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?

[savuporo]

>>If you're educated, anywhere, you speak english
You should go visit Japan and Korea. EVERYTHING technical is done in local languages. Good english speakers are actually very hard to find even in top technical teams.
I suspect the same is the case in mainland china, although i have no first hand experience ( in Taiwan and Hong Kong english is everywhere )

Re:VBA?

[Lord Lode]

I've seen programming languages using keywords in my native language (Dutch), and I found it silly, funny, and hard to be taken seriously. I just expect it to be English.

I also think way more than 6% of people, especially in software development circles, knows enough English to understand programming language keywords, compiler error messages, etc... And I'm sure there exist enough books in any spoken language about each programming language.

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?

[Rei]

Even here in Iceland where everyone is quite fluent in English (much moreso than in Japan), technical terms still are often handled in Icelandic. Aka, if you read the news about the Higgs announcement, it's not the "Higgs Boson", but "Higgs Bóseindin". It's not "centripetal force", but "miðflóttaafl". It's not "electromagnetic radiation", but "rafsegulbylgjir". Yeah, people sometimes use the English terms too (even for common words, some English words have become pretty much embedded in the language unfortunately), but in general, Iceland strives to avoid that. Even words for new products - computer is "tölva (number-prophet), phone is sími (old word for "line"), etc. The other Nordic languages don't do this sort of thing nearly as much.

Re:VBA?

[VGPowerlord]

2 tonnes = 4409.24 pounds.

So, 2 tonnes is $6,927.02 at today's exchange rates?

Re:VBA?

[mrbester]

Not if you're using Troy pounds it isn't

Re:VBA?

[theguyfromsaturn]

actually 1 tonne = 1000 kg
1 ton = 2000 lb

Re:VBA?

[just_a_monkey]

I'm using "rafsegulbylgjir" for EM-radiation from now on.

Re:VBA?

[ericloewe]

I haven't seen a Klingon manual for C++ yet

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it seems obvious to me that most things happen in the local language. Why do people keep insisting that English is THE language [to rule them all]? Are they just naïve or are they trying to push English down other's throats?

Learning a bunch of keywords and functions is not the same as speaking English. What needs to be in multiple languages is the documentation, the tutorials, the reference specifications. The keywords are minor details.

Re:VBA?

[TheoMurpse]

Isn't that partly (wholly?) because Iceland has a language academy that regulates the Icelandic language (Like the Real Academia Española or L'Académie française) and it insists on coining proper Icelandic terms instead of using loan words? Sort of like how anyone born in Iceland is required to be given a name that must be approved before being introduced into the language (if it's not already an existing Icelandic name)?

Re:VBA?

[amorsen]

Mg, not MG.

Re:VBA?

[tapspace]

English words have become pretty much embedded in the language unfortunately

I understand what you mean. The US has been such a technical force in the last 200 years that we were on the forefront of all major technological developments (railroads, computing, television, telephones, automobiles). The Internet pretty much cemented English as the lingua franca for the foreseeable future. And we certainly see lots of languages that just take the English word for some new technology and never have a native word.

But, every language borrows, and that's a lot of fun. When I was in China, I said "cest la vie", a Chinese friend said "hey, that's French," and I explained that at this point it's pretty much a part of the English language too. THAT kind of borrowing is a really wonderful thing.

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

French is famous for it, but they don't really do it that much in real life, while in Iceland, it actually does work its way into real life.For example, the French word for telephone, to pick one of my above examples, is téléphone. Versus sími in Icelandic.

For a broader sample, let's go to Le Monde's website and look at the titles. I'll list them in English first, then what Le Monde uses, then the same term that an Icelandic paper would use (native French speakers, feel free to correct any mistakes translating from French!):

International / International / Al(th)jóðlegt
Politics / Politique / Stjórnmál
Society / Société / (TH)jóðfélag
Economy / Économie / Hagkerfi
Cullture / Culture / Menning
Ideas / Idées / Hugmyndir
Sports / Sport / Í(th)róttir
Science / Sciences / Raunvísindi
Technology / Techno / Tækni
Style / Style / Stíll
You / Vous / (TH)ú

Notice the difference?

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

Well, the name thing is actually a practical limitation - you want to make sure that the name can decline properly in Icelandic (even people's names are declined).

It's not that there are "groups" coming up with terms for what should be in Icelandic... the real difference is that people here actually use them, and even individuals try to help establish Icelandic variants of modern terms (often with discussion among peers). When tablet PCs first came out, they were being sold as tablets, as iPads, as whatnot. But then there was a campaign pointing out that, no, we should be calling them "spjaldtölvur". Well, in most countries, people would react to that as, "great, like I care." (France and Spain, included). Here though? Check out what Icelandic computer stores now list. There's a degree of social pressure for people to use "proper" Icelandic, which helps counter the "cool factor" for (mainly young people) to work English into their sentences. Not totally counter it, but it helps.

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

Actually, it's not usually tech words; Icelandic is quite good at resisting those compared to most languages (although they do work their way in somewhat). It's the "cool" colloquialisms that seem to have gotten the most toehold. "Okei" (Okay) and ""Hæ" (Hi) are pretty much embedded into the language now, for example (although not used *exactly* the same as in English - Okei is more like "Oh really?" and Hæ is often doubled to "Hæ Hæ!", which you don't get in English).

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

English language education is universal in Japan

For what little good it does.

Yeah, they all speak at least a little English, but that doesn't mean they're all good at it. Almost much every adult in the Nordic countries, for example, is fluent, often so good at English that they could pass for a native speaker.

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.

Re:VBA?

[Invisible Agent]

Actually, Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" reads much better in the original Klingon.

Re:VBA?

[Schmorgluck]

While I agree with your point, your examples are hilarously irrelevant. Almost all of them are instances of English borrowing from French.

It's a consequence of roughly 80% of the English lexicon being of Romance origin, a large part of it through French (which brought also the words based on ancient Greek, lile politics and economy).

As a side note, in your last example, the Icelandic (TH)ú looks a lot like a cognate to the deprecated English "thee", but IANALinguist.

Better examples of English loanwords in French are "week-end", "parking" (for a parking lot), "design" (in its specific meaning of designing shapes), freezer and so on.

Re:VBA?

[fatphil]

Dang - I've got to find an excuse for spending some time in Iceland. After spending time in a partly Swedish speaking environment, and being an obsessive pattern matcher finding Germanic roots shared by that and English, it would be interesting to immerse myself in another Scandinavian language, so see how far the pattern-matching works.

I know the Swedes have "hei hei" (and variations), and I'm not 100% sure that that was borrowed off English, so perhaps your "Hæ Hæ" is proper Scandinavian, and not an import from a remoter tongue.

Re:VBA?

[fatphil]

Dutch has had its influence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_(programming)#Function_name_etymology

Re:VBA?

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

True for other technical areas, but for IT, terms are in English. Except for a couple of countries that insist on translating everything (France and Spain come to mind).

Stupid Spaniards insist on translating (ridiculously) words like Firewall (Corta Fuegos), Motherboard (Placa Madre), etc. It sounds stupid, and shouldn't be done.

The worst I've ever seen is translated unix tools, kernel and config files. Debian does that shit. It's bloody stupid. Basic tools, such as rm, ls, sed, ln, fdisk, etc have been translated. That's stupid and dangerous.

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

Almost all of them are instances of English borrowing from French.

To be fair, my first example was "téléphone" :) And anyway, it gets hard with words that branched earlier to say who borrowed from who, as both languages have diverged from the branching point. But a couple of those words do not look like they follow traditional French naming conventions and instead look more like English naming conventions, suggesting a later borrowing.

As a side note, in your last example, the Icelandic (TH)ú looks a lot like a cognate [wikipedia.org] to the deprecated English "thee", but IANALinguist.

Icelandic is a north germanic language, while English is primarily a hybrid west germanic / old french language. So they both have a strong connection in proto-germanic. Icelandic then re-intersected English during the viking raids - most of the early settlers to Iceland came not from Norway, but from viking colonies in the British Isles. Icelandic then turned into sort a living time capsule due to a combination of a strong writing tradition and the island's isolation. The language has changed, but not as much as most languages have during that time period, so a lot of aspects of it are reminiscent of older European languages.

