QTZwVmJxMlE... (Russian)

Wikipedia has a list of similar projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

It's really not easy to create a programming language that "catches" on, as readers of hackernews are probably aware. There are a lot of brilliant languages, based on English, wich didn't.

I suspect those international programming languages are not failing because of the language barrier, but rather because they don't add enough value and/or fail to attract a community.

Most importantly, anyone that only speaks english will be unlikely to ever hear about a non-english language.

There were other French programming languages, e.g. Logo in French which was used in schools along a physical turtle (see http://gautard.pierre.free.fr/la_tortue_jeulin_t2.htm for a picture) that you could pilot to draw on big sheet of papers, or WLangage from WinDev. But AFAIK all these were just translations of English programming languages, not original creations. And didn't really caught on.

>We haven't yet seen a serious non-English programming language

There are such languages. Mostly DSLs, but here[0] is a general language from a Russian ERP system. Every keyword has both English and Russian equivalents. There are tons of maintained code written entirely in Russian, including business-critical.

[0] https://1c-dn.com/1c_enterprise/1c_enterprise_script

There's a “易(Easy)语言(Language)” in China which advertised itself as epitome of "Chinese Programming". It is basically a re-skinned C with a visual programming tookit, which does has its merit as visual programming tools were rare during that time. However, it only catched on in the "domain" of cheat engines and trainers, and eventually died out.

The support forum page for it links to a parked domain, so it probably isn't very active.

I’m working on a language for Japanese but it’s not quite in a useful state yet. https://github.com/kayleemann/pinpon

1C is popular programming language in Russian.

The Amstrad CPC (under CP/M I guess) had a French LOGO, where it wouldn't be "forward 10" but "avance 10".

I think what mostly kills the appeal is 1) The actual keywords in the language are not that many (<50) and have a technical meaning where knowing English is only of limited help. 2) Much of what we do today uses library of code from others, where either you limit your audience by using non-English function (and/or class) names or you use English function names and hope that everyone will understand them to the necessary degree.

For Japanese, I hear about Nadeshiko (なでしこ) a lot. It has a thriving user base, apparently. [1]

[1] https://nadesi.com/top/

I have heard from some people that used to work in some major Japanese companies (famous worldwide) that they had a version of COBOL developed in-house that was entirely in Japanese. It seems it was widely used within the company and used to power some banking infrastructure. I wonder if such system still exists in production nowadays.

IDK if Excel functions can be called a "serious programming language", but their local names are driving me nuts.

> Oh, it's just an art project.

Little dismissive don't you think. I get your point, but don't undervalue this project.

Well, it was done for an art collective and displayed in a museum... it is at least an art project.

I think parent was referring to that "just"

People are mentioning MS Excel and the only other example I can think of is Logo (turtle graphics). It was quite popular in Poland when I was a kid to teach children programming and I vividly remember it was fully in polish (which even at that age I found a bit weird).

https://metacpan.org/pod/Lingua::Romana::Perligata :-)

A translator that takes say C code written in a non-English language and spits out ASCII C (except for variable/function names) ought to be simple.

Providing a mapping from utf-8 to ASCII is easy, e.g. punycode. The problems arise when it comes to things like checking equality of two identifiers, as it becomes non-trivial in general Unicode: https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/

Well, yeah. That already exists if you go to any non-english speaking country and look at the coursework of people doing introductory C classes...

#define pour for #define ent int etc...

I think these don't really capture the whole idea around creating a programming language in another language, though...

I have seen schemas written in Japanese but yet to see anything in Chinese (apart from comments) despite living in a Chinese speaking region.

There were French and German versions of LOGO, for example.

No idea if this counts as "serious", but it was used in schools back then.

If given an opportunity, the French language police of Québec would have adopted and enforced it in Québec.

« the French language police of Québec » = the institution who defines the institutionnal use of the official language in the state, like all countries in the world do. France have almost the same laws as Law 101.

> the institution who defines the institutionnal use of the official language in the state

... and forcing everyone to put up signs in French [1]. Compelled speech, if you will.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_de_...

Heard of 'pastagate' ?

With the power of c preprocessor, you can program in any natural languages. /s

maybe not serious, but excel functions are translated I think ?

Never understand why non English programming language would exist except for identity politics reason, nowadays.

It is not like using non English languages would change paradigm programming itself.

For education and compatibility ? I have no idea if the latin alphabet is learned everywhere.

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