[HN Gopher] Rouille
___________________________________________________________________
Rouille
Author : cunidev
Score : 312 points
Date : 2021-09-11 11:02 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ghego1 wrote:
| First, the readme is simply hilarious!
|
| Jokes asides, the concept underlying this project is actually
| interesting. It wouldn't be bad at all if programming languages
| were localizable.
|
| I think it would help many if it was possible to choose the
| (human) language in which to use a programming language. Ideally,
| the same source code could be viewed in different languages
| depending on the preferred idiom of the developer.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > It wouldn't be bad at all if programming languages were
| localizable.
|
| It wouldn't be bad indeed, it would be terrible.
|
| I wouldn't be against some IDE add-ons allowing you to see the
| keywords in your language if you wish, but the underlying names
| should stay in english. And the function names as well.
| Otherwise:
|
| - you duplicate the documentation effort, which is already a
| burden;
|
| - you make googling things extra hard
|
| - people will use their language features, which means non
| ascii chars. Good luck typing "La lecon du pere noel a l'ecole
| de la foret" with something else than my french keyboard.
|
| - IT is nothing but thousands of conventions glued together.
| And names are a hell of a shortcut to describe conventions.
| Break that and you destroy trust, reliability and productivity.
|
| - you split the community. FOSS works so well because we can
| collaborate so well: we have one rosetta stone that lets us do
| so. Is has a basic alphabet, few rules, and is quite easy to
| learn.
|
| I'm a french Python dev, and Python 3 does allow you to write
| variables names with french accents. I would never do that, and
| really hope nobody ever does.
| Jach wrote:
| I almost entirely agree, though I think your third point
| (typing non-ascii characters) could be less severe with one
| extra lesson in the typing course most kids are forced to
| take. When I first took French in 7th grade somehow I learned
| online you could enter ascii codes (whatever those were) on
| Windows with alt+numpad, and I still have memorized that
| alt+130 gives e. Later I moved to Linux where we have a great
| Compose key system, so I can just type <compose> + e + ' and
| get e, <compose> + c + , to get c, and so on, with <compose>
| mapped to whatever I like (currently right-alt). Supposedly
| (haven't tried it) this system now has a Windows port:
| https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose
|
| Asian languages are harder. But if you're told about IME,
| then at least if you know what you want to type, how to
| actually type it isn't a big burden. IME can also help with
| rarer math symbols like [?] (\bigcap) [?] (\cong) or [?]
| (\unrhd), or is another way to get something like the compose
| key system.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| That's a recipe for combinatorial explosion: each language
| has special chars or even are just made if glyphs, are you
| going to learn them all? Do you want to impose the burden
| for all devs in the world?
|
| And now your typing is not at all fluid, even if you didn't
| have to stop and thing about every single special
| characters (which most people do), you will have to enter a
| combination to get them every time completion can't help.
|
| In fact, even with an AZERTY keyboard, typing French, my
| native language, is slower than english.
|
| Instead of having one simple common ground, you also now
| have an infinite number of variations to care about.
|
| Not to mention having to understand a lib in spanish, an
| another one in russian and a last one in Hindi or arab.
| Jach wrote:
| I don't need to learn them all, I just need to know the
| ones I expect I need to type in for the foreseeable
| future. I might even forget them later (as I've forgotten
| a lot of LaTeX mappings, fortunately there's a cheat
| sheet).
|
| You're just repeating your other points about the
| problems that come from having so many languages, which I
| mostly agree with, but typing at least is not really an
| issue, which is all my point is. The issue is: "do I know
| Arabic?" not "I know Arabic, can I type it?"
|
| As for your experience with French, maybe the AZERTY
| layout is just inherently bad, but how much slower is it
| really? Typing your example sentence with my compose key
| takes me about 3x longer than ignoring the accented
| characters entirely, which is more than I expected,
| though I'm very unpracticed. With Japanese, which I'm
| even more of a noob at, nevertheless the overhead is
| smaller. If I wanted to type 'purple', I hit a chord to
| enter JP IME mode if I'm not in it already, type
| 'murasaki' (the romanized version of the word) at full
| speed, and leave it as murasaki or select from kanji
| completions to get Zi or maybe I needed it to be in
| katakana so I hit F7, finally I commit it and move on. It
| may seem like a lot but whatever the case it's a really
| tiny overhead from just typing 'murasaki'. In practice
| though looking at source code from Japanese developers I
| see a mix of full English (maybe some Japanese comments,
| maybe not), some mix of Japanese but always using
| romanized symbol names, and full-on variable and function
| names are in actual Japanese. Because the overhead of
| typing is so small though, I don't have a preference for
| the second or third option, they're both fine, though of
| course selfishly I'd love for the whole world to
| understand and use English exclusively. For the French
| case, even with an overhead of 3x in the worst case, I
| wouldn't object to a variable with an e in it.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I know a lot of devs that don't even type with 5 fingers,
| you are apparently well trained with your keyboard and
| you take a X3 hit.
| pjerem wrote:
| I'm also a french developer and though i've been very
| pedantic in the past against non-english code, I must say
| today that I really prefer "french" well expressed code over
| "english" code full of errors, "faux amis" everywhere and
| wrongly expressed intentions.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Bad written code is bad written code in any language,
| that's a false comparison.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The kind of code you talk about are usually internal only.
