
NAR 2: Serbian Assembly Language - vmorgulis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAR_2
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nulldata
It's kinda refreshing to see a assembly(/ programming) language which isn't
based on English for once. Personally as a non-native speaker, writing code in
anything else than English seems unnatural. But that probably just have to do
with the culture and environment in which I've learned to program. I started
out self-taught, which meant all my sources were in English. Here in Denmark,
the first introduction to programming my class-mates got was through Gymnasium
(HTX), where when talking about programming concepts they would be translated
to their Danish equivalent. It just sounded to wrong to me, but there's
nothing that dictates that English should be the standard, other than that's
the current spoken international language in the Western world, which has been
more or less the forefront in this field so far.

And it might not be so far fetched that in the future significant programming
languages might use another natural languages. I wouldn't see surprised to see
engineers from China to develop programming languages for example that have a
chance to be in Chinese.

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dogma1138
Well much of the 20th century computing research was done in the UK and the
US.

Since the 1930's English has replaced German as the common language for exact
science if you were studying engineering upto the end of the 1920's you would
pretty much have had to learn German at the time to be able to read textbooks
and cutting edge papers.

And while we might get natural language programming (even tho I think that the
recent advancement in visual assisted programming kinda makes that irrelevant)
English would most likely still remain the standard at least as far as the
actual ASCII alphabet.

When BASIC (and the likes) was popular there were quite a few localized
versions of it including Russian, Chinese (which mostly simply mapped
simplified Chinese to it's English counterparts on the keyboard which created
a language that made very little sense) as well many European languages
(German, Italian, French). But considering that for the most part programming
languages are now consolidated there is very little chance that localized
languages would become popular, sure you can localize pretty much any language
since you only need to modify the compiler/interpreter but it just doesn't
makes sense.

English as being one of the most simplest languages (fairly simple grammatical
rule set, low word count etc.) as well as the fact that for better or worse
pretty much every term in computer science originated in English just means
we'll have to stick to it.

And while China does like localizing most things considering they've added
English to their national curriculum now you'll have more English speakers in
China within a decade than the rest of the world combined. India already has
the 2nd most English speakers in the world and is expected to pass the US
within the next decade to become the country with most English speakers.

~~~
pjmlp
When I did my degree in the 90's, German was still pretty common for graphics
research.

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dragandj
Is there anything interesting other that it is a Serbian X? In my opinion, and
I am from Serbia, no. Please, keep in mind that NAR WAS a Serbian Assembly
Language.

It was created a long time ago. At that time, most students in Serbia did not
speak English sufficiently well, foreign books were very expensive and very
difficult to acquire, and the requirements were for all courses to be taught
in Serbian.

In that context, a theoretical assembly such as NAR totally made sense. Hats
down to the creators.

Today, Serbian kids interested in computers have so much English exposure on
the Internet, that it is not that hard for them to use English technical
literature. They are so few, Serbia being a small country, that it does not
make sense economically to publish technical books in Serbian, let alone
create Serbian programming languages.

That is better for the kids, since they will get the jobs in companies working
for foreign markets anyway, so English is unavoidable.

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dogma1138
Very interesting reminds me of Karel.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_\(programming_language\))

