POV: ESL programmers
="I like Dutch function names in Excel at least, "&ALS(DutchFunctionNamesRule=WAAR; ALS(IS.EVEN(DAG(VANDAAG()))=WAAR; "I just like not always using English for everything."; "I just like using Dutch."); "though it can be a bother having to translate them when troubleshooting.")
In college, we had to use Hungarian pseudocode. I still have PTSD from it, especially as the teacher was a psycho that had a meltdown every time her “how do you do fellow kids” moment terribly backfired, most infamously by putting Twilight references into a test (everybody audibly cringed reading the tests).
Support your teachers trying to be fun, at least it shows they care enough to put in more effort.
Also I’m curious how she managed to slide in Twilight references of all things in a programming class lolYeah its kinda based lol
Ouch.
My experience with German programming languages is with Siemens PLC’s, since the programming language changes together with the IDE when you set the language to German. Looking at Structured Text / Instruction List having U (und) instead of A (and) operator and bunch of other things was interesting.
But IIRC there were also higher programming languages that are in other languages? Wasn’t there one for arabic? Was this it: https://github.com/nasser/---/
Of course… even an Arabic programming language has a recursive acronym name
There’s also Alef, which I thought was the only Arabic programming language 'till now.
The pain is real. Now I wanna design/implement a programming language in the Egyptian dialect (j/k. fuck no)
Maybe that was the one I’ve originally seen. Not sure which one :D
As an Arab, I now want to learn to code in Qalb so I can romantically say that I know the workings of the heart <3
Also, how about we make a programming language called ب and have it just stand for برمجه (“Barmaja”: literally programming in Arabic)
Yeah, Excel does that, it always fascinated me. It was so weird writing =KDYŽ instead of =IF in Excel. Different times, I guess.
Does that get translated if someone else with a different language opens that file?
No idea, but I would hope so.
Yes, but it would be funny if you could just switch languages in the middle of your sheet, чтобы можно было начать на русском, continue in English,وانتهى باللغة العربية.
Tap for spoiler
I hope that the built in translation in iOS can translate to Arabic well
Don’t worry, the arabic translation is correct
It’s formal Arabic, as is expected of any translator
The best part is that if your version of Excel is German, you can’t write
=IF()
. You have to use=FALLS()
.It’s always fun to google a function and then the translation.
I’m pretty sure it’s not
FALLS()
butWENN()
, at least the last time I used Excel.
Internally Excel saves it in English (or some internal code) and translates it when opened.
My company switched from Excel-Interops, where you had to send the German function name to Excel. Now we write .xlsx files directly and have to send the English function name. But when opened it displays all functions in German (or whatever localization Excel is set to).
I am german and I feel physical pain reading this code
A key reason English became the preeminent language of scientific and technical communication, and thus the source of keywords in programming languages, is because German (the other candidate) fell out of favour due to the two world wars. So, were it not for Prussian militarism, our programming languages may have instead been based on German (along with most scientific literature being in German).
Also because, as a person who has studied multiple languages, German is hard and English is Easy with capital E.
No genders for nouns (German has three), no declinations, no conjugations other than “add an s for third person singular”, somewhat permissive grammar…
It has its quirks, and pronunciation is the biggest one, but nowhere near German (or Russian!) declinations, Japanese kanjis, etc.
Out of the wannabe-esperanto languages, English is in my opinion the easiest one, so I’m thankful it’s become the technical Lingua Franca.
Had the world settled on German, someone might be making a similar argument that the world dodged a bullet by choosing a language with phonetic orthography and words composed of logical building blocks rather than a mess like English
Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you’re only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don’t give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).
OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.
So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.Making fun of people has more “stank” in English (not a hard fact, just my opinion).
* Yiddish has entered the conversation
Seriously, fuck Excel for this. I always hate to look up function names in German.
Yes, I also hate it!
The Italian version of Excel had the brilliant idea of translating the
MID()
function intoSTRINGA.ESTRAI()
, which means “extract string”.Seriously, what the fuck.
The localisation of office software functions is atrocious in all languages. They should have defaulted to Volapuk, so that at least we could all suffer together.
It should have been Latin so at least you could feel like a magician or something
I thought of Latin, but then some people actually speak it, so they’d have an unfair advantage.
I would happily pull out my old dictionary and grammar books, for sure!
Wofür steht ‘wd’??? Wochendag oder wie??? GEFEUERT werden muss die Person!
Abor dor Klaus aus Leipzsch saacht das doch so…
Ei fa “Wochedaach” nadierlich. Wie em de Schnawwel gewachst is.
Whoa, I was expecting just a light joke & was not prepared for this, lolwut.
I use VBA frequently, don’t actually speak German, so I’ll ofc try this. And none of my code was ever readable (weirdly lewd, not not fully making sense), so that’s fine.
Finally, a language where CamelCase feels natural
*KamelKiste
In German you would write “Kamelkiste”, nicht “KamelKiste”. This holds true for most Java class names. I begin to see huge potential for evil …
That was excellent
The ruby on rails generators do this sort of magic. It’s fun while you’re using it, but a nightmare to remember how to use on a 10 year old project.
Oh? You want composit(ion)? Over inheritance maybe?
Mine gott
I’ll just leave this here, “An Introduction to German for ABAP/4 Programmer” (SAP):