| People don't write libs, framework or main stream language
| in those situation.
|
| In that case, then it's ok to bite the bullet, to avoid the
| worst case scenario. But you are already in a bad place to
| start with. Because if you put in prod some code by
| somebody who can't write english properly, then it means
| your team doesn't have access to most information resources
| in the world.
|
| So your problem here is damage control, hardly a situation
| to generalize from.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > Good luck typing "La lecon du pere noel a l'ecole de la
| foret" with something else than my french keyboard.
|
| There's key bindings for a regular qwerty keyboard that lets
| you compose letters and symbols to make accents. It's very
| easy to write French (with all the accents) on a US keyboard
| (on Gnome Intl. Alt keyboard with dead keys I believe).
| hyakosm wrote:
| I had a computer with an US ANSI keyboard a few years and I
| don't remember it to be very easy. It's annoying to compose
| accents, it's worse when you have to switch to another OS
| or another computer. On Windows, it's a mess when you have
| more than one keyboard layout activated. And it's terrible
| when you have to type << >> or ae oe like : << J'ai mange
| des oeufs pour Noel >>
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Easy doesn't mean productive. My guess is that you take 2
| to 3 times longer to time such sentence.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Versus using an azerty keyboard or another French-
| specific layout? Yeah, it's a tad slower. But it's a hell
| of a lot quicker than trying to look up/remember alt-
| codes or something. Writing in 2 languages with one
| keyboard is never going to be optimal.
|
| And 2-3 times longer? Most sentences in French don't have
| that many accents, the example picked was a rare one.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| French here. I've an American keyboard, not only because my
| company language is english, but especially because writing
| code on a US layout is from far the best. [], {}, () can be
| typed directly or by pressing shift. On a French keyboard,
| you've the additional Alt-GR key which must be used (second
| Alt key), which makes some keys awkward to type efficiently
| - if you've a MacBook, the Alt-Gr key doesn't event exist,
| which makes writing code a nightmare ([ and { just don't
| exist!!).
|
| Then, numbers which are very common to type when writing
| code must be typed by pressing shift. A French keyboard is
| made to write French efficiently, arguably English too, but
| definitely not to write code.
| makapuf wrote:
| I very much long for a French keyboard designed for
| coding ...
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Quebecois here, for me I have to switch between English
| and French all the time and pressing Alt do ~{}[] and
| Shift for <>()| has become a second nature. I just don't
| think about it anymore and I have to say that when I have
| to use a US keyboard I just feel so limited.
| hyakosm wrote:
| The problem with US keyboard is that it's most of the
| time an ANSI layout, with a missing key between Z and
| left-shift. I love the CSA keyboard because letters with
| accents are in direct access (a lot better than French
| Azerty) and {}[]() are positioned logically.
| xcambar wrote:
| French here using US keyboard with Compose key. Works like
| a charm.
| Jach wrote:
| I'm curious, do you speak another language? Anyway, I think the
| history of programming languages indicates that it wouldn't be
| all that helpful, simply because nothing's really caught on,
| despite many opportunities. What does seem useful is being able
| to have a way of representing non-ascii characters in source
| code, at least with comments but hopefully with symbols and of
| course with data, but even in languages that let you trivially
| define your own names for everything including the basic
| keywords and standard functions, you don't really see
| localization attempts or non-English speakers caring. It's more
| than good enough to just have native-language documentation
| that explains the concepts behind the English tokens; you need
| this in English too since it's not like there's always a clear
| direct correspondence between the English dictionary meaning(s)
| and the programming language's meaning(s) of the same
| word/abbreviation.
| DylanSp wrote:
| Early VBA did this, apparently - see
| https://ericlippert.com/2021/02/17/life-part-38/#comment-119...
| on Eric Lippert's blog.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > It wouldn't be bad at all if programming languages were
| localizable
|
| That is an admirable dream to have, and one that I have
| sometimes had myself. Unfortunately, as with most things
| reality soon puts an end to it.
|
| First, the dream is only really a dream you can have with the
| luxury of a Western language. It is unlikely to be viable once
| you start looking further East in the direction of e.g.
| Kartvelian languages (i.e. low number of speakers worldwide and
| even fewer with relevant specialisms in programming to write
| compilers) or Asian languages (e.g. Japanese and its particles
| and other complexities).
|
| Second, when you are writing code you don't really want to have
| to worry about the possibility of debugging your compiler.
| Sticking to English means the likelyhood of a more robust
| compiler because of more widespread adoption. You also remove
| technicalities such as UTF-8 or whatever else that might cause
| indirect issues.
|
| Its a bit like science really. Sure you _can_ write your papers
| in your native language, but the reality is if you 're serious
| about your work being discovered and are interested in being
| offered bigger and better jobs, you'll want to publish in
| English sooner rather than later.
| pyrale wrote:
| > Unfortunately, as with most things reality soon puts an end
| to it.
|
| Usually, when a thing gets labeled as a dream, people don't
| try very hard either.
|
| > Sticking to English means the likelyhood of a more robust
| compiler because of more widespread adoption.
