An Interview with Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto | Hacker News Reader

An Interview with Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto

fredwu.me

74 pointsthrowa13 comments

I saw Matz in Saigon.

After his presentation, and during Q/A, someone asked Matz for help on their program. Matz walked over, crouched next to this young developer, and looked over their code. Gave some feedback, walked up to the podium and started answering more questions.

Really nice person.

The most fascinating part of this article to me is getting the perspective of two southeast Asians on language popularity. Also interesting to learn that golang.org is blocked by the Great Firewall.

Golang is probably hosted on blogspot, google.plus, or app engine, which are all blocked by the GFW. Call it collateral damage.

This site[1] seems to indicate that golang.org is reachable from within China, but I have no clue how trustworthy or representative it is.

[1] http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/

While I can't read much of any CJK languages, I am interested in seeing code samples from these Chinese and Japanese programming languages.

Anyone know where to look? What obstacles or advantages does the character sets give these languages?

I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean by "code sample from these languages", but Ruby's source has plenty of code contributed from all over the world https://github.com/ruby/ruby

If you're talking about code written in non-English languages, Peter Cooper has a fun article about writing Ruby code in UTF-8: http://www.rubyinside.com/the-split-is-not-enough-whitespace...

This is right up there with naming functions in Emoji. There are a few in my current codebase that could be gladly replaced with beers, martinis, etc.

http://www.chinesepython.org/english/english.html

A simple Python program:

  import sys
  filenames = sys.argv[1:]
  
  def fixline(filename):
       text = open(filename).read()
       text = text.replace('\n\r','\n')
       return text

  for file in filenames:
       print fixline(file)

and its translation:

  載入 系統
  文件名 = 系統.參數[1:]

  定義 修正行尾(文件):
       內文 = 打開(文件名).讀入()
       內文 = 內文.替換('\n\r','\n')
       傳回 內文

  取 文件 自 文件名:
       寫 修正行尾(文件)

Well, I ever! Didn't even realise something like this is even possible! :O

Is it the same for Cyrillic or German or Spanish for that matter?

Blown. Away.

This is of course interesting. I have thought about this before: But wouldn't it be more interesting to use (say the orient) language's mindset to set, embedded into the language at its core?

For instance, check 'Chinese Python' samples [1].

Besides CJK, there are several programming languages that based on non-English languages [2]. A few ones are even widely used in industry.

[1] http://www.chinesepython.org/doc/sample/ask.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...

Can you please remove the anchor from the submitted URL? Thanks.

I disagree with basically everything he said about Lisp: first of all, Common Lisp was the frontrunner for several decades, and can hardly be described as having the "smallest, cleanest core". Furthermore, Clojure has been reasonably successful in the past few years, and continues to increase in popularity. It doesn't have the commercial backing of C# or Java, nor does it have the head start of Python or Ruby, but it's getting there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com