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Comment by oostevo | Hacker News Reader

"The current name قلب means Heart, but is actually a recursive acronym for قلب: لغة برمجة pronounced ‘alb: lughat barmajeh meaning Heart: A Programming Language"

My Arabic ability has degraded badly, but I'm fairly sure the name of the language (قلب) can also mean things like 'inversion' or 'reverse.' That's fitting, of course, given the right-to-left character set.

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Depending on the harakat (حركات).

Heart: قلّب Inversion: قَلَبَ.

Different words, same root. One is a noun, and the other a verb in its basic conjugation will have the same set of letters.

And therein lies a possible problem with using Arabic as a programming language: it is normally written without explicit voweling, which can lead to ambiguity of meaning. That might not be desirable in a programming language.

Which happens all the time already with english programming languages. "or" does not mean the same thing in most programming languages that it does in English.

Arabic is a very rich and complicated language, yes :) It is one of the toughest languages to learn.

قلب refers to the verb "to invert" and the Hearth in arabic is "قلب", and it was named so because the heart emotions and believes changes all the time

FYI: Arabic is the language by which Algorithms and Algebra were canonised the first time

You are correct, قلب does mean that.

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