|
| The comment you quote specifically talks about localizable
| software, not having one compiler per language. When you I18n
| a website, you don't write n sites, for instance.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Usually, when a thing gets labeled as a dream, people
| don't try very hard either.
|
| Some things are hard, but worth trying.
|
| Other things are a dream because the reality is they are
| unachievable either due to the realities of practical
| constraints or because the amount of work involved would be
| hugely disproportionate to the benefit.
|
| For example, I mentioned Kartvelian languages. How about we
| specifically look at Laz which according to Wikipedia at
| the last count in 1980 had only 22,000 native speakers.
|
| Writing a Laz compiler ? I'd say if we're being totally
| honest its a dream, not just "hard work".
| pyrale wrote:
| > the amount of work involved would be hugely
| disproportionate to the benefit.
|
| And you can trust english speakers to properly assess the
| benefits of I18N, right?
|
| > Writing a Laz compiler ? I'd say if we're being totally
| honest its a dream, not just "hard work".
|
| As I said in the message you quote, internationalizing a
| compiler is not the same as rewriting it. If you consider
| that making languages accessible to other languages means
| each natural language should have its own programming
| language and compiler, of course it's going to be hard.
|
| But that's moving the goalposts.
|
| First off, you don't need to port a programming language
| to every natural language. Some smaller goals would
| already help. For instance, making it easy for third
| parties to i18n the language and libraries would be a
| significant enabler.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Writing a Laz compiler ? I'd say if we're being totally
| honest its a dream, not just "hard work".
|
| This seems like letting the perfect be the enemy of the
| good. "We can't possibly localize for every possible
| language ever" is not much of an argument for why
| localization itself isn't worth it.
| temac wrote:
| IIRC, TI Basic dynamically translated keywords (and probably
| function names) depending on the current langage.
|
| That's less interesting if you have lots of libraries if you
| don't translate them.
| junon wrote:
| > It wouldn't be bad at all if programming languages were
| localizable.
|
| Go switch Excel or Google Sheets into a language you don't
| know. Then try to use formulas with them.
|
| Come back and tell me if localized programming languages are a
| good thing after that. :D
| pyrale wrote:
| > Go switch Excel or Google Sheets into a language you don't
| know.
|
| I don't believe that point supports your claim. Switching
| excel to a language you don't know is a good example of the
| benefits people who don't speak english get from localized
| languages, not the other way around.
|
| > Come back and tell me if localized programming languages
| are a good thing after that. :D
|
| The truth is that localized excel has enabled a generation of
| people speaking poor english to still do pretty dope stuff
| for their business.
|
| Likewise, localizable languages for children (e.g. Hedi) work
| pretty well at helping children discover computers before
| they have a firm grasp of english.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > The truth is that localized excel has enabled a
| generation of people speaking poor english to still do
| pretty dope stuff for their business.
|
| I got paid a lot to transform projects that used abusively
| Excel sheets. All of them had absurdly long delay and cost
| explosions caused by this.
|
| Excel sheets are for small business and small projects by
| non-programmers. Excel sheets in a non-English language are
| for small businesses and small projects by non-programmers
| that are doomed to stay this way. This is because having
| programmers that want to unfuck a mess of macro AND
| speaking your foreign language simply are very rare AND
| doing so before the business implodes are very slim.
| pyrale wrote:
| > I got paid a lot to transform projects that used
| abusively Excel sheets.
|
| I wonder where all this money came from.
|
| I also got paid a lot to transform projects that abused
| excel, among other things. The usual truth was that,
| without excel (or, on other projects, without their
| tortured python scripts, or without the off-the-shelf
| software modded to death), these companies would never
| have built a business successful enough to pay entire
| teams for months or years before any returns.
|
| > having programmers that want to unfuck a mess of macro
| AND speaking your foreign language
|
| I mean, at which point did the idea "Oh, that language is
| so weird that very few can possibly speak it _and_ learn
| to program" start to make sense to you?
|
| Did it ever occur to you that my _foreign_ language was
| the first language of a whole lot of people living in my
| country, and that maybe there are a few good universities
| here?
| junon wrote:
| And it makes support, reusable code, common understanding,
| and readability (in a team) fly out the window, and
| increases the amount of development overhead of whomever
| has to maintain the language.
| tasogare wrote:
| Only if the said support and code are not localized too.
| I'm using all my devices in English because it's easier
| to find help online but I can see why people less
| proficient in it would prefer localized software down to
| formulae and documentation.
| pyrale wrote:
| > it makes support
|
| Support is already a problem currently, because
| personalized error messages are less searchable but more
| useful than generic ones. Moving to error codes is a good
| example of an orthogonal concern that would incidentally
| help i18n. Supporting error formats that can be treated
| by machines is a further unrelated step that would also
| benefit i18n.
|
| So I would say the stuff we already do tend to make this
| concern less relevant.
|
| > reusable code
|
| That's an orthogonal concern. You don't write new code
| when you i18n something, you just create dictionaries.
|
| > common understanding, and readability (in a team)
|
| I don't believe anyone is making the point that one team
| should write in separate languages. However, a team able
| to choose its own language (possibly the one used by the
| rest of the business) is a plus.
|
| In non-english countries, it's very common to have code
| written in english to describe a business that is done in
| local language, with really bad translations of business
| terms. This already causes issues.
|
| > increases the amount of development overhead of
| whomever has to maintain the language.
|
| Why would the language maintainer do the i18n themselves?
