JavaScript For the Rest of Us

First time accepted submitter my2iu writes "The JavaScript programming language is both widely available and very powerful. Unfortunately, since only 6% of the world's population are native English speakers, the other 94% of the world are forced to learn English before they can start using JavaScript. Babylscript is an open source project that aims to translate JavaScript to all the world's languages, including French, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. The project has recently completed its 12th translation, enough so that the native languages of over 50% of the world's population are now supported!"

Comments

VBA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because having local-language versions worked out so well for VBA - and that isn't even on the internet.

Re:VBA?

[multicoregeneral]

I don't see what the problem is. Outside of the US, most anyone in business speaks english anyway. If you're educated, anywhere, you speak english. Most every programming language is in english. It's a misstatement to say that 94% of the world doesn't speak english. It's factually incorrect. It doesn't actually matter what the language they speak is. Foreign born programmers can look up the docs like anyone else when they don't know what a function does. This project is neat, because it's technical, and nobody actually needs it (as every fun project should be). But I see it as causing a more complex problem than the one it's trying to solve. Amazed it's still running though...

Re:VBA?

[multicoregeneral]

Never been to Korea, but I have been to Hong Kong, Israel, and India. To the best of my knowledge, it's never been a problem in any of those places. The problem with a project like this is that the nature of code is international to begin with. And support across the board sucks as it is. You have to write different code like they're proposing, your support is going to waver, and you're going to have an internationally fragmented Javascript unless everyone adopts some variation of their engine (unless they're running a moore machine to convert it back to mainline js. Ref website isn't clear at a glance).

Re:VBA?

[jez9999]

I don't see what the problem is. Outside of the US, most anyone in business speaks english anyway.

I just wish the people *in* the US could speak English.

Re:VBA?

[Optic7]

Hmmm... there's a simpler explanation for why French uses many similar words as English: I've heard it said that English is about 60% derived from French. It's really remarkable how many same/similar words between the two languages. The roots of English would explain why there's so many similarities. Instead of the French using English words, it's much more likely that it's the other way around. While on the other hand, Icelandic has probably close to 0% French origins.

And this is different...???

[Grashnak]

How is this different than every other programming language I've ever encountered? And doesn't writing javascript in, say, Arabic, just make it inaccessible to 99% of the people who like look at your code?

Re:And this is different...???

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm pretty sure that, aside from its dependence on Latin characters(which is, all in all, a good thing, Unicode would probably allow it to achieve malign sentience), TECO has no basis whatsoever in any human language.

GZ0J\UNQN"E 40UN ' BUH BUV HK
  QN
  QQ/10UT QH+QT+48UW QW-58"E 48UW %V ' QV"N QV^T ' QWUV QQ-(QT*10)UH >
  QV^T @^A/ /HKEX$$

Re:And this is different...???

[UnknownSoldier]

> I see this as an interesting idea. Why should I write "if" instead of "jos" (i.e. Finnish)? The latter is easier for Finns to understand and learn, especially if they are very young (or very old).

Except this idea was designed by people who have no clue how interpreters/compilers do their parsing.

So now I have to add *all possible potential translation words* as reserved for identifiers??

Using your Finnish example...

"English";
var jos = 1; // OK, jos is not a reserved word IN English
if( jos ) console.log( "jos = " + jos );

"Finnish";
var jos = 1; // FAIL, jos is reserved as 'if' in Finnish
jos( jos ) console.log( "jos = " + jos ); // ERROR: AMBIGUOUS

Re:And this is different...???

[shutdown -p now]

And as a foreigner I can attest that the translation of keywords is a non-existent problem.

As another foreigner, I can second that. I didn't know English when I started coding. I actually learned the basics by coding, and reading the docs. Similar ideas were floated then and some were actually implemented, and every time they were tried they were found to be an epic fail in practice, and most programmers (even those who didn't speak English beyond keywords in their favorite language) laughed at them.

Forced to learn English to learn Javascript?!

[bool2]

Javascript keywords are English words but it's quite a leap to suggest you need to know English to learn Javascript! In fact, it might be an advantage to have the keywords as foreign words because they represent abstract concepts that ought to be considered apart from their real world meanings. IMHO.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

The programming language is the language, not the english language. You need to learn keywords, they could be klingon, do not need to make any sense for you. On the other hand, documentations are usually written in english.

Misguided

[Bogtha]

Unlike other multilingual programming languages, Babylscript allows people to write programs in a mix of different languages. A programmer can take a library written in French, mix it with their own program written in Spanish, and use code snippets they found on a Chinese help forum.

I would hazard a guess and say that it's easier for a non-English speaker to learn normal JavaScript than it is for anybody to deal with this kind of nonsense.

I don't really see the advantage in this. You would be deliberately segregating yourself from the wider development community, and for what? Anglophones have to learn a lot of this stuff too. An asterisk doesn't mean multiplication to us, yet we learn that. Double ampersands don't mean "and", yet we learn that. Parentheses don't mean "do something", yet we learn that. The equals sign means "equals" in English, yet it's the assignment operator in JavaScript.

There are languages which are designed to more closely match natural language. AppleScript and Basic, for instance. There care also language which aren't very readable at all in English, such as LISP or Perl, that are still very successful. Natural language isn't really valued in the programming world for a variety of reasons. Sure, function calls might have some correspondence with English, but in the end, they are labels, not sentences, and everybody needs to learn what the labels mean precisely, even English people.

Who came up with these awful translations?

[psychonaut]

The translations look terribly inconsistent and even completely erroneous. The German one, for example, strangely mixes verb forms: "throw" is "wirf" (informal imperative) but "catch" is "fangen" (infinitive). "char" is translated as "aeichen", which isn't even a word in German. Are the "translators" just people with no knowledge of the target language who are simply looking up words in a dictionary? If so I don't see how this project is possibly going to be of use to anyone.

STOP!

[fredprado]

For god's sake! Please lets stop translating computer languages.

Idiocy

[pinkeen]

This is the most idiotic idea I've ever saw.

Will they also translate all the libs, the docs, the books out there?
IMHO This makes JS even less accessible and seriously increases the confusion factor.