The declension of personal non-possessive pronouns goes:

I: Ég Mig Mér Mín
You (s): (TH)ú (TH)ig (TH)ér (TH)ín
He: Hann Hann Honum Hans
She: Hún Hana Henni Hennar
It: (TH)að (TH)að (TH)ví (TH)ess
We: Við Okkur Okkur Okkar
You (pl): (TH)ið Ykkur Ykkur Ykkar
They (m): (TH)eir (TH)á (TH)eim (TH)eirra
They (f): (TH)ær (TH)ær (TH)eim (TH)eirra
They (n): (TH)au (TH)au (TH)eim (TH)eirra

Notes:
  * Trailing consonants are soft, almost disappearing. So, for example, "Mig" sounds almost like "Me" and (TH)ig like "Thee" (unvoiced th, though). (TH)á is said like "Thou" (again, unvoiced th).
  * au isn't like the german - it's really "öi". "ö" is like the german, or kind of like the u in the English word "fur" said with rounded lips.

I won't go into possessives because they get a lot more complicated, lol!

  You learn a lot of interesting history as you learn the language. For example, it's a little shocking when you hear for the first time, say, little old ladies saying that they need to go to "pissa" (pee) - said just like "piss" with an a at the end. "Skíta" (related to the word "shit") is also a casual term. Well, the reason for this is that when French intersected English, the new imported terms were seen as the "polite" way to talk about such things, and the old terms became seen as dirty or profane.

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

Hehe, just to let you know, there was a typo in there, it's rafsegulbylgjur. It literally means "electric magnet waves".

Even Batman gets in on the act. ;) He's "Leðurblökumaðurinn", lol.

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

Icelandic is really fascinating because of all of the Nordic languages, it's the most of a time capsule (even moreso than Faroese, which had nearly the isolation of Iceland and an even smaller population, but not as extensive of a literary tradition and which later had more Danish influence). It's shifted, yes, but not nearly as much as the other Nordic languages. When I look at other Nordic languages, they look degenerate (I'm sure to them, Icelandic looks archaic). For example, I automatically recognize the spots where they lost thorn and/or eth, and things like that.

The downside is that, like its old-Norse (and earlier, proto-germanic) progenitors, Icelandic has an incredibly complex grammar system. For example, there's 120 declension forms for every adjective (3 genders * 2 numbers (sing. and plur.) * 4 cases * 5 instances (strong/weak and base/comp./superl.)), and about 10 declension patterns, plus a couple exceptions. Nouns and verbs are worse (esp. verbs) - there's fewer forms, but they're much more irregular. Icelandic kind of makes English look regular, lol ;)

Re:VBA?

[McFadden]

You should go visit Japan and Korea. EVERYTHING technical is done in local languages.

Except actual programming, which they have absolutely no problem with. Which makes your point somewhat moot given the context of the discussion.

(I work in software development in Japan, for what it's worth.)

Re:VBA?

[fatphil]

> When I look at other Nordic languages, they look degenerate (I'm sure to them, Icelandic looks archaic)

I've seen an exact analogue of that first hand. The last 2 countries I've lived are Finland and Estonia. To Estonians, Finnish looks all old-fashioned and posh and formal with all those unnecessary extra trailing vowels. To Finns, Estonian looks all old-fashioned, backwards and plebby with all those dropped trailing vowels.

Icelandic does sound a bit scary, but at least in "3 drinking horns" in Icelandic, I'm sure "drinking horns" is plural. In Estonian/Finnish it's singular (but "partitive" instead). Mind kerblown...

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

Haha, the one I'd really like to hear people start using in English is "Áfram með smjörið!" It's used to cheer people on, sort of "go for it!" or "keep going!". But it's literally, "Forward with the butter!" ;)

(There's also a joke saying, "Áfram með smjörlíkið" - smjörlíki literally means "butter-like", but it figuratively means "margerine")

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

Yeah, horns has singular/plural forms for the word "horn" (although it's strong neuter, so the nominative and accusative forms are identical between singular and plural except for umlaut-shifts, which there aren't any in "horn"). But Icelandic still has lots of mass nouns - for example, "fólk" (people), which is always singular, and the opposite case - for example, "skilaboð" (message), which is always plural. I'd say that something like 5% of words fit into one of those categories.

BTW, is it easy to tell noun gender in Finnish and Estonian? There can be clues in Icelandic, but they can often be contradictory and unreliable (for example, almost 2/3rds of nouns with a base -i ending are weak masculine but almost 1/3rd are strong neuter), and there's always exceptions - and on probably 1/3 to 1/2 of all nouns there's not any clues, you just have to learn it.

Re:VBA?

[fatphil]

Thank goodness, there's no gender in Finnish and Estonian. I often hear Finns in English just use 'he' and 'she' interchangably, likewise 'him' and 'her' etc. .

I don't hang around Estonian speakers enough to have spotted this error from them yet (and most of the Estonians I know work in translation, and have excellent English).

For a laugh, when living in Finland my g/f and I decided to get some "his & hers" embroidered pillowcases, which obviously just had the same word on both them!

Re:VBA?

[Rei]

Hahaha, that's great ;)

Re:VBA?

[hicksw]

Mg, not MG.

MGA, MGB,or MGBGT?

--
A little prevarication can save lots of explanation.

Re:VBA?

[metrix007]

I just don't get that. I understand translating, but when new things come into play why not use the name it is known by?

Why create a new name for it in your native language?WHy is using "number profit" in Icelandic better than "computer"?

It just seems like petty spite.

Re:VBA?

[KillerLoop]

practicality.

english has become the de facto lingua franca of the internet, which is a good thing. my native language is german, and I regularly see the atrocities commited when text gets translated from english to german. a lot of the time you are better off learning english and reading the original.

translations are terribly time consuming, just ask the EU who prepares its documents in a plethora of languages.

also, interesting information should have, at least in my opinion, as large a reader base as possible. fine if your latest findings are written in romania, hungarian, finnish, german or bonga-bonga. either you find translators for every little rotten language on earth or your information is simpled locked into the language bubble of the author.

english has the potential to be a remedy of sorts (easy,concise,not extra characters), but as always nationalistic or chauvinistic tendencies come into play. the french seem to be a particulary interesting example here. the more nationalist minded germans try to do the same, translating every "lehnwort" (english word incoporated into german) into its german counterpart... which more often than not sounds a little bit retarded. (ie. "heimseite" for homepage)

speak english or die! (to quote an album from S.O.D from years past)

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...???

[junglee_iitk]

Quick question: What is more important?
1. Writing code
2. Being able to read code AFTER it has been written?

Sheesh... Most people in this world already face the problem you are talking about when they see everything written in English. And they are trying to fix it!

PS: Hopefully Slashdot fixes its commenting system. Months have passed since I posted anything and it is complaining that I have reused this form already!

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

[jginspace]

And doesn't writing javascript in, say, Arabic, just make it inaccessible to 99% of the people who like look at your code?

Yeah - it'll be interesting to find out what the LibreJS people think about it: https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/

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

[gman003]

They should be able to have a program "translate" JS!Arabic to JS!English with relative ease. You just parse the script, replacing Arabic keywords with English keywords (that's even how I suspect they're doing it). You could probably even have an interpreter that can mix several languages.

I actually had a similar idea myself, years and years ago. Never did anything with it, though, and my plan was for C, not Javascript.

Oh, and in any case, comments and filenames often *are* in other languages already. So there are already barriers between coders of different languages.

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

[marcello_dl]

IIRC applescript had localized versions. There wasn't a problem in reading foreign scripts because keywords were translated (at one point keyword must be recognizable to the interpreter, that makes it relatively easy to translate them.

It is still not a good idea, of course. You need to copypaste a script from a blog and have it translated by the interpreter before understanding it.

And as a foreigner I can attest that the translation of keywords is a non-existent problem. Either you know the syntax of the whole command (parentheses, colons, semicolons, tabs, whatever) or you look it up. Once you have memorized it, could be english, your tongue, or LOLCODE, doesn't matter.

I'd possibly endorse localized versions of Logo and Smalltalk for basic teaching to kids. Everything else is overkill.

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

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Honestly, if you can deal with the character set, the names of the internals are irrelevant. You'll spend long enough learning their idiosyncrasies that you won't be able to help memorizing the tiny fraction of English you need to write and read code. Your biggest problem will be the documentation not the code itself.

