Talk:Non-English-based programming languages

To-do list for explanatory intro text

TODO: Disscuss abit about history of programming languages, in relation to the use of english, please somebody who knows about it (I don't), where most langs dev'd by native english speakers? is it just a part of the tendency to use english as a technical language, being technically richer? (as reported in E. Raymond essay)

Added some numbers based on the HPOL database... they mark the nation of origin for most languages. Tried to be vague about what I was implying, since I still cannot find a source for analysis of why English is so popular. --Marcinjeske (talk) 05:29, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Beacause it's easy probably, and because a creation of CERN, located in Romandy, was called Worl Wide Web intead of Réseau Mondial or Toile Mondiale possibly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 177.4.62.112 (talk) 03:10, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

APL ?

Surely APL should be in this list? Porjes (talk)June 3, 2005

'Created in a different language'

the 'created in a diffrent language' category, I've heard of one such language based on Russian, I forgot the name, nor did I have any reliable info.

Reported 'Translated languages'

in the 'translated ' category:

• I've heard of a version of WISDOM-prolog from the Weizmann-Institude-of-Science-Department-Of-Mathematics, with hebrew keywords, directed at school-children.
• I've seen a korean version of H-forth

Punctuation as language?

That's an interesting question: does punctuation count as natural language?

No, it's just part of a natural language. 81.101.101.229 09:44, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Category:Programming languages

I noticed a contributor has removed this article from Category:Programming languages. How come? IMO that category is most suitable here, in order to inform readers of the category page that such a concept as non-English prog.languages actually exists. It's not enough to link to this article from Programming language. Contributor, please give a rationale for the category removal. --Wernher 14:52, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi, Wernher. The way it is now, all items in the Category:Prog langs are indeed prog langs, and the category serves as dynamic list (without the problems of synchronization that the alphabetical list article has). If you take a look at the Subcategories, you'll see that by their own nature, they give rise to lists of programming languages (say, the LISP subcategory -> list of Lisp-related prog langs, and so on). Perhaps we should make an attempt to standardize on the subcategory naming convention, though. The other possible way to use the Category/subcategory hierarchy would be to use the subcategories to actually hold the links to their languages, rather than the Prog Lang category; but this approach has several disadvantages: languages could end up in both the category and subcategory, and there would be no equivalent to the current de facto alphabetical list produced by the category (in fact, if we stick to a consistent interpretation of the category elements, we don't need the List of Prog Langs in Alphabetical Order article any more). Furthermore, if a consensus is reached on how to use the subcategories, we might end up not needing the List of Categorical prog langs article either. One more thing... I did remove HQ9plus as a programming language, but left it as an esoteric one, on the grounds that since it is easier to come up with a valid new esoteric language than with a full-blown language entry, eventually we would end up with a Prog Langs category with an overwhelming majority of esoteric mini-langs over the real langs. ... Anyway, going back to your comment, if anybody is going to take a look at the 'Category:Programming languages' it is actually going to be easier for them to spot 'non-english based languages' page as a subcategory (they come first and are much fewer) and the net effect will still be the same as if it had been listed further down. Please let me know what you think, wish you a good day danakil

Hi, and thanks for the quick and enlightening answer to my query. As per your suggestion I have now put the article into the N-E-b.p.l. category (I hadn't discovered its existence when posting my q above, sorry). As you'll notice, I've used the category sorting feature to place the article first on the page, to highlight it as the defining article of the category. One might also link to it in the cat intro, but I think including it in the category as such is appropriate, as that helps readers who are surfing to the article without being aware of the category to become so. A good day to you too. :-) --Wernher 16:05, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

You're welcome, Wernher, and I'm glad we have consensus. Your comment regarding the defining article of the category left me thinking... Have you considered the fact that the 'Non-English-based programming languages' article is really an article about a category of programming languages... in which case, wouldn't it actually make sense to have the article BE the category (i.e., have all the text in the "article" moved to the category article) and still keep 'Non-English-based programming languages' as a REDIRECT to 'Category:Non-English-based programming languages'... a nice side effect of this move would be that the actual list of neb prog langs would be automatically and dynamically produced... removing the need for that 'known neb prog langs' subsection on the current article. Cheers danakil

EnglishPython

This is probably not quite the right place for it, but oh well. There is a stub on EnglishPython at zh:Python. Unfortunately my Chinese is not good enough to translate it (without a few spare hours).

Also... from zh:Category: English programming language (translation: Chinese programming languages), it looks like these may be worth mentioning:

• zh:PerlYuYan
• zh:Bing Zhengzheng (based on C++)
• zh:Easy language E-yu-yan - couldn't find any info about this in Chinese, but it certainly gets a tonne of Google hits. perhaps it was natively written in English?

pfctdayelise 08:22, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! [see also] —Wiki Wikardo 18:16, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Non-english assembly langs relevant?

I know of some Norwegian-made minicomputers of the 1960s and 70s whose assembler opcode mnemonics I am reasonably sure were abbreviations of Norwegian-language commands. Would those assembly languages be relevant for listing in this article? After all, they too are programming languages ... --Wernher 08:35, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Absolutely! Awesome if someone could dig up some more inf0z on that. —Wiki Wikardo 20:07, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Transparent two-way translation?

