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Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

Do you program in - or what do you prefer - right to left as in Arabic or left to right as in Latin ? edit: I see now that the image was taken through a mirror, I thought it was right-to-left programming.

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it's not a choice, we program LTR and in latin because it's a requirement of all programming languages (apart from insignificant exceptions)

There have been a couple of big HN threads about this - but IIRC, it's an art project rather than an executable language:

قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21352508 - Oct 2019 (623 comments)

Ramsey Nasser's Arabic programming language artwork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700691 - May 2014 (108 comments)

FWIW, it's the same in Israel.

Despite Hebrew and Arabic being right-to-left languages, all coding is done in normal left-to-right Latin (really, English) programming frameworks.

As Dalia noted, all major programming languages are left-to-right with Latin alphabet, and their frameworks/SDKs/APIs are filled with English words for functions and classes.

People then keep the IDEs in English? Or the UI is set up to the right-to-left flow, only the text blocks with the code itself are left-to-right?

My Iranian coworker leaves everything in English for what it’s worth. I can ask her what she would prefer and why?

we keep it in LTR although some prefer to set up the IDE for their preferred latin based non english language. it's because some software messes RTL and the translations for the technical keywords in arabic are not standardized. For example I can't tell you what "Refactoring" would be translated to in arabic

This can be amusingly seen peeking through in PHP sometimes. The scope-resolution operator appears in the code as "Paamayim Nekudotayim" (double-colon in Hebrew, for non-speakers). You can see it in parse errors:

> $ php -r :: > Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_resolution_operator#PHP

My first assumption (which I guess was correct) was that the image was flipped, but then I got confused because I started looking closer and, while I could see some English syntax ("for { ..."), it also looked as if there were Arabic characters mixed in, so I wondered if it was some interesting mix, and also that they were rendering English RTL.

Then I realized that was much less likely than simply having flipped the image.

Exactly! I program left to right in English like the whole world I think. :)

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