Are There Any Non-English Programming Languages?

In this video I discuss why English is such a popular language for programming syntax and some additional programming languages that don't use English.

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Intro: (0:00)
Origins Of English In Programming: (0:41)
Localised Programming Languages: (2:06)
Arabic Programming Language: (4:09)
Mandarin Programming Language: (5:00)
Irish Programming Language: (6:02)

[carloszamorano]

I wondered about this, I live in Chile. I speak spanish natively, learnt english as a second language, when I was in college on my first class of programming, it was easy for me, and everybody else struggled a lot. I thought well maybe its because I learnt some VB6 when I was 15 so it was easier for me because I already knew how this worked, but.. how could I be the only one in the class that felt it was easy and the rest, all struggled so much?

Now that I think about it, this might be the reason, most of my classmates were also taking Basic English I, they didn't know english. And I came here because I was watching another video were a guy was talking about assembly and said all those words that I didn't know what they meant and thought "why are all programming languages even the most primitive ones using english words?"

It all comes into place now, and if you think about it, it is a problem. The world must be full of people with the potential to be great programmers, to think about great algorithms, and they wont ever use that ability because they don't know how to speak English nor understand it so they give up about programming all along.

You may think "well just learn english then, it's easy". Is it? I could say the same about spanish. "Oye pero que el resto del mundo aprenda español y ya, es facilísimo. Yo lo hablo sin ningún problema." ("Well just learn spanish then, its easy. I speak it without any problems.")

[konstantinsotov]

As a person from russia, I can say that in our programming state exam, when we have some small program and we need to tell what is it going to output, we have this program listed in 5 languages: python, c++, pascal, basic and "algorithmic language", which is just a concept and it uses russian words.

Another example is that there are python extension that introduce some russian syntax (mostly the pronunciation memes, but still).

Also, since GCC can handle variable names with russian letters (I don't know the exact version, but I suppose it is not something very recent), you can introduce macros and programm in C in russian

And, finally, none of my friends ever had troubles with understanding programming because it was all in english. Even those who can not speak it properly or at all do know what "integer" or "assertion" mean, at least in syntax. Programming languages usually do not have more than 50 commonly used keywords, so it is no problem at all

[folomba]

Hello from Moscow! 1C is russian language programming with russian syntax.

[jaychen]

The language you mentioned (易）is just one of Chinese based language that was practically used by some developers to build real applications. There is another one which is completely written in Ancient Chinese and can execute any task. It's a wonderful art piece that the code is so beautiful if one can appreciate ancient Chinese. but there's no practical use because there's no motivation for majority software developer to use it. There's also a derived language you can write program in pure Chinese but underneath it's Forth, a language still alive today.

By the way， Mandarin means a way to speak Chinese. Another famous we to speak is Cantonese. There are countless infamous way to speak. All share the same written language called Chinese. You can substitute Mandarin in your video with Cantonese. But I thought programming languages are mainly for writing and reading, not for speak. I could be wrong😊

[dontmindme]

I guess it's more common to learn at least some English before getting into programming. That was certainly the case for me. Still, it's cool to see that there are options for some other languages, even if they are mainly educational.

[dafoex]

There's lots of "esolangs" (think brainfuck, malbolge, puberty, etc.) so it doesn't surprise me that people make "normal" programming languages that just happen to be in Irish Gaelic. I wonder if anyone has tried to make programming languages in Esperanto or Interlingua. Since conlangs like those are intended to be international languages, it would strike me as the first ones to try, but who knows.

[reda]

4:40 you don't need an Arabic Keyboard. The computer (more accurately the keyboard) reads the keystroke and translates it to the proper character of that language.)
I know I butchered that sentence fact-wise, but when you type g, the Arabic equivalent on that key is ا (alef). Your keyboard doesn't stutter and wonder what character to input. Your computer translates the key to the proper character of that language.

And obviously, you can write any unicode character from your keyboard if you change your referred languages on your OS

But what I suspect you want to say is, is you have to memorize what [Arabic] character is the counterpart of every English/Latin character key.