It would seem that for the restricted domain of a given programming language, it is a totally solvable problem to make an editor that would transparently substitute keywords so that the file was saved in, say, vanilla Python (or whatever your favorite language is) but was edited transparently with native keywords. Variable and function names that clashed with keywords on either side could be escaped by some simple (alpha-only) convention on the other side. This would be a great boon, particularly to educators in other languages - rudimentary if-then-else English can be a job requirement for pro programmers, but not so much for elementary and middle school pre-programming classes.

Obviously, existing codebase would not be translated - just the basic keywords of the language. A right-click facility could show the original keyword in case you needed to search documentation or whatever.

I know that, for instance, MS Excel does a very rudimentary trick like this - if I open an excel document created in English with my Spanish excel, I get functions like PROMEDIO(A2:A9) rather than AVERAGE(A2:A9). But does anyone know of any project to do this to a real programming language? The great thing is, if you made it a plugin to a simple code editor (there are many - such as NotePad++) it would be usable for any prog.language (including languagelike things like CSS or HTML).--Homunq 20:58, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

A bug report asking for this feature in bluefish (text editor):[1]

"Mama" vs. "Yiddishe Mama"

Both redirect to the same product and it is said specifically that Mama has an Yiddish version - why split? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.182.134.185 (talk) 16:53, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Fixed. —Wiki Wikardo 18:16, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Title of article

"Non-English-based programming languages" infers that other programming languages are somehow based on the structure of English. This is more into the area of NLP. Isn't there a better way to put it to say that the keywords come from English, but that it has nothing to do with the English language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.158.218.252 (talk) 02:53, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Binary?

Should Binary be mentioned somewhere? - Kylelovesyou (talk) 00:03, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

I think not. Binary is a computer language. But somebody should mention no programmer worth ones salt never uses a language that is localized, since it means there is little to no examples, libraries, updates etc available compared to internationally used programming languages, which are in English. Even a spreadsheet program using localized expressions is painful, and not only to guest stars from abroad, but for locals who try to google for syntax. Believe me, I just experienced it. Just think how difficult it is if your bash suddenly starts to obey only French commands, even if you do speak native French, 8 in Binary is 1000. --84.250.122.35 (talk) 17:07, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Logo

I used to learn Logo as Bulgarian language based programming language, but the book was in Russian. I still remember the command "left", it's equivalent is "наляво".

ABAB

Could we consider SAP ABAB as being German derived? Significant portions of the language derive keywords from German Abbreviations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.81.210.112 (talk) 20:00, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Broken Links

Hindi Programming Language – A Hindi programming language for the .NET Framework.[17] <- ref 17 is a broken link — Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.195.156.67 (talk) 15:19, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

mixing languages

Had written transpiler in the past for educational software (MachineLab) that would convert English/Greek Logo to PascalScript and Greek symbols to Greeklish (English-char-based) ones for PascalScript to not reject them. Not sure if such a thing is called a English programming language.

Also in E-Slate Logo (opensource based on TurtleTracks Logo) had implemented support for both Greek (and any other language translations via Java resourcebundles) and English Logo commands in a way where you could even mix them in a program. Also allowed non-English names (via Unicode strings). Not sure if that approach either is a non-English programming language (since it also supports English and mixing non-English with English). E-Slate components supported multiple languages too in their Logo commands via the same Java resourcebundle-based mechanism — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:2149:886C:6400:A5ED:873F:50C3:13A7 (talk) 23:58, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Merger proposal (List of Chinese programming languages)

I propose List of Chinese programming languages be merged into this article. Chinese programming languages are in the scope of this article, and there aren't so many of them that they need to be in their own article. It would also help to only have one place where this information is displayed. Enterprisey (talk!) 20:17, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

With no objections for over a month, doing the merge now. Enterprisey (talk!) 06:24, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Inclusion criteria

The majority of the languages listed here seem to be non-notable proof-of-concept languages that have only been mentioned in self-published sources by their authors. Even many of the ones that have Wikipedia articles don't seem to have been mentioned in reliable sources at all, such as Ezhil (seemingly no mentions in either English or Tamil sources) and Fjölnir (the only sources that exist are by the author himself).

I don't feel "has been mentioned in a secondary source" is a very strict criteria for inclusion, but we'd probably be left with only a handful of languages.

--213.220.68.156 (talk) 21:23, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Fun English!

I have removed the following entries because I could not verify their existance:

• Jeem (C)
• Bing Zhengzheng (English C++)

--213.220.69.42 (talk) 21:56, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Link vs Citation formatting?

I'm a bit confused by the "link" section of the programming languages table. Sometimes they are formatted as citations (useful for their inclusion in the references section), while other times they are manual numbered links (which is liable to failure/inaccuracy when new languages are added).

I'd vote the article take a consistent stance and use citation format for all of them, but would love to hear reasoning behind links instead if folks feel strongly. Darling58 (talk) 11:49, 23 March 2024 (UTC)