Since many of the platforms and conventions that came to dominate computing came from the western world, we never give it a second thought that virtually everything related to programming is written in English using the English alphabet. However, there’s no real reason behind arriving at this point other than convention and the course of history – with the right tooling, you could program a computer in whatever language or alphabet (or other writing system!) you desire.
For example, what about programming in Korean, using Hangul?
Han is a statically-typed, compiled programming language where every keyword is written in Korean. It compiles to native binaries through LLVM IR and also ships with a tree-walking interpreter for instant execution. The compiler toolchain is written entirely in Rust.
↫ Han’s GitHub page
Han is written entirely in Korean, and uses the genius and easy-to-learn Hangul script. Hangul was developed by King Sejong the Great in the middle of the 15th century, to replace the Chinese-based characters used to write Korean up until that point. Since it was specifically designed to be easy to learn by scholars and the general public of the time alike to promote literacy, the Hangul alphabet is stupidly easy to learn; I managed to teach myself the Hangul alphabet in an single afternoon a decade or so ago. Obviously, do note that learning Hangul (an alphabet) isn’t the same thing as learning Korean (a language).
One of my favourite aspects of Hangul is that it combines the letters making up a syllable into single structured syllable blocks, which gives it its unique look and makes it quite easy to grasp – you’ll quickly start recognising common syllables. On top of that, it’s said that the individual Hangul consonants mimic the shape of speech organs (tongue, throat, etc.), which, once you see it, you can’t unsee, further aiding in remembering what letters sound like. If you have an afternoon to kill, it’s certainly a fun thing to learn.
Regardless, it’s very welcome to see efforts like this, if only to remember that programming being an Anglophone affair is but an accident, not a law of nature.
Korean is an interesting choice, IMHO it still lacks neutrality!
Maybe somebody should create a programming language based on Esperanto 🙂
Thom do you know Esperanto?
I looked up Esperanto words for “if” and apparently there are multiple forms…
https://glosbe.com/en/eo/if
All the better! The Esperanto programming language shall have all of them…
Also, the programming language will make semantic use of Esperanto’s conjugations. Verbs in present tense will execute the commands synchronously. Verbs in future tense will execute commands asynchronously. And verbs in past tense will “await” the completion of previously executed asynchronous commands.
Also throwing errors can be done using the conditional adverbial passive participle form.
Finally a neutral common programming language that everyone around the world will be able to use!
Funny thing about that which I’ve seen brought up in RFCs for new Rust language features: While it is English privilege and history… it’s not directly that anymore.
It’s more that not much other than English falls entirely within the text-processing equivalent to the Web-safe colors.
Instead of 216 colours that were common between the default Windows and Mac OS 256-color palettes, it’s an effort to prioritize using the subset of 7-bit ASCII that is acceptably easy to type on as many different keyboard layouts as possible.
The historical artifact is that most non-English languages that use the Latin alphabet also use at least one combining diacritic, which can’t be represented in the 7-bit ASCII set and can’t be easily typed on other people’s keyboards.
(Common subset of keyboard layouts aside, 7-bit ASCII is also relevant because UTF-8 is designed so that the ASCII compatibility subset is the only one with fixed-width one-byte character encodings, so sticking to ASCII for your syntax opens up opportunities for making certain kinds of parsing tasks more efficient.)