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

[Kjella]

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?

That depends on whether it'll be 99% read by Arabs or not. There's several older code bases I've heard of here in Norway that's been written in Norwegian, simply because it was easier since it's our native language and you can use native terms the business side use in dealing with customers and they had no international ambition or plans to outsource. Well not the programming language, but the functions, the variables, the comments and so on. Changing the language itself would probably seem more natural, not less. That said I'd say the trend has been strongly the opposite, everybody wants their code base in English because otherwise it's impossible to use that code in an international setting. It's actually a much stronger pull towards using English as your code language than as your business language - and even that is pretty rampant in larger companies.

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

[mwvdlee]

Yeah - it'll be interesting to find out what the LibreJS people think about it

Since LibreJS doesn't let you easily define your own version of Arabic, RMS will probably throw a hissy fit.

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

[jhol13]

1. The keywords are localised, no other programming language I know have this capability.
2. Who cares? The point is not to give access of your source to others, it is to give easier access to the programming language itself to those who do not speak english.

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).

BTW, did you even read the article?

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

[littlebigbot]

At least learning English is useful outside using JavaScript, whereas that is an exercise in masochism.

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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But learning TECO allows you to write a brainfuck interpreter and get into a state where writing in brainfuck feels like a blessing at the same time!

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

[Anonymous Coward]

For the most part, you could probably abuse a preprocessor to make any programming language localized

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...???

[kuiken]

Not to mention that you'll have to learn English to use any library or are they going to translate all those as well.

As a non-native English speaker that has had the torture of seeing dutch and french VB/excel I can only hope that this never takes off.
Even localized EDI's are a silly idea.

If you want to learn to program learn English, you can do both at the same time and have access to so much more information.

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

[Eraesr]

Just going out on a limb here, and I'm not sure if this is the case with this newfangled i18n-ed javascript nonsense, but we're basically talking keywords here. Single tokens without any of the grammatical complexities we have to deal with in natural languages. So basically, if I'd write a project in Dutch as:

functie test(i) {
als (i == 0)
retourneer waar;
}

Then your IDE could parse that and translate that to

function test(i) {
if (i == 0)
return true;
}

I'm not really in favor of this because it creates an IDE dependency but the problem may not be as big as many people make it out to be. The only real concern is that if people start using different language keywords, they will probably start choosing variable names in their own language as well, not to mention commenting (oh wait, nevermind, that's barely done any way).

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

[Rei]

Agreed completely. You don't need to go around translating internals. Just let me name my variables, function calls, etc properly, dang it! How hard can that be? Yet few programming languages seem to support that.

It's not even just about wanting to "write in a non-English language"; sometimes you're referring to actual proper nouns, and currently, the only solution is to mangle them. If I wanted to write a variable that holds data that gets sent to a system in (TH)orlákshöfn, I can't use any form of the city name (TH)orlákshöfn in the variable name. If I wanted to write a function to look up a record in the (TH)jóðskrá (the national database), I can't use any form of "(TH)jóðskrá" in the function name. And of course I can't even call it that here on Slashdot, because Slashdot mangles the thorn for some inexplicable reason, so I have to substitute letters. And this is just a comment website!

It just amazes me how bad international character support generally is. I guess because most people who only speak English could give a rat's arse about other languages and people in other countries. Honestly, I don't think it's so much wishing ill will on other people as that it doesn't even occur to them that this matters to other people. We're constantly having to work around the limitations in other people's systems. If you mail something from America to Iceland and you substitute all the thorns in with TH and all of the Ð with D and all of the Æs with AE and remove all of the vowel accents, it'll generally still get to its destination. We have to work around your limitations. Likewise, if you're in the US and you send something listing "Ísland" (Iceland) as the country, it probably won't get here, but if we list "U.S.A." as the country (the Icelandic word for the USA is Bandaríkin) and send it here, it'll still get to you.

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

[junglee_iitk]

Once in a while I come across something that I know a little about, and then I wonder if everything I ever read and took as a wisdom was written but ignorant people on Slashdot.

Yeah I know... am I new here?

Have you ever been to China? Have you ever seen the code they run? Ever seen FORTRAN in Chinese characters? You think they should have learnt English first?

And you a foreigner! Really... I bet an Indian/European who already knew the Latin characters before he/she heard about JavaScript. There are billions of people who don't know Latin script and you are asking them to memorize it.

Just like that.

How many Chinese characters have _you_ memorized? How many Arabic? I am an Indian and have yet to memorize Urdu/Persian script, my grandfather's mother tongue.

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

[VGPowerlord]

And of course I can't even call it that here on Slashdot, because Slashdot mangles the thorn for some inexplicable reason, so I have to substitute letters. And this is just a comment website!

Slashdot's web server and webpages claim to support UTF-8, but the Slashdot backend treats it as ASCII and will helpfully display the ASCII 2+ character representation (sometimes these characters are unprintable).

For instance, here's a Euro currency symbol (U+20AC): â

However, HTML entities work. Here's a Euro currency symbol (€): €

As for thorn, I believe Þ and þ will give you the characters you want: and respectively... although I don't seem to see those, so maybe not.

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

[Rei]

Yeah, that doesn't work either. :( It's just simply broken.

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

[seandiggity]

And doesn't writing javascript in, say, Arabic, just make it inaccessible to 99% of the people who like look at your code?

Yeah - it'll be interesting to find out what the LibreJS people think about it: https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/

From TFA: "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."

...if it really is that easy, going from one language to another should be trivial (and presumably built into the interpreter). Code comments are another thing, obviously.

LibreJS currently requires developers to self-identify javascript as freedom-respecting, using a few different formats (such as javascript web labels). I wouldn't be surprised if future versions identify popular libraries (jQuery, Modernizr, HTML5 Shiv, etc.). Most of the big javascript libraries are hosted by Google and are MIT/Expat licensed, so it shouldn't be too difficult to identify them and, although linking to the libraries directly on Google Code etc. is a really bad idea, a lot of sites do it.

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

[cryptizard]

Except not really? You just have a preprocessor step where you specify which language you coded it in and everything is translated to some canonical form. You could even do this in everyone's precious favorite language C using macros.

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

[bzipitidoo]

Pascal was once a popular programming language. I've always felt one of the reasons C beat out Pascal is English, but maybe not. In Pascal a block is delimited with BEGIN and END, in C it's { and }. Pascal uses IF THEN and ELSE, C uses "if" and "else" but not "then", and these can be avoided with the ? : operator. C uses "for", Pascal uses FOR and TO (or DOWNTO). Pascal unnecessarily adds two more keywords with this REPEAT UNTIL structure, C gets by with one more keyword with "do while". In Pascal, have to actually use the English words FUNCTION or PROCEDURE (and the distinction between the 2 is petty), in C it's all functions and all you do is add () to the end of an identifier. The C syntax is shorter, cleaner, and more neutral.

Most current languages borrow syntax heavily from C, and Javascript is no exception. Though, it seems the Javascript designers must have liked Pascal. Why else would they use "function" and "var"? Still, it's not that many English words, maybe about 20? I do not see that this Javascript translation effort is solving a real problem.

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.

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

[Samantha Wright]

The claim that TECO does not already have malign sentience shocks and offends me.

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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Even if you accept language-barriers in programming as a real problem, it isn't at all clear that translating the built-in keywords, even arbitrarily well, is going to help anybody except the very most inexperienced student programmers.

Much of a real-world program's language-specific content isn't going to be built-in keywords; but references to objects, libraries, and chunks of code that consist heavily of some other syntax, dictated by what the program needs to be able to query and modify(ie. a lot of javascript is built to spend its life chewing on HTML and CSS, and throwing together HTTP requests. Unless your localized Javascript is accompanied by a localized everything else, it isn't going to help the foreign-language user much.)

While the convenience of having a language's built-in keywords possess some degree of mnemonic value in your language certainly can't be denied, the built-ins are not very numerous, and are most likely to be used frequently and better documented than just about any other aspect of the project, both factors that work in your favor even if the keywords might as well be arbitrary symbols.

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

[theArtificial]

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$$

The code snippet factors pi to an arbitrary digit (wiki).

