Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
by EugeneOZ on Friday October 25, 2019 @06:53AM
(#21353708)
You don't need to know English to write code. I wrote my first QBasic and Visual Basic programs (one of them was "photo editor") when only foreign language I knew was German (my native is Russian).
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
by Digit-Al on Friday October 25, 2019 @07:55AM
(#21354062)
I'm really curious now. If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn the meanings of the keywords when they were in a language you didn't understand? Did you have to learn to translate "for", "while", etc into Russian equivalents?
Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
by EugeneOZ on Friday October 25, 2019 @08:10AM
(#21354158)
I knew meaning of "if then else", "function", "go", "return", other keywords were just keywords for me - I knew what they do and it was enough.
Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
by usrusr on Friday October 25, 2019 @08:50AM
(#21354429)
Same way you learn to use the ternary operator in c-ish languages? All the binary operators that have no equivalent in daily life?
Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
by rfhjt on Friday October 25, 2019 @09:57AM
(#21354967)
Context. I don't know what lingua franka means, but I also know what it means. I could bother and find literal translation, but why would I? The same applies to obscure English words, weird programming language keywords or math symbols. Integral and differential symbols don't really translate into anything and we use the word "integral" only because we can't type this symbol on an average keyboard.
Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
by gumby on Friday October 25, 2019 @09:47AM
(#21354859)
How do you learn to read music when all the keywords are in Italian? Do you have to learn to translate “fortissimo” etc into English equivalents?
Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
by tim333 on Friday October 25, 2019 @06:59AM
(#21353738)
Or at least just a few words I guess - if, for, while etc.
Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
by np_tedious on Friday October 25, 2019 @08:49AM
(#21354426)
It's a headstart for sure, but English speakers do have to learn those reserved words and control structures in each language. The difference is we have the benefit of grounding them in their similar, but not identical, ordinary meanings
The bigger deal is standard lib classes and functions. An English speaker can guess for the names of things they want whereas a nonspeaker would have to remember them explicitly