Culture and Code

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When I was a young programmer I worked with people from many different countries: Russia, China, India, Brazil, Africa. Of the the things that I would think of, was that all the code was in english.  Even though we would write, C++ or Java, or Perl (this was the early 00s), they were really derivative of english. A conditional in programming languages, uses the English words IF.. Then.. Else, even if case of Ruby, which was created in Japan.

I would think about this, what would a programming language look like in French, would there be a tense ending for conditionals instead of  if.. then … else.   What about a Latin programming language, would there be different kind of loops to refer to different types of time spans ? A future perfect loop, a perfect loop, an imperfect loop. What does a programming language look  like if it was built with the Japanese katakana syllabary?

This morning I ran across bato, it is a programming language written in Filipino. I dont read Filipino but this is an example of an if – then else statement:

kapag 1 > 0
  iprint "Kumusta mundo!"
kung_hindi
  iprint "Mayroong sira"
wakas

Would love to see more experiments like this in the future.

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