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

[Dave Emami]

IIRC applescript had localized versions. There wasn't a problem in reading foreign scripts because keywords were translated (at one point keyword must be recognizable to the interpreter, that makes it relatively easy to translate them.

Perhaps this is a minor annoyance, but it sounds like this would increase the chances of identifier names being forbidden due to collision with reserved words. For example, instead of just "export" being reserved, you'd also have (among others) "exporter" for French support. Or so Google Translate tells me. Of course, this assumes that the interpreter supports various human languages without you having to tell it ahead of time which one you're using.

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

[19thNervousBreakdown]

From TFA: "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."

How? What's the procedure when the library is written in French and contains a function named "return()" and I'm trying to program in English?

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

[19thNervousBreakdown]

And when I name a variable after one of those canonical names?

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

[seandiggity]

Dunno why you're asking me, just read the article:

"In Babylscript, there are different language modes. When Babylscript is configured to be in a certain language mode, keywords and function names will be in that language. Babylscript initially defaults to the English language mode. In the English language mode, Babylscript behaves like normal JavaScript.
...
When in a different language mode, objects will change their APIs to match the current language. For example, in the English language mode, an object will have English method names. But when in a French language mode, those same objects will expose French method names instead."

I assume that you have to stick to generic names for your own functions if this is going to work, but they might be able to cover a lot of use cases with a broad enough dictionary.

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

[tendrousbeastie]

Writing code in Arabic would be fascinating. Code in a right-to-left natural language with the maths and logic in left-to-right would confuse me to death.

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

[Rei]

Just tried it with python below, fails. g++ fails too.

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

[rtfa-troll]

I don't want to take away from the coolness of your post, but I would like to point out that the wikipedia TECO page shows exactly what he's talking about.

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

[icebraining]

It doesn't matter if the translation happens after tokenization. A 'variable' token won't be the same as a 'keyword' token even if they have the same name.

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

[junglee_iitk]

How about Hindi? How about Marathi?

Frankly a single day spent learning characters is one day spent not solving the problem and one day delay between the problem and its solution.

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

[umbria]

Agreed. And are we going to start using localized alphabets for hexadecimal representation of machine code?

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

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

It doesn't matter if the translation happens after tokenization. A 'variable' token won't be the same as a 'keyword' token even if they have the same name.

Wishful thinking. In practice it leads to much more complexity in the translation (lexing/parsing) stage than you'd want to handle. I can guarantee you that the error messages your "naive" users will have to decipher when they make a mistake, and the parser derails, will vastly negate any small advantage from having to learn "jos" than "if".

And it's not like that particular idea hasn't been tried before (in PL/1 and others). It wasn't pretty...

sounds like a bad idea

[OleMoudi]

Considering current situation with XSS prevalence, javascript obfuscation techniques and content filters bypassing, this will only make matters worse

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.

Re:Forced to learn English to learn Javascript?!

[dargaud]

Exactly. I learned programming in France, at a time when there were some (rather bad) national programming languages like LSE where the words seemed too grounded and loaded with double meanings. Also there were several translated versions of Basic. Some commands were much longer to type, some others didn't translate directly and the equivalent was unintuitive at best, and finally you couldn't type listings found in programming magazines.

Re:Forced to learn English to learn Javascript?!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Luckily, all human languages are isomorphic, so we can just draw up an unambiguous list of localized equivalents to each keyword, allow automated localization of javascript code without any possible ambiguity! What could possibly go wrong or undermine this glorious scheme?

(Other than comments, variable names, and the fact that languages are far from isomorphic?)

Re:Forced to learn English to learn Javascript?!

[dsvick]

I can see the advantage in having the keywords be in your native language, for the most part the keyword itself gives some indication of its function and makes it much easier to remember and look up than it would a word in a different language.

With that being said, I still think this is an incredibly bad idea. Right now you can go anywhere on the web and find help and code examples in English so that everyone who is using JavaScript can use them. With Babylscript you'll find examples and code in dozens of different languages so that no one can help anyone else. So now we really can all sit in our own little world and be oblivious to everything around us.

Re:Forced to learn English to learn Javascript?!

[Lunix Nutcase]

I can see the advantage in having the keywords be in your native language, for the most part the keyword itself gives some indication of its function and makes it much easier to remember and look up than it would a word in a different language.

Or you just provide documentation in the native language of the programmer that explains what the English keyword means rather than translating the keyword and doing nothing but cause confusion between programmers of different native languages?

Re:Forced to learn English to learn Javascript?!

[dsvick]

That's true, and I agree it is the way to go instead of trying to translate the entire language. I was only saying it was easier, not necessarily better.

Re:Forced to learn English to learn Javascript?!

[Samantha Wright]

I can solve two of those problems: all variable names will be limited to one character, and comments are strictly prohibited. Isomorphicising languages is left as an exercise to the reader.

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.

Re:No

[Rei]

You need to learn keywords, they could be klingon, do not need to make any sense for you.

Nonsense. "(car (cddr (cadr (car x))))" is a perfectly understandable English sentence.

Re:No

[medv4380]

Which character encoding should I use to make a Klingon based programming language?

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

shut up someone will take you seriously!

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late.

Re:No

[VGPowerlord]

You need to learn keywords, they could be klingon, do not need to make any sense for you

Nonsense, all programmers know JavaScript as well as Klingon!

Re:No

[cryptizard]

You can't deny that it makes it easier to remember the keywords if you speak the language. We are also not talking just about the small set of reserved words, but stuff like standard APIs and libraries. How much of a pain in the ass would it be if instead of strcpy() it was jrblik()? Don't answer, it would suck.

Re:No

[Samantha Wright]

ASCII did just fine for this one.

Oh non ...

[Anonymous Coward]

C'est pas vrai!

Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure translating the reserved words in a language is a TDWTF in the making.

Nonsense

[fragfoo]

Someone pulled this idea out of his ass and thought it was a genius idea.

Language keywords with accents?

[Rhaban]

I just took a look at the french translation:

charAt carÀ
    charCodeAt codeCarÀ
    indexOf indiceDe
    lastIndexOf dernierIndiceDe
    split fendre
    substring souschaîne

I foresee thousands of text encoding bugs appearing everywhere this is used.

I'd be happy if I could just use variable names...

[Rei]

function calls, classes, etc which use letters that are not in the English character set. :P No translation needed, just let me type them without getting spammed with syntax errors like happens in most programming languages. And for that matter, I'd be happy if I could even *type* a thorn here on Slashdot without having it magically disappear.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do they always only mention "native" speakers of a language. They do realize that in total numbers, English is the most widely spoken language on earth (yes, even more than mandarin! By a wide margin). And English is also the unofficial language of STEM at large as well as international business. When I worked at Ericsson, though it's a Swedish company, and only a very small number of employees actually lived in English speaking countries, the official language that all internal documentation had to be written in was English.

Sure, it may make somebody feel warm and fuzzy to translate javascript to other languages, but in the long run it's pointless since to work in engineering, you have to speak English anyway.

Re:Really?

[wjousts]

I work for a Swiss company. Our official internal language is also English.

Re:Really?

[Rei]

I'm *not* a native Icelandic speaker, but I still find it annoying that I can't program in Icelandic. No, not keywords like for, while, etc - translating those is an idiotic idea. I'm talking variable names, function names, class names, etc. Especially when I need to refer to proper nouns, it's annoying having to mangle my names for no good reason.

Re:Oh Great

[HarrySquatter]

Exactly. This is only good for making write-only code more prevalent.

Re:Language keywords with accents?

[HarrySquatter]

Such as wondrous Slashdot which still sucks at Unicode...

Yeah, let us all hide

[Yaa 101]

Yeah, let us all hide in our ghettos again, very good for the world.

While very noble, all this native translation stuff and UTF-8, what I see is that more and more people stop trying to reach out and stay in their own culture/circle.
The internet 10 years ago was much more international oriented than it is nowadays.

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.

Re:Misguided

[phayes]

Perl hard to read? I beg to differ!
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=963133

Re:Misguided

[Higgs Bosun]

I don't really see the advantage in this. You would be deliberately segregating yourself from the wider development community, and for what?

