Show HN: Pakhi – Bangla Programming Language (opens in new tab)

I think it is we who decided it is a racist word. I was a guest instructor in a university class in Islamabad, and people there used that word quite casually. It surprised me how often I heard it, but also that it was never treated in a negative manner. An important differentiator is that they weren't using it as a label to call each other maliciously, but more to denote that something is from Pakistan.

Perhaps at least in this case, intent has everything to do with its interpretation. I still don't use the word because that nuance is too easily missed.

Probably both cultures (which apparently are directly related, in terms of overlapping histories) are aware of words like this, and not likely to confuse them for ill intent. A little like how Canadian Anglophone children make fun of the French word for 'seal', but Francophones who also use the English swear word that it sounds like clearly know when you're swearing, versus when you're talking about a seal.

There are plenty of terms in languages that are common words in that language but may sound like different and possibly offensive words in other languages. But that doesn't mean we should avoid using those words.

This is an ignorant statement. Pakhi means "bird" in Bengali. Check the translation.

Edit: To all the downvoters, I truly hope that ignorance is bliss for you. Maybe learn another language before you project your ressentiment tinged identity-politics idiocy onto something you don't even understand.

[1] https://translate.google.com/?sl=bn&tl=en&text=pakhi&op=tran...

One more casualty of the absence of retroflex consonants in English. Before you jumped the gun, you should’ve taken into account the difference between ‘Ka’ and ‘kha’ consonants.

It doesn’t sound the same spoken. Pakhi (bird) is pronounced like “pa” (as in dad) + “khee” (as in “fee” but starting with an aspirated k). It’s not pronounced like the racist term, which is pronounced in Britain like “pack” + “e.”

Pakhi means bird in Bangla. Bangladeshis also used to be Pakistani, so they're probably fine. ;)

Yes, non-white Englishman here cringed when I saw the name having been on the receiving end of the term many times.

Isn’t “Paki” just shortened for “Pakistani”? I never knew the word itself to be considered racist; but it’s definitely been used often in a racist / degenerative context and manner.

The thing is that nobody should care about what is considered racist term by some people in the UK or the US. Customs of the anglosphere most definitely shouldn't define and limit language and culture in rest of the world.

Pakhi means bird in bangla. I was not aware it was a racist term when i named it.

I see programming as manipulating a bunch of semantic objects. Syntax is just the (bad) user interface to this. This shouldn't rely on a natural spoken language at all. For example instead of `case` or `if`, there could (and should) just be symbols for such common things. Languages like Java have a lot of English keywords to represent flaky, redundant concepts with bad semantics. It's also a bit cumbersome that these languages often prevent you from naming variables with these already taken words. Seems actually like every 10 years people realize they didn't need all those English sentences in their languages if you look at a lineage like COBOL -> Visual Basic -> Java -> JavaScript or whatever 2010 fad.

Since RPN is front page, let me note that Turkish can be viewed as an RPN language -- the verb comes at the end

(although agglutination etc make it not quite so clear cut)

The agglutination is very similar to properties on structs

object.time.by.ability.duration

Except that there is a fixed standard order, and every object (word) responds in the same way. -- Very similar to an inheritance hierarchy from a single object :)

A difference would be that every subclass a.k.a word has a meaningful way to respond to the dimensions of duration, ability, startPoint, byWho, and a few others that are not easily expressible in English but very convenient

An interesting concept from Turkish is each word can directly give you all (or single) objects that do or can respond to that action

  yap -- make
  yapan -- the one who makes
  yapanlar -- all those who make
  yapılan -- then one being made
  yapılanlar -- all those being made

This would be like functions having a standard way to return lists of all objects they're related to

Or direct solving of some complex queries like 'Who can open this door?'

In Turkish that would be open_this_door_an, where '_an' is the standard way to get a list of all objects capable of doing it

Perl's $_ is supposedly something inspired by linguistics.

Apparently there are a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

IIRC, AppleScript was once usable in languages other than English.

This is a different take, but I have always been a huge fan of Damian Conway's Lingua::Romana::Perligata, a thought experiment in writing Perl in Latin.

Just a taste from the documentation: "To simplify the mind-numbingly complex rules of declension and conjugation that govern inflexions in Latin, Perligata treats all user-defined scalar and array variables as neuter nouns of the second declension -- singular for scalars, plural for arrays."

I vaguely remember reading about an esoteric programming language that was based on Klingon. IIRC, it was a functional language. (-:

But I do not speak or read or write Klingon, so I never looked at it, and I do not remember the name, either. It did make me chuckle, though.

Well there is Citrine: https://citrine-lang.org/ - it offers a specialized version for over 110 human languages.

I would suggest watch bangla content with english subtitle. Thats how i learned english when i was young, by watching a lot of pokemon and transformers in english. I should also warn you bangla content of good taste is very hard to find. Here is a link to list of extremely good bangla movie:

https://asianmoviepulse.com/2020/09/20-great-bangladeshi-fil...

I’m currently learning Bangla and there are a few basic apps for iOS that present the letter along with it’s name, pronunciation, and how it is to be written (as in how to piece together the strokes to write the letter). It’s definitely geared towards kids, but the one I’m using is called BorKnow.

Also I’m using a book by Hanne Ruth Thompson called Beginner’s Bengali that does a good job at introducing the script.

I don't think people will ever use this on serious work. It's not even close to python or javascript, so there is no reason to use this instead of those. You can name variables with english characters or any other utf8 characters (including emojis).

Its not a serious project, i worked on it during pandemic when all of our educational institutes were closed.

ধন্যবাদ। ন টাইপ করতে কম সময় লাগবে কিন্তু ন _সংখ্যা এর মত অর্থবোধক না।

I remember one being posted to r/programminglanguages in Hindi keywords, and another called ezhil with Tamil keywords.

Yes, i think i can have it support hindi language probably in a day

> It's easy to imagine scenarios where the first programming languages were based on Mandarin or Bangla or Hindi keywords.

I don't know. To me that seems pretty far fetched idea.

Russian, or German, maybe? But I don't really see how the computer revolution could have started in SE Asia without fairly major changes in history

Not sure how that’s relevant, given that it appears to be expressing the usual language constructs but not in English or via a Latin alphabet. A couple minutes with Google translate made that apparent.

They provided one license for every one of their product to use on this project. It was not mandatory but they requested to put a link to their website. So, i put it there.

Btw their products are extremely good.

Thanks