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > orthogonal concern
|
| Sorry to be blunt, but you have no idea of what you are
| talking about.
| junon wrote:
| > You don't write new code when you i18n something, you
| just create dictionaries.
|
| No. i18n is not that easy, sorry. I wish it were.
|
| To be frank, this answer reads as though it was written
| by someone who has not done any extensive i18n work in
| their life. Languages are not 1:1 translatable. This goes
| beyond words and phrases - numbers, math, time, dates,
| names, grammar, etc. are all completely unrecognizable
| between certain languages.
|
| It's not a problem that even regular software has solved
| generically and elegantly, and then going on to apply it
| to programming language design is a completely different
| beast, with its own set of problems.
| pyrale wrote:
| > this answer reads as though it was written by someone
| who has not done any extensive i18n work in their life.
| Languages are not 1:1 translatable.
|
| I argue that i18n is not translation.
|
| It seems like you're making a point for solving problems
| beyond the scope of PL internationalization, including
| problems that are not solved when it comes to how english
| code translates to english natural language.
|
| My original point is that foreign excel versions already
| did help people. From there, improving compilers to make
| that work easier and less costly is a reasonable goal, or
| at least a tractable one. Some of that work is already
| being done for unrelated reasons (e.g. modern compilers
| offer interfaces for LSPs as well as error messages in
| formats that allow processing beyond reading for CIs --
| both of these changes benefit potential i18n efforts).
| temac wrote:
| Switch back to a langage you know?
| ur-whale wrote:
| > It wouldn't be bad at all if programming languages were
| localizable.
|
| What a terrible idea.
| saint-loup wrote:
| If this is a _Brice de Nice_ reference I 'm going to lose it.
|
| https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille/commit/3d67732c593a78f0545...
| dan-robertson wrote:
| A curious thing about programming is that it became prominent
| when English dominated academia (and computer science was
| extremely American.) Compare this to, for example, mathematics
| where:
|
| - some words are loaned from another language like Eigenvector or
| group (sort of--I think it came from the French _groupe_ ). Also
| eg a blackboard-bold Z (for _Zahlen_ ) or Q (for _quoziente_ )
| for integers or rationals
|
| - other words are taken from the native language (eg rational or
| probability or field extension) though they may derive from Greek
| or Latin and have cognates in other languages.
|
| - some symbols are quite universal and used in every language (eg
| the forall or exists or implies symbols)
|
| - I don't know whether letters that are typically used for things
| are the same (eg I don't know why density is often rho. Is it
| referring to a word in a different language)
|
| - the proofs are written in the native language and often that
| part matters a lot.
|
| - so much stuff is named after people so words don't need to be
| translated (eg noetherian domains or Cauchy-Schwarz)
|
| - I wonder if some theorems get different names? (I assume in
| China they don't call it Chinese remainder theorem)
| jumelles wrote:
| If you like this, check out qlb [The current name qlb means
| Heart, but is actually a recursive acronym for qlb: lG@ brmj@
| pronounced 'alb: lughat barmajeh meaning Heart: A Programming
| Language].
|
| https://nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/ https://github.com/nasser/---
| siva7 wrote:
| I wish this was a joke but actually reading upon the french
| governments plans i'm not entirely sure anymore
| remram wrote:
| They also expanded all keywords, so "fn" becomes "function",
| "mut" becomes "mutable" (which is not even a common word? How
| about "alterable" or "modifiable"?). Interestingly the
| Result::Err variant was kept short with Resultat::Arf which is an
| onomatopoeia.
|
| 10/10 looks very painful to use. Reminds me of my college days.
| ece wrote:
| This must be what the Merovingian codes in.
| atc wrote:
| Non
| michidk wrote:
| And now there is a german fork as well:
| https://github.com/michidk/rost/
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| You know nobody's intended to use it when it has WTFPL
| brundolf wrote:
| People are probably going to say this is silly (and maybe the
| author would say the same), but I think it's an awesome
| demonstration of what Rust macros can do, and I think it could
| also become genuinely useful for non-English speakers who want to
| write code in an English-centric landscape. Most people in France
| and Quebec probably know enough English to work with English
| keywords in code, but I bet for people in lots of non-western
| countries it can be a real hurdle in terms of approachability and
| readability.
| pyrale wrote:
| Rouille is also best deployed using Marcel.
|
| https://github.com/brouberol/marcel
| cfn wrote:
| As a !Quebequois I was disappointed that the Readme was in
| English.
| charles_f wrote:
| Awesome idea and well realized.
|
| In my consulting days I met a number of customers in Quebec who
| were coding with French method names, variables and such. They
| were even using accented names for variables. I actually think if
| they get onto Rouille they might start using it. That's scary but
| at least, it would look less _bancal_.
|
| I can bet you can find the same use case in all other languages,
| so we need Oxido and Xiu
|
| Edit: LOL just discovered there are a few of these already
| https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille/network/members
| dgellow wrote:
| Does one of you remember WinDev? Their programming language
| (WLangage IIRC?) and APIs were available in multiple language, I
| had to use the French version. It was really a horrible
| experience to always have to check the language spec to lookup
| for their weirdly translated keywords.
|
| I would definitely not recommend.
| Zababa wrote:
| I do, I worked with it until a few months ago.
| pjerem wrote:
| > were
|
| Nope, WinDev is still alive. The latest version is from
| December 2020
| dgellow wrote:
| Wow, that's insane! I never thought they would survive that
| long. I remember that we had to use a dongle to enable the
| license, you could only use their IDE if you had it plugged
| in, which was a real pain.
|
| Also, their monthly magazines were the most sexist stuff I've
| ever seen... hopefully that changed...