Yeah, it's just national pride. Good job trying to use libraries. I guess we can look forward to the day when jQuery, etc, has to be translated into all the worlds languages! Can you imagine a Arabic programmer trying to use a French and Russian libraries in a project? This sounds like some linguist's wet dream for preserving the diversity, heritage, and beauty of human languages.

Re:Misguided

[Hentes]

I write my code in English so that everyone in the world can understand my source. Digging through a library written in French would be much worse than learning the meaning of a few words (that have little to do with their English meaning anyway).

Bad math, bad premise

[danwesnor]

If your assumption is that only people in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia speak English, then yes, you can say that only 6% of the world's population speaks English. But your assumption would be very, very wrong. Also, as Javascript is not and never claimed to be a natural language, I don't understand why you think you need to learn English before using it. The definition of "for" in Javascript is so far away from the definition of "for" in English that knowing English doesn't help you grasp how it is used Javascript. Certainly English helps, but if enough documentation exists in another given language, it shouldn't be much harder to learn any given computer language without learning to speak English.

Re:Bad math, bad premise

[Grave]

I've always hated the argument that English is not the most widely spoken language because of "native" speakers. It is the most common second language that is learned throughout the world. And honestly, is the idea of having a single language that can be understood across the world so bad?

I'm all for translating documentation into a native language for more people to learn, but the programming language itself needs to be consistent across all uses. Otherwise, it's not the same programming language--just a copy cat with similar structure and syntax, but not very easily followed by someone who knows the original.

Re:Bad math, bad premise

[Lunix Nutcase]

English is also the language in which most of the computer-related neologisms originated. Leaving the terms in English makes them unambiguous whereas translating them has constantly been shown to do nothing but confuse people. This guy probably things he originated the idea of translating computer programming languages, but this has been done before many times and all such efforts have pretty much died out and for good reason: they suck.

Re:Bad math, bad premise

[jgrahn]

English is also the language in which most of the computer-related neologisms originated. Leaving the terms in English makes them unambiguous whereas translating them has constantly been shown to do nothing but confuse people.

Yeah. I always argued that we in the rest of the world got the better bargain. The English had to dilute their language by giving new, high-visibility meanings to everything from Apache to zip.

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.

Re:Who came up with these awful translations?

[LourensV]

"char" is translated as "aeichen", which isn't even a word in German.

It's just a typo, the German word for "character" is "Zeichen", and the A and Z keys are next to each other (on a German keyboard as well as an international one). I wonder why it's not been capitalised though, nouns in German are supposed to be. If you're going to translate things, go all the way...

Re:Who came up with these awful translations?

[LourensV]

Oh, you're right of course, thanks! I'm still betting it's a typo though :-).

Re:Who came up with these awful translations?

[Oligonicella]

A string of text FFS.

Re:Who came up with these awful translations?

[dokebi]

At least they have the "blink" tag right: Blinken.

From Das Blinkenlights!

Re:Who came up with these awful translations?

[pne]

the A and Z keys are next to each other (on a German keyboard as well as an international one).

They're nowhere near one another on a German keyboard; the key below A is Y, and Z is next to T. Perhaps you were thinking of the French keyboard (AZERTY)?

This will not end well

[phayes]

Decades back I used a research OS that was developed pretty much along UNIX lines except that it was written in this Pascal variant where all the keywords were in French (Pascal was popular back then as a first language). It never achieved any traction & disappeared because neither the OS nor the language proposed anything really useful that you couldn't get already from Unix/C or just plain Pascal.

On a more recent level, one of the biggest PITA I and many others have with Office in non-english locales is that they translate the function names.
=sum(a1:a6) becomes =somme(a1:a6). I'ts easy enough to find websites that will help perform actions in Office, but I often spend twice the time finding out lust what wierd name MS has come up with for some VB function.

Is "pour" so much better than "for" for someone who is not a native english speaker? No, as by the time you have become proficient in the computer language, the subset of a foreign tongue it uses become well known & the difference irrelevant.

It looks to me that Babylscript is just a tool for the language bigots out there. Give it a few months & people will have forgotten it.

6% is just wrong!

[Goth Biker Babe]

You fail so completely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_English_is_an_official_language#Sovereign_states

I think that's more than 6%!

Re:6% is just wrong!

[wjousts]

While I think this whole exercise is a waste of time, and that there are a lot more English speakers than TFA claims, I would quibble that there is a difference between being an "official" language of a country and being widely spoken in that country. For example, Romansh is an official language of Switzerland, but is only spoken by about 0.5% of Swiss. French, German and Italian are the other official languages of Switzerland for those keeping score, and yes, a lot of Swiss people learn English.

STOP!

[fredprado]

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

Re:STOP!

[fatphil]

Que?

Re:STOP!

[fredprado]

É isso aí!

Re:STOP!

[mha]

Especially since the keywords of the language itself are few - compared to the OCEAN of identifiers in libraries and those the programmer used for variables and function names in the actual application!

That said, while I personally MUCH prefer English (I'm German), I don't have a problem with people inventing and/or using whatever the %$ they want. I think we (all humans) discuss way too much stuff that's better left to the individuals. If it causes problems - well, so does pretty much anything anyone ever does, in one context or another.

Re:STOP!

[fredprado]

Multiple languages exist by the power of circumstances and not by design. It would be much better for us all (except maybe translators) if we had a single language in the world.

Computer languages are universal by design, there is no sense in trying to add to them all the problems to communicate we have because multiple spoken languages. As you said it is relatively simple to learn a few tokens regardless of your spoken language.

Re:STOP!

[Anomalous Co-worker]

God! Didn't God create the problem at the Tower of Babel incident? Being able to translate languages freely sticks it to the god!

I hope this is a joke

[jginspace]

Presumably these 94% will have put for foray into the javascript dom on hold until that gets translated.

The Japanese like to put their verbs at the end - are they going to accommodate that?

About half the planet like adjectives after the noun - so is going to be array new?

Re:I hope this is a joke

[mwvdlee]

Are they also going to translate numbers?
In my native Dutch (nl-NL) locale, floating point numbers use a comma as decimal separator. So english "123.45" should be "123,45".
As I understand it, other locales also have differing floating point notation.

Really Necessary?

[am 2k]

I learned programming in BASIC way before I learned English (my mother tongue is German). It didn't pose a problem at all, you have to learn the keywords character-by-character anyways, since you aren't allowed to make any stylistic modifications to the text. I don't quite see the point in this exercise, especially for languages that use the same writing system.

Additionally, programming nowadays is also about getting more information and help online. When you don't know English, most of the information online is inaccessible to you, and you can't even ask any questions.

Re:Really Necessary?

[VGPowerlord]

It didn't pose a problem at all, you have to learn the keywords character-by-character anyways,

As a native English speaker, I can tell you that I didn't have to learn all keywords character by character when learning BASIC.

IF and THEN are common English, I didn't have to think about those. ELSE was a little trickier (because "or else" is a common English phrase) but still simple enough. ENDIF and GOTO were easy because they're two English words stuck together. PRINT was a common word for newspaper or magazine text, so it clearly had to do something with text.

FOR EACH was somewhat understandable because I knew what EACH meant, even if FOR didn't make a lot of sense there. A LOOP was something round that came back to meet itself, such as a piece of string looping back on itself. Oh, and there were things you would DO WHILE waiting for something.

A computer language using native language terms really is easier to learn.

Re:Really Necessary?

[am 2k]

IF and THEN are common English, I didn't have to think about those.

Still, you can't use WHEN or UNLESS (in some languages at least).

PRINT was a common word for newspaper or magazine text, so it clearly had to do something with text.

All that does is helping you remember the word itself, not what it does. What you did is just a mnemonic trick to learn faster.

A computer language using native language terms really is easier to learn.

If you are having trouble remembering pronounceable four-letter character combinations, you shouldn't try to program anyways, since there you have to juggle around hundreds of variables at the same time in your mind. Better learn memorizing first (by using the technique you described, for example).

Way to make un maintainable code.

[Goth Biker Babe]

This is a really stupid idea!

Re:Way to make un maintainable code.

[darkat]

This is a really stupid idea!

Totally agreed! Coders use a formalism to build programs. The base symbols used don't matter.

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.

the upside

[DriveDog]

Just think how many jobs this will add in the future, all those former COBOL coders retrained to fix Y2K, er, I mean, other-than-English version bugs...

