News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by petepete on Friday January 12, 2018 @08:57AM (#16132800)
Is it just Ruby with Filipino words?
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by panyang on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:27AM (#16132996)
Tagalog speaker here. Yes, it is.

edit:

Bato -> stone.

Ang 'Bato Programming Language' ay isang scripting language sa wikang Filipino. -> The Bato programming language is a scripting language in the Filipino tongue (T/N: or more specifially, Tagalog).

---

More interestingly in the following section: Bakit Bato? -> Why call it Bato?

Ang 'bato' ay hango sa Ruby Programming Language na may Filipino sintaks. Ang kadahilanang ginamit ang pangalang 'bato' ay dahil ang Ruby ay isang uri ng bato. -> Bato is made with Ruby using Filipino syntax. The reason to use the word "Bato" as a name is because Ruby is a kind of stone.

Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by murph-almighty on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:07AM (#16132855)
Even if it is, this might be the first time I've seen a programming language that isn't based in English (aside from the more esoteric Brainfuck-esque languages for code golfing).
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by googamooga on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:26AM (#16132985)
At my school days in 1980s we used to write programs using RAPIRA (russian: РАПИРА) programming language on AGAT microcomputer. RAPIRA was an original programming language with Russian keywords. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by supergreg on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:14AM (#16132904)
I've seen a couple of Spanish versions of Python out there, just novelties, never seen them move beyond a proof of concept. There's a whole bunch of esoteric programming languages that don't use English, just like Brainfuck. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_languag...

Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by pjmlp on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:16AM (#16132916)
Back in the 80's there were a few variants of Basic and Pascal in Portuguese.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by bluedino on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:57AM (#16133268)
In the first BASIC programming book I ever read, there was a program to change all the keywords from English to Tagalog, to help a Filipino student who didn't know English.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by domenukk on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:17AM (#16132919)
Esperanto would be nice
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by tjalfi on Friday January 12, 2018 @10:50AM (#16133741)
There was a programming language with Esperanto syntax. I have to leave for work but I'll respond later with the name if no one else posts it.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by tjalfi on Sunday January 14, 2018 @12:25AM (#16142941)
I searched yesterday but wasn't able to find the reference.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by wyclif on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:14AM (#16132900)
In the Philippines here. I'm a native English speaker and my Tagalog is pretty bad, but it looks like it's Ruby with Filipino syntax.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by dota168 on Friday January 12, 2018 @11:34AM (#16134111)
It is just Ruby.

Everything is just alias-ed:

e.g. https://github.com/jjuliano/bato/blob/master/lib/bato/core_e...

Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by isxek on Friday January 12, 2018 @01:57PM (#16135319)
Indeed. The submission's title should then be changed perhaps to "Bato - the Ruby programming language in Filipino/Tagalog," or perhaps "Bato - Ruby made Filipino/Tagalog."
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by perfmode on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:08AM (#16132860)
A language with Internationalized keywords would be pretty dope.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by nuclearcookie on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:13AM (#16132893)
That's what they do with formulas in Excel. There it sucks HARD. Try googling for documentation on StackOverflow for example. Anything you want to copy paste doesn't work because Excel is expecting the commands in a different language.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by zbentley on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:51AM (#16133211)
That sounds like there's a demand for a code-help service that is syntactically aware enough to perform translations into the viewer's native language. I'm sure it would be harder to implement than a basic text-only + syntax highlighting site, but imagine how nice it would be to have your user's language preference (or, if not logged in, with a dropdown "pick $human_language for this $programming_language snippet"). You could also optionally integrate Google Translate or similar for the non-programming-language parts (obviously with less accuracy, but still better than nothing).

Searchability would be tricky, since google etc. might detect the very-similar-but-for-code-snippets links as duplicate/spam and bury them, but there are hopefully ways around that--up to and including asking google to somehow improve their algorithm; it seems like they might be sympathetic (because they're programmers and because there's money to be made) to a request to accommodate such search patterns.

Not only would that solve the problem you posed (googling for stuff on SO is tricky for you as a (presumably) English speaker if it's in another language), but it would also address a far wider-reaching problem with big implications: the relative inaccessibility of programming, especially at the early-beginning stages, to people who are not fluent English speakers.

Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by Retra on Friday January 12, 2018 @10:04AM (#16133354)
Sure, you can solve almost any problem without a budget...
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by dx034 on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:48AM (#16133172)
If you google in your native language you'll get results in that language. I agree that it takes a bit to relearn all formulas (and I find it too confusing to use different versions at the same time) but when I was still using a non-English version I had no problems finding solutions.

I think it was exactly the right thing to do. Excel formulas are often used by people with little knowledge of programming who aren't aware that "if" is a common keyword. Using the local variant makes formulas much easier to understand (and to get people closer to actual programming).

Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by nuclearcookie on Friday January 12, 2018 @10:27AM (#16133568)
I agree it's a good move from Microsoft to make Excel more accessible. It's just not something I was expecting the first time I stumbled upon the problem.

I have a programming background so I'm used to searching everything in English, even though that's not my native language.

I inserted sqrt() in my non-English Excel and it didn't work. I thought I had a completely broken version of the program. Took a while to figure out it was a language problem!

Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by Nullabillity on Friday January 12, 2018 @10:06AM (#16133368)
And now you need to maintain hundreds of variants of each SO answer.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by pjmlp on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:19AM (#16132935)
It only sucks for us, that are used to English as "programming language".

Many Office users only speak their native tongue, are quite happy with the translations and don't even know that StackOverflow exists.

They rather buy books, https://www.fca.pt/en/catalogue/computer-science/office/page...

Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by flohofwoe on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:25AM (#16132978)
I don't know, for me as a non-native speaker the words in a programming language are just memorised tokens, they could just as well be symbols or emojis. The bigger deal is libraries and documentation. For instance Microsoft is attempting to localise all their SDK documentation, and at least for German it's a nightmare, either the translations are done by non-technical people, or algorithms, sometimes the information is twisted in a way that reads like correct German, but doesn't contain any useful information, or is even plain wrong.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by rplnt on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:27AM (#16132992)
> they could just as well be symbols or emojis

I'm sure they will...

Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by Raphmedia on Friday January 12, 2018 @10:03AM (#16133340)
You can already use emoji in JavaScript.

There's also http://www.emojicode.org

Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by dagw on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:19AM (#16132931)
You just described Excel, and I can assure it is anything but "pretty dope". It is in fact a monstrous pain in the ass.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by AugustJok on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:13AM (#16132890)
What would be the point though? I feel like that would only increase misunderstandings . Like searching for documentation or help online on that function.
Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language by skybrian on Friday January 12, 2018 @10:25AM (#16133549)
I can't find anything about this on the web, but didn't AppleScript originally do this?