Alb

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  • Artist helps Arabic speakers to code without learning English

    by 
    Daniel Cooper
    Daniel Cooper
    05.07.2014

    If you want to build software, it's almost mandatory that you'll need to know the English language since all of the tools rely upon that tongue. Unfortunately, that puts non-English speakers at a huge disadvantage when it comes to computer literacy and programming. Artist and coder Ramsey Nasser decided to remedy the problem by constructing a programming language written not in English, but in Arabic. Nasser had more than a few problems getting "Alb" to work, since Latin-based text editors couldn't handle the script, and even GitHub struggled to accommodate the data. In the end, Nasser had to use Lisp, a language from 1958, because it doesn't rely upon non-Arabic punctuation like semicolons and commas. "Alb" actually works, and if you fancy giving it a go, then you can test your Arabic programming skills down at the source.