Is it April 1 already? Surely they wouldn't really name it Babylscript, knowing what happened to the Tower's progress after language-splintering, would they?

This makes me hate the world.

[eddy]

This is so stupid, it makes me hate to world.

That this is a bad idea with a long history is what makes it so grating, and if it's a joke -- which I hope -- it's one that's been done before, better.

Self-promotion?

[GroovyTrucker]

Anyone else notice that this is submitted by its creator?

Umm...Slashdot is now open to the highest bidder?

Maybe the editors need to vet the submissions better.

Bloody good idea, chaps.

[Higgs Bosun]

Finally use English programmers change the appearance of GUI widgets by their colour property!

This might be a bit imperialistic, but is a programmer who is not comfortable with English a good programmer? Since there is so much technical info in English, if your English skill aren't they good then you are going to miss out on a lot of good info. I seem to recall an interview with Linus Torvalds where he said that because all source code, etc, he ever saw was in English it never even occurred to him to code in his native language. Someone who wants JavaScript in their native tongue has probably only just picked up "Learn JavaScript in 24 hours"...two hours ago.

Re:Bloody good idea, chaps.

[Lunix Nutcase]

It's not imperialistic. English is the language of trade and science and is also the language from which the vast majority of computer-related neologisms originated. To have programming languages use English for its keywords makes it unambiguous to all users rather than you having some sub-par translated version that makes it impossible to use, say, MDN because you can't match up the keywords from the English version to your own.

Re:Bloody good idea, chaps.

[Higgs Bosun]

I agree you with, I just didn't express my point well. I think I've heard some linguistics express objections at English being the world's defacto technical language. A sign of the evil oppressive colonial past and an artefact of Anglo-centric privilege! And it's crass too, we should embrace the full gamut of how the human experience is expressed! Where is the soul in writing everything in English?!

Unfortunately I could see Babylscript being embraced by those with nationalistic axes to grind. Kind of like how French ATC will speak to French pilots in French (while everyone else uses English).

kind of silly

[circletimessquare]

when a native English speaker learns a computer language, you might have to learn a function like, say for example, concat()

array1.concat(array2,array3,...,arrayX)

ok, I get it that concat is from the word concatenate. but concatenate, in English, can have all sorts of meanings, and in the context of javascript, that the meaning of the word concatenate should lend itself ONLY to the scenario of arrays, and ONLY to the meaning of joining arrays together... this is rather arbitrary

such that knowledge of English doesn't really advance your learning of the computer language. in fact, weighted down with assumptions from the human language, you might think a function does something else than what it really does

so we all start with a clean slate, from any language background

the point is, you have to learn a computer language means you have to learn a computer language. and knowledge of the human language that some of the functions have cutesy relationships with words from the human language, doesn't really mean much in the end. in fact, it might work against you if you make bad assumptions

you have to learn what? a "vocabulary" of 40-50 "words" to get 99% of the functionality of a computer language? this is beyond the ability of anyone intelligent enough to be engaged in the effort of programming, from any language background?

so i don't really get this exercise. i guess it is good for school kids, but it kind of adds an extra unnecessary layer of incomprehensibility for anyone seriously engaged in programming, beginner or expert

heresy

[Anonymous Coward]

English is the lingua franca of the technical, engineering and scientific domains. It allows anyone to communicate and understand one another, and suits nicely because it's been formed by usage. I can't use my native language (french) for any of my coding - its vocabulary doesn't suit or simply does not offer proper equivalents for many technical terms and expressions. It just plain feels wrong. Besides there's no use being "local" in such endeavors. Really I don't see the point beside the fact it seems politically nice and fancy.

Re:heresy

[pablo.cl]

You are wrong. You can use French when programming. You want your variables and comments in French. But it's ridiculous to have your keywords also in French. It is debatable if it is a good idea to have libraries translated into another language. Here an example in PHP

$query = "SELECT ID, Parent, Nom FROM Animaux ORDER BY Nom ASC";
$result = mysql_query($query);

$categories = array();

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$categories[] = array(
'parent_id' => $row['Parent'],
'categorie_id' => $row['ID'],
'nom_categorie' => $row['Nom']
);

Better idea

[FilmedInNoir]

How about an IDE that allows programming in a native language and then saves the resulting code in English.
Then the IDE could be expanded for other programming languages more easily and
doesn't require that a javascript library get tacked on to every page they make with "native language" javascript (webpage bloat is bad). Anyway, I could see this mostly be useful to Chinese programmers since I assume they have to type less? e.g. function is (two characters)

Re:Better idea

[technosaurus]

Actually it wouldn't even need to be limited to javascript. All you would need is a unicode-capable sed/awk/gcc to preprocess the keywords from back to syntax ... this is what compilers _do_ ... just give it a *.js.c extension and use sed 's/'$GOTO'/goto/g' $file.js.lang > $file.js ...or... gcc -E ... or ... awk 'gsub(...)'... to transform it ... in fact, why not go an extra step and compile all functions used in web programming down to a 2 byte enumerated representation? It could be post processed back to a pretty format if/when a user hits view source. It would save a ton of bandwidth (not to mention how much that would be if just the white space or comments could also be "stripped") Think of it as assembly for the web. Unfortunately it (the web) got xml-fied like everything else because it was straight-forward to work with and reasonably robust for the types of things they were doing with html-1.0. If you had told those guys of the massive bandwidths, frameworks and code that would be built atop their work, you would likely have seen something like that (I wonder if that is kinda what the Opera turbo feature does, besides regular compression - kind of like a predefined compression table)

Re:Better idea

[UnknownSoldier]

Counter-Example of why this won't work: (From my previous post http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2990493&cid=40698389 )

"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

Now multiply ALL the keywords for EVERY language. This is a retarded idea.

So now the interpreter/compiler has to deal with this case? One possible solution is to RENAME variables. i.e.
  var jos = 1; // original code
  var jos1 = 1; // interpreted/compiled in the Finnish version.
Yeah, that's going to go over REAL well...

Re:Better idea

[technosaurus]

Just because a implies b, does not mean b implies a. In English, you can't do var if = 1 , so why would you suggest that for translations, non-english speakers aren't retarded (in fact I hear that over a billion of them have learned Chinese by the time they are toddlers). Yeah, so each language would have 2 sets of keywords: native and english ... _until_ you preprocess the js (_before_ running/distributing) and then all of the localized keywords are gone, so it won't matter if framework X uses jos as a variable.

--finnscript.h--
#define jos if

# gcc -E myfinnscript.js.c -o myscript.js

Re:Better idea

[FilmedInNoir]

I was thinking in terms of easy-to-use (i.e. proprietary shit that I could make $$$ off of) Windows software,
but Linux/Unix stuff would make it more flexible and open source.
Either way, me and Technosaurus are still smarter than Ming-Yee Iu from Waterloo. Hope this wasn't his Doctorate thesis project.

Javascript is just the beginning

[ColdCat]

After translating javascript you need to translate every javascript library, applications DOM or the translation is useless
I remember a French version of Pascal which makes me laught a lot.

Javascript is maybe around 150 translatable words, I'm sure it's easier to learn by sticking to english instructions and reading tutorial in your native language.

Bad name

[jimbrooking]

Should be called Babelscript as it reduces comprehension. (See Tower of Babel.) Like APL, a write-only language.

/. united??

[dwater]

Wow. I've read all the comments (that have been selected) and not one thinks this is a good idea.
Amazing to see everyone agree for a change.

"6% native English speakers" - is that relevent to anything? How many people can *read* (or write) English, as a 1st, 2nd, or nth language? - I'd guess somewhere over 75%, even higher if you consider the simple keywords used in javascript (not that knowing their meaning in real English will help enormously, as has been pointed out). Are there any complicated keywords? I suppose 'function' might not be so often used...then there's CSS (I assume they mean that and HTML too)..."border", "margin", "padding" - they're reasonably common for me, but that doesn't help me in the slightest.

Nope - knowing English isn't much help at all, imo. At best, it gets you over the first hurdle...but there's a whole 800m-worth of hurdles to go with the rest of Javascript/CSS/HTML. Really, it's horrible - and they call Symbian C++ hard! (I didn't think Symbian C++ was so hard - pretty much the same as Android, imo).

Re:/. united??

