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...

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...

[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...

[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...., 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.