Also, at the beginning:
It's strange why English-based syntax is the dominant human language in today's programming languages. It came from the dominant countries which happen to speak English like the US and UK.
Also BiasedBot:
7:48 only 2 million people speak this language, so why bother?

In the end, I can't speak of difficulty as I started programming in age ~ 20 at college age so I'm not a case of someone who found a difficulty in studying programming.
And that implies English is the spoken language in academia here in Saudi Arabia. And that's why it's obvious at this point why a 20 yo won't find English difficult as the syntactical language in programming.

[gabiedubin]

I am not a native english speaker, however english is taught widely in every place computer sceince is taught. so if you are learning the latter you probabley have some understading of the former.

[kuhluhOG]

Interestingly enough, one apparently doesn't need to know English to program professionally.
I once met a programmer who retired a few years ago who was for their entire career a programmer, but didn't know English at all.
I think that Microsoft localises even their developer documentation certainly helped with that.
And quite frankly, I think it's good that they do, because even if somebody becomes REALLY good with a foreign language (like English), having the documentation in their native languages can help a lot. Afterall documentation normally explains the difficult parts or a piece of software and then needing to first translate that can be really hard (especially because you need to normally understand things before you can translate them accurately).

[josephgaviota]

Even HTML, <P> (Paragraph), <em> (emphasis, italic), <strong> (strong, bold), <tr> (tab row) ... etc., all English.
As the others have said, most languages have a fairly small number of reserved words, so I guess it's not _that_ hard to learn 30 or 50 words—everything else is foreign anyway, when you're first learning to code.

[shiftrunstop]

"Féach ar an gCód" I love it! didn't know this existed. The problem I find with modern Irish though is the pseudo-english words that have been incorporated into the language, for example "muisiriún" meaning mushroom, however in old irish "fan aon oíche" is the word for mushroom "over one night" or "púca" they are known as in some parts of the country. Also the loss of the old script doesn't help. It really shouldn't be an endangered language but it is.

[xmohd]

Yes you did pronounce it right. At least, you tried your best. Since the letter 'Q' is the closest letter in sound to the letter 'ق' that the world heart starts with in Arabic. Great video and great channel!

[cat-.-]

I would much rather learn the couple handful English keywords than adding another tool chain to transpile a niche localized language
Plus English is the easiest to type
Plus you can just treat the keywords as tokens. Some ppl don’t even know the meaning of if and else, but have no problem using them at all

[pro-socialsociopath]

Perhaps an emoji programming language would be a lot more universal...

To create string: ✏️🗒️
Create an immutable string: 🖊️🗒️
Append to mutable string: 📝
Perform arithmetic operation: 🧮
Example of multiply: 🧮👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
Pointer: ➡️💾

Oh yeah, it's all coming together.

[rtsa]

Maybe transpilers instead of compilers. For example what if you wrote C code in Hindi/Urdu then transpiled it to standard C.

[boobafett-]

Found this channel randomly. Very interesting thank you

[almpazel]

What about nodered like using graphic and icons to make program, that can be easy to orgnize ?

[Zephyrus]

Just write in Perl, nobody would understand it even thou it's in english because it's the best write-only language. :]

[JamesSmith-ixjd]

If you can't remember ~200 word-tokens you will not go far in programming regardless. Plus you are losing so much information not knowing english, and how will you communicate with the broader world of programming and IT, you may want to host your app or integrate it with other software, you can't even start a web server not knowing some english.
English is perfect for programming because it transmits information without the additional fluff or too much ambiguity, it is difficult to transmit feelings or metaphorical constructs in english, so for poetry it is not a good language, for programming though it is very, very good.
Fun fact, if you want to be extra autistic and programm in different language you can patch st terminal to change your glyphs from latin to your own script, you can invent the script and teach yourself to read it, of course it will not be secure against statistical analysis, but it will be really badass to be able to read 'the matrix' on your terminal, while others have no clue if you play some cli MUDs or working.