[shutdown -p now]

Wow. I've read all the comments (that have been selected) and not one thinks this is a good idea. Amazing to see everyone agree for a change.

English speakers think so for obvious reasons.

Non-English speakers have seen it being tried before for their respective languages, and we know what a monumentally stupid thing it actually is in practice.

No surprise here.

Re:/. united??

[dwater]

> No surprise here

Well, I might have thought there'd be one or two....I mean, someone obviously thinks it's a good idea, else it wouldn't exist.

But, no, not really a surprise.

I'm not entirely sure what the 'obvious reasons' are. If you're suggesting all English speakers are incapable of thinking objectively, then, well...hrpmh to you.

English!

[gestalt_n_pepper]

It's the new Lingua Franca! No, wait...

Dummeste. Ide. Noensinne.

[bAdministrator]

Is this a rerun of The Tower of Babel?

Lingua Franca

[jimbrooking]

The lingua franca in international air travel is English, so international pilots and all air traffic controllers at international airports must learn English. (See this reference. Maybe we ought to let each airport direct traffic in their own language as well?

Get over it!

Know english first to learn Javascript?

[Saija]

That's bullshit, i learned javascript in Colombia as a native spanish speaker.

Javascript was better ...

[Infernal Device]

in the original Klingon.

More precisely

[Kupfernigk]

English is the language of almost all the people who came up with the stored program digital computer. That is the overriding reason.

There are other important trade languages and, during the period when computers were getting started, German was still the language of chemistry and our R&D library had lots of engineering textbooks in German. If you don't know basic Italian and German you won't go far with opera. Musical notation is still Italian and I haven't noticed any moves to replace p and f in musical scores with Q and L (quiet and loud). Words like "crescendo" just got taken over into English.

I am all for linguistic diversity, but this is really a straw man argument about learning programming.

Step away from the computer please

[he-sk]

Oh god, this is such a horrible idea. So they fixed the VBA problem where code developed for the German version of Excel fails to run anywhere else. Good for them. But then they claim that you can mix and match French and Spanish code. This is good how? As a German native speaker I was exposed a Java program written in German. For example, getters and setters were prefixed with "nimm" and "gib". My eyes start to bleed just thinking about it.

If you learn programming you have to deal with complex abstract problems. Learning the arbitrary names of a few keywords doesn't really impose such a cost, compared to the gymnastics you have to make to wrap your head around, say, pointer arithmetic. Okay, so nobody uses that anymore, but what about the difference between a value and a reference (e.g. in a linked list)? Or even simpler: how about the basic concept of extracting common code into a function?

OffShore Programming

[heatseeker_around]

I can't wait to see the result of the code for the project that my company decided to develop offshore, in India. I am sure that our clients will be pleased to learn that we will not be able to debug a fucking line of code on site.
What a fucking great idea ! yeah !

Why don't you just write it in our beloved Universal Language "Esperanto" ? It should be even easier to maintain... It is UNIVERSAL !....

I believe that sometimes, if nobody invented a specific thing, maybe it's because this thing is fucking stupid. Try it, figure out by yourself that it is so stupid that even your mother would disown you, then trash it forever.

Too hard to learn a few keywords?

[qrwe]

A computer language is, as seen from a natural language perspective, constrained to its reserved keywords. A simple Google query shows that JavaScript has remarkably many - I can count it to be 184 (as seen in http://www.quackit.com/javascript/javascript_reserved_words.cfm). However, is it really necessary to understand the literal meaning of each keyword? Many of those keywords need a short description anyway to use them, and those descriptions alone could simply be written in any natural language of choice. Hence, changing the reserved keywords would only confuse any "English JavaScript" developers.

Re:Too hard to learn a few keywords?

[DriveDog]

I'd go even further. When first learning to program, I was thrown more than once by thinking that a keyword meant something like its English definition would suggest. I would have learned quicker had the keywords been randomly selected from Dr. Seuss books.

Can software development deteriorate any further?

[fredrated]

Once upon a time, when computers were not available to all, when it required an investment and expertise to write software, the higher barrier to entry essentially insured that, basically, only well qualified people were writing software.

Today, when anyone with 25 cents can write and compile software, it shows, I believe, in a lower overall quality of software and documentation. In those days I loved my software job; today the software overall sucks so bad I can't stand my job anymore.

This javascript 'enhancement' will only make the problem worse. If like me you think software sucks bad, just wait.

Really bad idea

[sl4shd0rk]

This would be and incredibly stupid move. One of the greatest strengths of code is that it's a shared, common language. You can easily debug someone's syntax on usenet/blog/whatever without having to know their native language.

Sure it's nice to localize and cater to individual cultures, but the reason computer languages are so accessible to beginners is because they don't need to learn the language through google translate. Ever try and debug HelloWorld() in Arabic?

0LT$$

[jabberw0k]

I love progamming in TECO. Because it feels so good when you stop!

Remember, EMACS was originally written in TECO. Does that tell you something about its author?

Re:0LT$$

[fatphil]

Drugs are baad, mmmkay.

I had to learn English too!

[wjousts]

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.

I'm a "native" English speaker and guess what? I had to learn English too! I wasn't born that way!

Since 100% of JavaScript programmers have to learn at least some English, I demand they translate JavaScript into baby talk! It's not fair that my daughter will need to learn English before she can program.

Re:I had to learn English too!

[wjousts]

Woooooshhh!

How does it compare to having to learn a sense of humor as an adult because you didn't learn it as a child?

What's the point?

[gshegosh]

There are just about 20 or so keywords one has to learn in most of programming languages and one has to learn them anyway, even if they are in one's native language. And if they translate all libraries and APIs -- this makes it harder to learn, because one will only find a subset of forums, stackoverflow posts, etc. while googling about the problem at hand.

One more translation needed...

[DaneM]

Now, if we can only translate Javascript into a less painful scripting language, we'd have REAL progress! *insane laughter*

One more translation needed

[DaneM]

Now, if they'd only translate Javascript into a less painful scripting language, we'd have REAL progress. *insane laughter*

Not the first language to have this done to it

[roman_mir]

This is not the first time somebody does this either, there is an entire industry in Russia built around a business platform (1 s) that prides itself by the fact that they have translated BASIC into Russian, I shit you not.

so, in arabic,...

[heatseeker_around]

would you write your code from right to left too ?

Bad Translation in German and some other issues

[Qbertino]

The German translation isn't good. They could've easyly improved on the syntax. let ist translated into 'sein' (to be) rather than 'lasse' (let). There are a few other instances were they could've actually improved on the language as a whole but messed it up.

Besides, as others have pointed out: The PL being in a different language than the native is an *advantage*. Less mixing of words. It's great to have native Variables and english keywords - it gives you way more flexiblity with your code.

My 2 cents.

Re:Bad Translation in German and some other issues

[Cow Jones]

Exactly. The German translation is horrible. It looks like one person just went over the keywords and translated them without considering the context they'd be used in. I'm pretty sure that nobody else checked on that translation before they decided to go with it.

The main problem seems to be that the translator decided to use the infinitive verb form for command/method names, when the imperative form would have been more appropriate.
E.g., arr.zerteilen(x) literally means arr.to_slice(x), not arr.slice(x).

They're not even consistent in that usage:
decodeURI --> dekodiereURI (imperative)
break --> abbrechen (infinitive, "to break")
try --> versuche (imperative)
throw --> wirf (imperative)
catch --> fangen (infinitive, "to catch")

Some translations are incorrect or just plain weird:
length --> länger ("longer")
parseFloat --> parseGleitkommazahl ("parse" is not a German word)
parseInt --> praseGanzzahl (neither is "prase", obviously ;-)
return --> rücksprung ("the jump back", awkward when used with values)
escape --> umsetzen (??)

This clearly needs more work. Which is a shame, because I'm teaching programming to an 11-year old who only has a rudimentary grasp of English. This could have been used as a stepping stone to the real thing, but not in this state. It's probably a good thing, anyway. It won't hurt the kid to learn some more English.

CJ

Re:Bad Translation in German and some other issues

[dokebi]

It won't hurt the kid to learn some more English.

Bingo. You win slashdot today.

