

Ask HN: Are there non-english programming languages and what do they look like? - ohashi

I am a native English speaker and have always taken for granted that programming languages were in English. I was curious if people had built languages in other languages besides english and what they might look like?  Are there any popular ones?  Have any taken a drastically different path than the English ones?
======
mathijs
When I was young my dad's computer had Office with a localized version of VBA,
in Dutch. If I'm correct it was Office 95. I've tried to use it for a while
but it was horrible; even as a non-native English speaker I couldn't get used
to the translated statements and kept mistakenly typing their English
counterparts.

Here's what it looked like. If regular Visual Basic looked like this:

IF x == 1 THEN '... ELSE '... END IF

the Dutch version would be: INDIEN x == 1 DAN '... ANDERS '... EINDE INDIEN

Odd thing that 'indien' is a rather formal and slightly archaic version of the
(much shorter) equivalent 'als'. I don't even remember how FOR, WHILE, and all
the other statements were translated.

------
kroger
There is Portugol, a programming language in Portuguese used for teaching.
This is what it looks like:

[http://gpt.berlios.de/manual_big/manual.html#programa_exempl...](http://gpt.berlios.de/manual_big/manual.html#programa_exemplo_condicional)

If I remember correctly, you could write visual basic in other languages as
well.

------
adamnemecek
There is actually a wikipedia article dedicated to this topic
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-
based_programming_l...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-
based_programming_languages)

~~~
ohashi
Thanks, I took a lot at that before posting. Most seemed to fit into the
categories of: old, for teaching/proof of concept, ports of other languages.

None really stood out as in-use and actually different from english
programming languages. Was wondering if someone knew more or could offer some
insight.

I was thinking there are probably a few candidate countries/languages: Japan,
China, Russia. Each would have enough technical people and an economy that
might really be able to support something.

------
gizmo686
I've also never seen non-english languages, but I imagine porting a
programming language would be a simple matter of replace code words with their
corresponding code word. This seems like a much simpler possess then porting
most applications to other languages. (Of course, the apis of common librarys
would also need a port for this to be useful.) I would also imagine that if
something interesting happened in such a language, it would be ported to
english even quicker.

------
digitalWestie
I'm pretty sure there's one in French. Can't remember what it is off the top
of my head. On a sort of related note, anybody know what software was used for
the early Minitels? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel>

------
paperwork
Here is one in Urdu [PDF]: <http://init.org.pk/papersandpublications/P5.pdf>

The last few pages have some sample code. Clearly this is just an academic
exercise. Non one would actually use this.

------
yossilac
<http://he.eytam.com/yi/mama/scripting> "Yiddishe Mama" - a Python-like
language in Yiddish, mainly for teaching programming concepts to Ultra-
Orthodox jews in Israel.

------
Iceland_jack
Fjölnir[1] is an Icelandic programming language from the 80's.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_%28programming_lan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_%28programming_language%29)

------
audreyr
There is ChinesePython <http://www.chinesepython.org/english/english.html>

------
jfaucett
brainfuck (sort of, its symbol based i.e. '>' means ++pointer, the while loop
is [ ... ], etc). I like the Perl latin module,
[http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata....](http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html),
I'm pretty sure there's not a practical non-english lang though...

~~~
ohashi
I saw that listed on the wikipedia page. It looked hilarious. But none of the
languages listed looked 'practical' other than simply ports/translations of
existing languages. I was really curious to see if there were popular and
_different_ languages being used in other countries. To me that would be
fascinating.

------
mdelvaux
And then there is APL, that barely uses any letters at all and so can even be
seen as natural language neutral.

------
viraptor
Logo existed in many languages, although I think it started in English. Falls
into the educational category.

