wenyan

I think another part of it is culture. Outside of Western tech circles there's far less a culture (it feels) to invent new languages. To my knowledge Ruby's Matz is the only notable exception, and he's highly unusual as a Japanese. Then, using non-ascii-friendly character set is an even greater challenge. Non-ascii encodings are harder to program in due to the need to switch in and out of input methods. That said, some languages like Arabic and Japanese (and possibly Korean and Hindi) lend naturally to VSO token ordering, which maps directly to LISP syntax, so it's unfortunate that there isn't a lot of interest in this. It would be lots of fun. Maybe agents will make this possible! Here are some interesting examples. - https://github.com/nasser/--- (Arabic) - https://honoka.nukenin.jp/Introduction/Loop.html (Japanese) - https:

If you’re interested in Chinese characters, there’s https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan

You will appreciate this image: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan/master/... [1] [1] https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan

well, you can always program in wenyan: https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan But seriously, it's 2021. We are no longer slave to ASCII, or even English. Most of the newer math oriented langs have heavy use of unicode (julia, agda, lean, etc).

There's actually a Japanese programming language (created around 2005) that is highly readable and natural - Nadesiko. Here's the first tutorial in Japanese, with executable snippets: https://nadesi.com/v3/doc/index.php?%E3%83%81%E3%83%A5%E3%83... 「こんにちは」と表示 Display 「Konnichiwa」 5に6を掛けて5を足して7で割って表示。 Multiply 5 by 6, then add 5, then divide by 7, then display it. Sample program: 「身長は何センチですか」と尋ねる。 Ask "What is your height in cm?" 身長Mはそれ÷100 heightM is that divided by 100. 標準体重は２２×身長M×身長M optimalWeight is 22 x heightM x heightM. 「標準体重は、｛標準体重｝kgです。」と表示。 Display "Your optimal weight is {optimalWeight} kg." Since it's basically natural language, it's a really nice language for introducing Japanese speakers to programming! ==== There's also this language, Wenyan-lang, that imitates classical Chinese: https://github.com

https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan the ancient Chinese programming language is way cooler than this

the author got many other brilliant repos: https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan https://github.com/LingDong-/qiji-font

There's a fun example in the GitHub repo for calculating the square root of a number based off of a real algorithm found in a real ancient Chinese text (九章算術). https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan/blob/master/examples/z... I don't have the time to translate at the moment but I'll just leave the two here for others to see just how different they read (and for those who can read Chinese, what similarities they have). The Wenyan language: 吾有一術。名之曰「增乘開平方」。欲行是術。必先得一數。曰「實」。乃行是術曰。 注曰。『增乘開平方法，以商數乘下法遞增求之。』。 吾有四數。名之曰「果」曰「商」曰「餘」曰「廉」。有數一。名之曰「法」。 恆為是。施「取底除」於「實」於「法」。若其之『商』小於百者乃止也。 乘「法」以百。昔之「法」者。今其是矣云云。 恆為是。若「法」不大於零者乃止也。 乘「果」以十。昔之「果」者。今其是矣。 加「廉」以「商」。乘其以十。昔之「廉」者。今其是矣。 施「取底除」於「實」於「法」。名之曰「甲」。 昔之「實」者。今「甲」之『商』是矣。 昔之「餘」者。今「甲」之『餘』是矣。 昔之「商」者。今零是矣。 恆為是。加「廉」以「商」。乘其以「商」。若其不小於「實」者乃止也。 加「商」以一。昔之「商」者。今其是矣云云。 加「廉」以「商」。乘其以「商」。若其大於「實」者。 減「商」

As others have noted, the choice of both syntax (extremely elaborate, to the point of reeking of esoteric languages like Shakespeare) and semantics (scalar imperative language, JavaScript) seem to be a poor match for Classical Chinese, known for the brevity and tacitness of its texts. I always thought that if for some reason one wanted to map an existing programming language into Classical Chinese (instead of coming up with something semantically closer resembling the latter), one could do worse than start with the likes of APL. Consider the Fibonacci example: https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan/blob/master/examples/f... Is this really how you would like to use Classical Chinese to convey the idea of a Fibonacci number? Indeed, this form maximises the number of words one can use in a single definition; is there anything else for which i

https://github.com/wenyan-lang/wenyan/issues/560 Looks like the author decided to make the syntax more concise with their object parser/serializer.

The Mandelbrot example, as well as the Fibonacci one, I find quite beautiful. https://github.com/LingDong-/wenyan-lang/blob/master/example... I think ancient Chinese people would be proud and awed by seeing how language becomes a living thing, performing logical operations. Maybe because my only attempts at studying Chinese was the Tao Te Ching, the programs written in 文言 feel like they're expressing universal truths.