US was (is) the major innovator of computer technology, and her influence in the global "culture" of computers will be felt for a long time. People stopped trying to translate terms like "internet" and "http" a long time ago, and new computer terms appear as English first, even if the inventor is a non-English speaker.

This won't dissuade some misguided people, though. You just hope them to disappear quickly.

Re:Bad Translation in German and some other issues

[pne]

parseFloat --> parseGleitkommazahl ("parse" is not a German word)

Yes it is; it's the imperative of parsen. Ich parse, du parst, er parst. "Parse die Gleitkommazahl!" Optionally, you can also say "Pars die Gleitkommazahl!"; both forms are possible for the imperative.

I agree that it doesn't really roll trippingly off the tongue, though.

Now that I think of it, wouldn't it be better if we were a bit more polite to the computer, though? var pi = parsenSieBitteDieGleitkommazahl('3.14159'); vielenDank();

Re:Bad Translation in German and some other issues

[Cow Jones]

Live and learn... The online edition of the Duden doesn't have a history, but my friend just looked it up in her 2006 dead-tree edition of the Duden, and "parsen" was not in there. Seem like parsen officially became a German word at some point in the last five years.

Re:I'd be happy if I could just use variable names

[Rei]

I just typed two in this post - I certainly don't see them.

Overtranslating

[jones_supa]

Aside this Babylscript, I sometimes wonder if there's already way too much redundant translations in the engineering world. For example, who needs a crappy article about mini-ITX in Finnish at Wikipedia. That is so special technical information that you oughta learn English anyway. I understand technical articles like Huuto.net (Finnish eBay-like site) that describe a local speciality. Then some game makers strive to have the menu texts in all possible languages, which again is a bit questionable. For games that have lot of text (such as adventure games), translations do make sense.

Misleading stat

[QuietLagoon]

Unfortunately, since only 6% of the world's population are native English speakers

I've been to countries where the people do not speak English "natively" and I have been very surprised that most of the people speak English (as their second language) better than many people here in the US. While English may not be the first language of a significant portion of the world, English is spoken and understood by a very significant portion of the world's population.

M$ did it in VBA (and Excel) ...

[garry_g]

... so what could go wrong?

Never trust a language which is not demonstratable

[stiebing.ja]

...by ist own... They need a *java applet* to demonstrate their language?!

Programming in one's native language?

[Millennium]

Whoever manages to enable people to program in their native language has a Nobel prize waiting for them. It certainly hasn't happened yet, even for English speakers: if I were to type a few lines of English describing a program, there is no tool out there that would know what I was talking about.

Programming languages are just that: distinct languages of their own, usually characterized by a small vocabulary and highly expressive grammar. It is true that most of the common vocabulary we see between languages -things like if, else, function, while, class; perhaps some 100 words in total- are pulled from English, but although these words share some meaning with their English counterparts, those meanings -both in terms of semantics and in terms of grammatical significance- are also far more narrow and rigidly fixed: more comparable to mathematical symbols than words. Learning to program will not teach a person to speak English, nor the reverse.

I suspect that this is why complaints from non-native English speakers are rare to nonexistent: the advantage gained by speaking the language from which these words derive is trivial. Redefining the symbols to have synonyms pulled from other languages doesn't really solve the problem; indeed, it only makes matters worse by multiplying the number of symbols without adding any new meanings. That sort of obfuscation serves no one.

If you want people to be able to program in their native langauges, you need a completely different approach: natural-language processing that compiles down to object code of some kind.

Underwriters

[ThatsNotPudding]

Underwritten, no doubt by the People's Army Central committee to speed the plow for industrial and military IP espionage.

useless

[ZiggyM]

As a kid I learned Basic before learning english. Language was not a barrier at all. the only prpblem is that i would say "If we go out THEN lets GOTO the movies" and 30 years later i still think of those keywords first in a code context.

Re:I'd be happy if I could just use variable names

[shutdown -p now]

I think he meant using them in the code. Java, JavaScript, C# and VB all allow that, for example. So does Python and Ruby.

Worst place to gauge acceptance

[Requiem18th]

As most people here don't give a shit about non-english.

Now, admittedly, I don't think this is exactly an excellent idea, but let me try and dispel a couple of misconceptions here. Firstly, that the "host" language doesn't matter because code isn't in English to begin with.

That's bullshit.

If everything you needed to understand a program was it's syntax and function definitions javascript would kinda look like this:

x a % 1*
x a2 % "hello world"*
w i a3 f I
  u a3ytif*
F

That is, with all keywords and punctuation chosen at random. That simply is no way to help the programmer get things done. Both the keywords and punctuation, as well as identifiers must be easy to remember. There is a reason we don't chose punctuation and identifiers at random.

Second misconception is that every programmer writes in English. Being a Mexican coder I can attest that most enterprise code is written with Spanish identifier names. That's even a guideline for some people. If an identifier is in Spanish they know they can check the source code, if it's in English it's part of the language, or the framework or a library and you don't bother checking the source.

And it makes a lot more sense that you people would think. Enterprise code tends to be overly specific, choosing English identifiers in an Enterprise environment means that you will end up changing the terminology and this custom software is usually written for experienced teams that already have developed a terminology that matters to them so there's value in keeping everything consistent.

I can only guess that code written in India or Japan would also use Indian or Japanese identifiers.

Now keywords... yeah, let them be English. The advantage of changing them is negligible compared to its downfalls.

Not all programming languages have reserved words

[alispguru]

Consider PL/I, which had no reserved words.

Not saying that was a good idea, mind you...

Non-English speakers only program in English

[Tony Isaac]

I once had a co-worker who spoke fluent Spanish, since he grew up in Puerto Rico. He was called upon to go to Mexico City to teach some programming classes. Before he went, he brushed up on Spanish words and phrases that dealt with programming and technology. As he started teaching the class, he found that his students were not understanding him. He finally realized that they didn't know the Spanish words he had brushed up on! He switched back to using the English versions, and everybody was happy.

Just as Arabic numerals are the language of math around the world, English is the language of computing around the world.

Wow thats retarded...

[hachre]

I'm sorry for everyone who is wasting time working on this ...

Re:I'd be happy if I could just use variable names

[Rei]

Just went ahead and tried Python again. Doesn't work.

#!/usr/bin/python
# coding: utf-8

ð = 3
print ð

File "./test.py", line 3
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file ./test.py on line 3, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details

Okay, fine, let's add a coding statement:

#!/usr/bin/python
# coding: utf-8

ð = 3
print ð

File "./test.py", line 4
        ð = 3
        ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Think I also tried Javascript recently and it was broken, too. And I know C++ complains, at least with g++.

Re:I'd be happy if I could just use variable names

[shutdown -p now]

Just went ahead and tried Python again. Doesn't work.

Are you using Python 2.x? That's ASCII only. Python 3k is Unicode.

Think I also tried Javascript recently and it was broken, too.

That would be a non-conforming implementation of the language - per spec, it should permit "any character in the Unicode categories: “Uppercase letter (Lu)”, “Lowercase letter (Ll)”, “Titlecase letter (Lt)”, “Modifier letter (Lm)”, “Other letter (Lo)”, or “Letter number (Nl)”.".

And I know C++ complains, at least with g++.

C++ is kinda funny. It permits Unicode identifiers as of C++11, but it has a very vague notion of input encoding and such. Implementations are free to accept UTF-8 and the likes, but they're also free to reject them, so in practice if you want to be portable you have to use \uXXXX escape sequences, which of course defeats the point of Unicode identifiers (unless your IDE renders them as symbols). I don't know the state of Unicode support with g++, but MSVC will happily understand both \uXXXX and literal UTF-8 in identifiers, though for the latter it needs to see the UTF-8 BOM at the beginning of the file.

Re:Oh Great

[rtfa-troll]

Ahhhhhh.....

So now if I mix all the languages I know into the code I write nobody but me will have a chance to read. I can even safely start using comments again so I know what the code was meant to do two days later without risking my job security...

APL has no human language bia

[dakra137]

The APL programming language has no human language bias, as far as I can recall, but the TUI (Terminal User Interface, where "Terminal" refers to the Interface, rather than the User) does. It has commands like )LOAD, )SAVE, etc.

Explanation (5:erocS)

[tepples]

Slashdot mangles the thorn for some inexplicable reason

The reason is perfectly explicable: past abuses of directional overrides.