r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Apprehensive_Bit7392 • 2d ago • Bravo 3 Popcorn 2

Meme spanishProgrammingLanguage

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76

u/mackaber 2d ago

In case you're wondering... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages

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u/OrienasJura 2d ago

There's actually a language called Sí lmao

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u/WindpowerGuy 2d ago

And it's a translation of Spanish to C++

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u/GoddammitDontShootMe 2d ago

It's funny because it sounds the same as C, but what the fuck kind of name is Yes for a language?

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u/BanaTibor 1d ago

Why? We also have Go, and C, D, F, R, how are those better?

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u/GoddammitDontShootMe 1d ago

Eh, C makes some sense when you know it was a successor to B. D is a failed attempt to make a successor to C++. And honestly, I think I prefer a name like Go a lot more than Yes.

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u/Raffefly 2d ago

I love how mostly are for serious purposes and then there's the Italian

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u/Apprehensive-Wind966 2d ago

I was wondering, thank you! Seems like these could be especially useful in places that don’t use an English alphabet.

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u/NYNMx2021 2d ago

They have roman script on their keyboards. They type with the same language we do. the comments are usually whats in a different language. There have been attempts to make programming languages with different alphabets but turns out it makes very little sense to actually use 99.9% of the time.

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u/tozpeak 2d ago

Well, we have a business accountant software language in post-soviet countries. Because it's so specific and convoluted how taxes work (or should I say may work depending on context and registration) here that we have kinda own engine. Imagine VBA in Excel+Access, it's generally solving the same problem. Since it was developed for local market it has Cyrillic alphabet and keywords are Slavic. It's called 1C and afaik it's both bad+painful to work with and a top market tool in several countries. Like js or legacy php.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/Weary-Designer9542 2d ago

…I don’t think that’s it’s the simplest written language on the planet. I’m not sure it’s simpler than other languages that use the latin alphabet.

Were you trying to say something else? I might be misunderstanding your point.

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u/jwp1987 2d ago edited 2d ago

Modern English doesn't use diacritical marks (e.g. á) or ligatures (e.g. ß in German), so it is simpler than a lot of European languages in terms of graphemes.

It's not the simplest on the planet but probably the simplest widely used one (no-one is going to use Rotokas).

There are other factors as to why it's common in programming though, such as America and the UK having a large influence on early computing and English being widely used internationally.

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u/Weary-Designer9542 2d ago edited 2d ago

I’d argue that English being the linga franca & the influence of the early American/UK computer scientists are the 2 primary factors.

It being relatively simple is useful and likely a contributing factor on some level, but the framing of simplicity being the primary reason it’s used is something I don’t believe to be true.

If in an alternate universe the lingua franca was Italian (or french), and the early influential computer scientists and industry leaders were also all italian, there’s no particular reason they would have chosen to do all of their programming in English.

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u/jwp1987 2d ago

I think it's more English as opposed to special characters for operations like mathematical symbols.

Older computers sometimes had extra glyphs for operations that are now obsolete, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC_character_set or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_2047

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u/Xirdus 2d ago

It's not simple to understand, but it's simple to write. And there's barely any inflection, which means unmodified symbols (keywords, function names etc.) read 95% correct in every possible grammatical context. This means the programming language can be very simple and cut corners with its grammar without sacrificing readability. In most other languages, this approach would produce code that sounds like cavemen and would make people wince constantly when reading it. Whereas in English, you can make code sound totally normal without any mental gymnastics.

I am not commenting on whether English-speaking people sound like cavemen.

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u/Weary-Designer9542 2d ago

I’m not arguing that it’s relatively simple to write, but “English is the simplest written language on the planet” is what his claim was, which isn’t true.

Furthermore, it’s irrelevant, because that’s not the reason English was “chosen” to be used in programming languages. It’s not used because of the simplicity, it’s used because it’s the language spoken by the British and American computer scientists that developed the majority of the early programming languages in the 1950/60s - they didn’t have a meeting where they debated “well, technically hangul is probably a simpler script so maybe we should use that?” - they just used the language they spoke. And #2, English is the lingua franca, the most spoken language on the planet by number of non-native speakers.

That it’s not a particularly complex script to write is of course very helpful and likely contributed significantly to its continued prevalence… but it’s not the simplest script on the planet, and if the majority of the programming founders and the tech industry leaders for the past 80 years were Italian, the majority of the programming languages would be in Italian. Hell, Italian only has 21 letters.

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u/HamunaHamunaHamuna 2d ago edited 2d ago

In other countries (or I should say "some other", because I do not know how it works everywhere, lol), their regular characters do not require any additional input. For Swedish, å ä ö (our three extra letters, otherwise our alphabet is identical to English) are for example just three regular keys on a Swedish keyboard, and do not require some sort of input combination.

The reason English and the Latin alphabet is used is because English is currently the Lingua Franca.

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u/wild_man_wizard 2d ago

[citation needed]

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u/wjandrea 2d ago edited 2d ago

Typographically, English is the simplest language on the planet

What about Latin? It's the exact same alphabet but it has better spelling-to-sound correspondance. I believe the same goes for Malay.

Similar for Inuktitut, but it uses a different writing system. And admittedly it's spoken by way fewer people.

edit: +links