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Would you like to try something different, in an exotic and
| funny-sounding language?
|
| Casually derogatory joke, a classic.
| desdiv wrote:
| >You're from Quebec and don't feel at ease using only French
| words? Don't worry! French Rust is fully compatible with English-
| Rust, so you can mix both at your convenience.
|
| Interesting factoid: in France, most of the stop signs say "stop"
| due to the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals linked
| below.
|
| In Quebec, on the other hand, most of the stop signs say "Arret"
| due to nationalism reasons. Bilingual Arret/Stop signs exist, but
| are rare.
| espadrine wrote:
| > _Interesting factoid: in France, most of the stop signs say
| "stop" due to the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals
| linked below._
|
| While that is true, the word "stop" had been part of the French
| language for centuries prior to 1968. It means "halt".
| Sytten wrote:
| In Quebec we also love to take English verbs and add them to
| the language. If you are in front of a shop, the proper way of
| saying things would be: "Je vais me stationner" (I am going to
| park)
|
| Here you would say something like: "J'va m' parker dan'l
| stationnement" (I am going to park in the parking).
|
| The rules are somewhat simple: 1) Take the verb in English and
| give it a French spin (add "er" to the end)
|
| 2) Add an unnecessary second part to your sentence in French to
| clarify the English verb
|
| 3) Reduce the total runtime by mashing together as many
| syllables as you can
|
| God I love our dialect!
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Hah! Glad to hear that you folks do that out east too! I did
| French Immersion in SK and we usually did that when we didn't
| know the French verb. Our teacher would scold us for our
| "Franglais".
| laurentlbm wrote:
| Franglais is very common here in Montreal.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| In France's French, "I am going to park" is "Je vais me
| garer", by the way.
| smashed wrote:
| You sure that would not be "Je vais me garer au parking" ?
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| not necessarily. That would mean "I'm going to park in
| the parking lot". But you could also say "Je vais me
| garer dans la rue" - I'm going to park on the street.
| Anyway, in french "je vais me garer" can be translated
| literally in English
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That means "I'm going to park in the car park.", not just
| "I'm going to park".
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| "Fetchez la vache!"
| na85 wrote:
| Indeed. In my old job, the number of times I'd hear "criss,
| j'ai fucke cette affaire la" or similar was beyond measure.
| cjauvin wrote:
| One interesting thing I noticed in the last few years is that
| the younger generation seems to have a modified version of
| your rule (1): they don't necessarily add the "er" part
| anymore (i.e. making the verb infinitive), which sounds (to
| me) grammatically strange and a bit confusing.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| That's great. I used to do something similar in Japan when
| talking to Brazilian nationals. When my poor Spanish wasn't
| good enough to fill in with Portuguese, I'd fill in with
| Japanese verbs. First it was "vamos taberu" instead of "vamos
| comer", but then pretty soon it felt more appropriate to
| shorten the Japanese and say "vamos taber".
|
| Weirdly (to me anyway), you could pretty much keep any "ne"
| you wanted to place after things and it worked fine, because
| it was a feature of both languages.
|
| When you got _just_ the right conversation partner the little
| word swaps led to a lot of laughter. (We did this in English
| to some degree too, e.g. naru-freaking-hodo)
| antoineMoPa wrote:
| In Quebec, there is more than just French, English & bilingual
| stops. As an example, there are Mohawk language stops in
| Kahnawake.
| hetspookjee wrote:
| Unrelated to Rouille, but I really like how the word factoid
| seems to be slowly inverting it's definition. Where it actually
| means an "Often thought fact that is actually incorrect", e.g.
| eating 8 spiders in your sleep per year. I am unsure if your
| fact is actually a factoid, but your comment reads as if you
| mean to use the word factoid in a reduced size of the word
| fact, it seems to mean something like; a small fact. In any
| case I see the word often "misused" in the latter sense. The
| appearant misuse of the factoid might make the newly acquired
| definition a ironic one, like an oxymoron.
|
| I feel the latter definition of the word factoid feels more
| sensical: suffixing the word fact with -oid makes the text in
| which it is applied softer, where the word fact is rather
| harsh, the word factoid feels more friendly, like boba/ kiki, I
| speculate. In addition I think using more letters to address
| the subject you're about to share might make the reader hold
| its attention for longer and thus feels "right" to use in short
| sentences. I also feel as if I prefer to read the sentence in
| which it occurs with a slight upward inflection, which I find
| more positive.
|
| Personally I hope the latter definition will stick and humanity
| is one more ironic definition richer.
