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Are all programming languages based on English? (lemmy.one)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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If you're from a non English speaking country, do you first have to learn English if you want to get into programming?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There are Arabic based programming languages, which is pretty interesting because right to left.

Generally though you need to know some English to learn the more widely used ones.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Neat. That's something I never even thought of. When typing in Arabic, does the cursor proceed from right to left, then?

Is this somehow handled with locales, are custom operating systems required, or is it really only handled by specific editors like word processors?

I'm trying to imagine how this would work at, say, a console bash prompt.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-left_mark

It's just a Unicode character; Copy-Paste and experiment!

(If you'd like more direction on how to play with this in a *NIX terminal let me know.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Terminal environments are always awful at RTL, they always need to make shitty compromises that graphical environments just don't need to make. The fact that you even need a RTL mark is already a bad start - graphical text renderers can deduce text directionality based on the characters in it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Try using a website in an RTL language some time. Facebook and Google both support Arabic and Hebrew for example. The entire site is flipped - a left sidebar would instead appear on the right, a logo might be at the top right instead of top left, etc. Getting it right is hard, especially with mixed RTL/LTR content (like if you have a Hebrew page with some English words on it).