Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like?

13 pointsohashi14 comments

I am a native English speaker and have always taken for granted that programming languages were in English. I was curious if people had built languages in other languages besides english and what they might look like? Are there any popular ones? Have any taken a drastically different path than the English ones?

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When I was young my dad's computer had Office with a localized version of VBA, in Dutch. If I'm correct it was Office 95. I've tried to use it for a while but it was horrible; even as a non-native English speaker I couldn't get used to the translated statements and kept mistakenly typing their English counterparts.

Here's what it looked like. If regular Visual Basic looked like this:

IF x == 1 THEN '... ELSE '... END IF

the Dutch version would be: INDIEN x == 1 DAN '... ANDERS '... EINDE INDIEN

Odd thing that 'indien' is a rather formal and slightly archaic version of the (much shorter) equivalent 'als'. I don't even remember how FOR, WHILE, and all the other statements were translated.

There is Portugol, a programming language in Portuguese used for teaching. This is what it looks like:

http://gpt.berlios.de/manual_big/manual.html#programa_exempl...

If I remember correctly, you could write visual basic in other languages as well.

There is actually a wikipedia article dedicated to this topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...

Thanks, I took a lot at that before posting. Most seemed to fit into the categories of: old, for teaching/proof of concept, ports of other languages.

None really stood out as in-use and actually different from english programming languages. Was wondering if someone knew more or could offer some insight.

I was thinking there are probably a few candidate countries/languages: Japan, China, Russia. Each would have enough technical people and an economy that might really be able to support something.

I've also never seen non-english languages, but I imagine porting a programming language would be a simple matter of replace code words with their corresponding code word. This seems like a much simpler possess then porting most applications to other languages. (Of course, the apis of common librarys would also need a port for this to be useful.) I would also imagine that if something interesting happened in such a language, it would be ported to english even quicker.

I'm pretty sure there's one in French. Can't remember what it is off the top of my head. On a sort of related note, anybody know what software was used for the early Minitels? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

Here is one in Urdu [PDF]: http://init.org.pk/papersandpublications/P5.pdf

The last few pages have some sample code. Clearly this is just an academic exercise. Non one would actually use this.

http://he.eytam.com/yi/mama/scripting "Yiddishe Mama" - a Python-like language in Yiddish, mainly for teaching programming concepts to Ultra-Orthodox jews in Israel.

Fjölnir[1] is an Icelandic programming language from the 80's.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_%28programming_lan...

There is ChinesePython http://www.chinesepython.org/english/english.html

brainfuck (sort of, its symbol based i.e. '>' means ++pointer, the while loop is [ ... ], etc). I like the Perl latin module, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata...., I'm pretty sure there's not a practical non-english lang though...

I saw that listed on the wikipedia page. It looked hilarious. But none of the languages listed looked 'practical' other than simply ports/translations of existing languages. I was really curious to see if there were popular and different languages being used in other countries. To me that would be fascinating.

And then there is APL, that barely uses any letters at all and so can even be seen as natural language neutral.

Logo existed in many languages, although I think it started in English. Falls into the educational category.

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