| pavlov wrote:
| I always thought "factoid" was meant to highlight the
| uncertainty of things you read or hear that are presented as
| facts.
|
| Like a humanoid is human-shaped, a factoid is fact-shaped but
| not necessarily or even probably actual fact.
| hetspookjee wrote:
| Thank you I really like that interpretation. I couldn't
| quite find it but this is splendid.
| [deleted]
| dimal wrote:
| Interesting. I never thought of "factoid" that way, and if
| that is an alternative meaning, then the "new" version has
| been around a long time. My introduction to it was from
| reading the "Factoids" section in "3-2-1 Contact" magazine as
| a kid in the 80s.[0] It was my favorite part of the magazine.
| Let me feel smart without making much effort.
|
| [0]
| https://archive.org/details/321contactjul88/page/n7/mode/2up
| wutwutwutwut wrote:
| > Interesting factoid: in France, most of the stop signs say
| "stop", since it's a perfectly valid word in French.
|
| Here's another interesting fact which I suspect is more of a
| fact than "your" fact: Almost all countries in Europe has stop
| signs with the word "Stop" because it was agreed upon in 1968.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Si...
| xeromal wrote:
| How you wrote this response is a bit dickish tbh.
| wutwutwutwut wrote:
| I couldn't give a fuck, tbh. I think you may need less
| coffee if it offended you.
| xeromal wrote:
| Man, it's no way to live life being this mean.
|
| Remember the human.
| wutwutwutwut wrote:
| Oh come on. I pointed out a factual error in something
| which was presented as facts. Someone found my reply
| dickish. Fine, but I really could not care less. If
| someone takes offense of that I really feel like they
| need to take a break from the computer and potentially
| reduce the caffein intake.
| [deleted]
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Well 'stopper' is now a valid French word. No idea if it
| became a thing because of this or always was a thing.
| https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/stopper/74789
| [deleted]
| desdiv wrote:
| Thank you. I did not know that before.
|
| I've corrected my OP.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I mean, you weren't wrong. Stop/stopper is valid French...
| isamuel wrote:
| That is an admirably charitable response to a comment that
| I could not truthfully characterize the same way. Good job
| by you.
| strangemonad wrote:
| The colloquial translation for "a stop sign" in Quebec is "un
| arret stop"
| laurentlbm wrote:
| I usually hear people say "un stop" or "un arret", not both.
| remram wrote:
| A stop stop? Doesn't even mention it's a sign?
| nephanth wrote:
| Well in France, most people just say "un stop", you don't
| need to precise it is a sign, because it was originally a
| borrowed word
| beeforpork wrote:
| preciser = to precise
|
| I like that. :-) Or maybe 'precisify'.
| nwatson wrote:
| On the other hand "precisar" in Portuguese is "to need",
| Spanish like French is "to specify" ... keeping a slew of
| these cognates straight between
| English/Spanish/Portuguese is a harder part of dealing
| with all three.
| bshimmin wrote:
| "preciser" in English is "specify" in case that helps.
| (This has been a lovely thread!)
| nephanth wrote:
| Oups
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| You can write Perl in Latin: https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-
| Romana-Perligata/view/lib/L...
|
| or Klingon: https://metacpan.org/pod/Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun
| tootie wrote:
| Or whitespace https://metacpan.org/pod/Acme::Bleach
| jeffrallen wrote:
| C'est magnifique !
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| There could be a compiler flag to parse keywords in another
| language.
| leshow wrote:
| I really thought this was about the web server framework
| https://github.com/tomaka/rouille, that's been around for ages.
| Sytten wrote:
| >You're from Quebec and don't feel at ease using only French
| words? Don't worry! French Rust is fully compatible with English-
| Rust, so you can mix both at your convenience.
|
| This gave me a "PTSD moment" of university projects in Java with
| variables in French and comments in Franglais (mix of French and
| English). Some old teachers even made it mandatory to write
| comments in french (I suspect they didn't understand English
| beyond the language keywords).
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I was a maths student and in the small programming part of the
| course, a friend of mine ran out of single-letter variable
| names and so started going through names of the lecturers he
| interacted with or random words like "dog" or "cat."
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Oh yeah. We had to do that for a big well known corporation. We
| had to program in English but the comments had to be in French;
| at least they tolerated anglicism. The result was code that
| only a little fraction of the population could understand, and
| I never heard of any software company getting sued for coding
| in English. What a farce.
|
| And let's not forget when the Orifice de la Langue Francaise
| shows up to your workplace and forces to have a Frenchisation
| committee to set up all workstations and software in French.
| Googling anything was a freaking nightmare and back in the days
| changing the OS language was a pain in the ass.
| hyakosm wrote:
| > The result was code that only a little fraction of the
| population could understand
|
| Sometimes it's better to have code comments that the little
| fraction can understand well, for specific purposes in an
| internal organization. Example, the source code used in
| French government for property taxes:
| https://github.com/etalab/taxe-
| fonciere/blob/master/src/EFIT...
| rzzzt wrote:
| No mention of the British PHP article yet!?
| https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| Someone from Italy should make a fork of Java called
| "Cappuccino"?
| perilunar wrote:
| You do realise that 'Java' was (is?) not originally an English
| word?
| nsarafa wrote:
| Native English speakers are quite lucky all programming languages
| are in English. Imagine China created their own languages and OS?
| We couldn't keep up
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| > Imagine China created their own languages
|
| Wen Yan is programming in classical chinese. So its
| starting... :)
|
| https://wy-lang.org/
| xcambar wrote:
| Il y a meme les accents, bravo ! Merde a Rouille !
| ur-whale wrote:
| No, you meant : "Rouille, c'est vraiment LA merde !"
|
| Which, of course, while it is a diret word-for-word
| translation, has perfectly antinomic meaning in each language.
| xcambar wrote:
| For those wondering:
|
| * "c'est la merde" : "we're in trouble"
|
| * "c'est de la merde" : it's shit
|
| * "Je te dis merde" : well... "F*ck you" or "all the best",
| depending on context.
|
| Yes, for real ^^
|
| (edit: formatting)
| traceroute66 wrote:
| I think you missed more than a few xcambiar !
|
| e.g. "ecoute ce que je te dis, merde" ... ending sounds the
| same as your example "je te dis merde" but totally
| different meaning.
| xcambar wrote:
| Indeed, but merde is such a versatile word, it's hard to
| be exhaustive.
|
| Thanks for your addition!
| phtrivier wrote:
| "Je te dis merde" before a performance would translate to
| "break a leg".
|
| The supersition goes that you should not reply with "merci"
| ("thanks") but "je prends" ("I'll take it ?")
|
| There are unverifiable explanations for why "merde" is used
| by actors ; my favorite one is that it is related to horse
| carriage carrying theatre-viewers to the theatres ; you're
| wishing actors that a lot of horse will carry a lot of
| viewers, and do the other thing...
| xcambar wrote:
| Oh thanks, I always assumed the carriage explanation was
| verified.
|
| Do you know of others you could share, before I google
| it?
| crvdgc wrote:
| > fonction ecrire(
|
| I love how in the README, the syntax highlighter doesn't pick up
| letters with diacritical marks.
| [deleted]
| efrecon wrote:
| I know this is a joke. But.. when I learnt C programming, and in
| order to smooth transition from algo classes to practical
| programming, we were told to #include a header file that would
| more or less do what this does for rust. The header file would
| also enforce curly braces and parentheses when writing loops or
| condition statements, as far as I remember. Fact is: it actually
| helped. Problem: my first foray in the industry would involve C
| and guess what? They used english-C (sorry no better word for it)
| rather then french-C. I fought for a few weeks re-learning the
| language.
| jpambrun wrote:
| I was also subjected to that.. it was insanely verbose had to
| type DEBUT_BLOCK instead of { and whatnot, all that in Borland
| C in DOS.. insane..
| bsenftner wrote:
| I worked in Tokyo for Sony in the early 90's, when they were
| just getting into game consoles. Their C source files were
| "well documented" with code comments, but required an editor
| plugin to handle multiple possible character encodings for
| them, because this was before standards like Unicode and the
| Japanese language comments could be in one or more character
| encodings. That period was kind of haywire, because code could
| be copied from an email between people, but emails used other
| character encodings, causing a mishmash of possible comment
| encodings for any comment. And being a gaijin dev, I could not
| read the comments if they appeared correct anyway. Fun times.
| raverbashing wrote:
| When you learn it straight in English it is easier. Even if you
| don't speak English!
|
| You just associate the words with what they do, but it doesn't
| matter what it's written. You just associate in the same way
| the operators +, - work in math. It just happens.
| [deleted]
| thefr0g wrote:
| Translating C to my native language was also the first thing I
| did when I learnt about the preprocessor :D
| nlehuen wrote:
| A while ago I wrote Babble, a toy language to teach myself
| ANTLR4: https://github.com/nlehuen/babble
|
| It initially supported both English and French keywords:
| https://github.com/nlehuen/babble/commit/eb090fd3e80238166ac...
| - that was fun but for some reason I found it cringy and
| removed it (as if the rest was not cringy either).
|
| Completely off topic, but I also implemented Hodor - "Its main
| objective is to teach programming to Hodor.":
| https://github.com/nlehuen/babble/tree/hodor
| chefandy wrote:
| As a monolingual English speaker I often wonder about the
| subtleties of this dynamic among newer developers.
|
| Is the difference in cognitive load among folks who speak
| different languages is consistent or even measurable? Does it
| bias a developer toward any specific
| pattern/mistake/misunderstanding/bug? Are there subtle mental-
| model-building advantages to decoupling software commands from
| their linguistic meaning through a language difference even if
| it's initially more difficult? Does the presence or quality of
| English instruction affect adoption of development beyond the
| first few weeks?
|
| Could be cool to explore these things to see how they might
| inform pedagogy or even language design. Then again, my
| relatively naive suppositions might lend entirely too much
| weight to it.
| ridaj wrote:
| To non-native English speakers, who often write variables and
| function names in their language, the language difference
| between keywords and the rest of their program acts as a kind
| of pseudo syntax highlighter: it's very easy to spot language
| keywords because they're in English.
|
| Secondly the keywords don't really have any strong prior
| meaning to overload, so in a way they're more "pure"
| cognitively and easier to grok. The word "for" in everyday
| English really has nothing to do with "iterative loop with
| variable definition", the word "use" has nothing to do with
| symbol imports, but that's all it means to a non-English
| coder.
|
| Now _libraries_ are another thing. Typically they start using
| higher level abstractions that start to map to everyday
| constructs (eg, in a drawing library you might find things
| like "stroke width" which are trivial to understand for a
| native speaker)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| For a lot of new shops in at least western countries,
| writing everything in english is becoming the norm,
| including technical docs and comments.
|
| The two main points I've seen are:
|
| - it's a daily pain to handle two vocabulary sets and lead
| to undue errors and bugs. When you have a "FishingBoat"
| class which related to a "boat" table and all the
| documentation points to "Bateau de peche" and "barque" it's
| 2x harder to follow things. Then people will accidently
| translate "bateau" to "ship" and it slips through a few
| reviews of mostly independent features, and you'll have
| both words in the code base before you realize.
|
| - it becomes a swamp the day a non native speaker touches
| your code base. For instance you need to share part of it
| with a company next door that happens to be the other side
| of the border. Or you ask a Romanian dev team to port your
| code to another platform.
| smashed wrote:
| Yes, that is a huge problem I have seen often here in
| French speaking Quebec. Developers will prefer all the
| code in English, because the libraries and language
| keywords are in English and it is thus more consistent.
|
| This leads to business domain objects to be translated in
| English by the devs and they will make different or
| incorrect translations.
|
| Then, all the stakeholders and requirements will be in
| French. All developers need to constantly map the real
| world names to the English names used in the code base,
| but that nobody else uses.
|
| This leads to bugs, inconsistencies and extra cognitive
| load. It comes back to how hard "naming things" is.
| ridaj wrote:
| Yes and it makes sense because great software eventually
| becomes worth internationalizing. If you start with a
| non-English code base and documentation, good luck
| translating that.
| curryst wrote:
| > Secondly the keywords don't really have any strong prior
| meaning to overload, so in a way they're more "pure"
| cognitively and easier to grok. The word "for" in everyday
| English really has nothing to do with "iterative loop with
| variable definition", the word "use" has nothing to do with
| symbol imports, but that's all it means to a non-English
| coder.
|
| I would disagree with this. A lot of programming keywords
| have enough context to help new people. I.e. "for" or
| "forEach" maps almost perfectly to English. "For each
| friend you know, call them and ask what their birthday is
| and what kind of cake they like".
| friends.forEach(friend => { friend.askBirthday();
| friend.askFavoriteCake(); })
|
| While loops are the same way. "While there's still boxes on
| the truck, you need to be moving those boxes".
|
| It requires some slightly awkward contortions, but you can
| phrase English so that it somewhat resembles code.
|
| "Use" and "import" both also have relatively clear
| parallels in English. import meaning bringing something
| from a foreign space into your own, and "use" being
| equivalent to using a tool.
|
| English is my only real language (other than horribly
| botched Spanish) and the similarities to English really
| helped me when learning Python. Both in understanding and
| just simply remembering the keywords.
| ridaj wrote:
| Yes for python and others whose syntax matches the
| language more closely. Now as for languages that talk
| about "virtual" "methods" of a "class"...
| mejutoco wrote:
| A data point from my experience. My native language is
| Spanish, and in +15 years I have only at one job dealt with
| code in a language other than English (maybe I have been
| lucky).
|
| I think as a developer one quickly realizes the value of
| sticking with the defaults (in this case English). Like
| configuring your system in English to be able to google the
| error messages; or Excel, which changes key shortcuts based
| on your language (ctrl+G for Guardar, to Save; ctrl+S in
| English); checking documentation in English or buying books
| in English because they are 2-3 years earlier than the local
| ones.
|
| Using an US keyboard configuration also makes it much easier
| to type certain common characters in programming, although
| that might be too much to ask for :)
| dgb23 wrote:
| For me most obvious implication is that I mix english and
| german in (internal) comments, docs and spec drafts.
|
| I also regularly can't recall a german word, when there is an
| english one that is more precise and vice versa.
| dgellow wrote:
| As a small anecdote, it took me maybe half a decade of casual
| programming to realize that "yield" is an actual English
| word, with an actual meaning, used in real conversations, and
| not just a weird "programming language keyword".
|
| I always assumed it was just a random keyword for a
| programming concept. Same for "thread" by the way (also took
| me a while to understand how to pronounce it as I only read
| it).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| For me it was "deprecate", which my non-tech acquaintances
| didn't think was a word (they thought I meant depreciate).
| pm90 wrote:
| Fascinating, I had the same problem. Programming/CS became
| a lot more fun when I realized that the keywords and design
| patterns weren't "just words" but were inspired by some
| "real world" phenomena.
| Zababa wrote:
| I don't think "PeutEtre<T>" is a good substitute for Option<T>.
| The direct translation is Maybe<T>. Maybe<T> is used in Haskell.
| Haskell was made in the UK. There's no way we could accept this
| for our French language.
| mhd wrote:
| This used to be a lot more common in the early days of computer
| science teaching, where you had localized versions of Pascal or
| Basic.
|
| For an extreme version of this, where the language isn't just
| used to replace a few keywords, there's always
| Linga::Romana::Perligata.
|
| https://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
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