Processing in Irish

edited July 2016 in Developing Processing

I'd like to be able to program in my native language, Gaeilge (Irish).

In order to create software I have to think in English. It seems a minor issue, as I am quite capable of thinking that way.

But it's actually a big deal. Our education system never evolved beyond a flawed 'learn Irish but think in English' approach. Thus has the Gaelic revival hobbled along since famine times.

Now we have entered the technological and open-source era, and there is no reason not to unbind the Gaelic imagination.

Virtually all Irish speakers also know English, therefore the task of translating the Processing documentation could be completed in due course, if the idea catches on.

But a fork/edition which accepted keywords and methods in Irish:

poiblí //public

slá // int

stataċ // static

7irl // etc

would be an unprecedented addition to the Gaelic revival and computer literacy in Ireland.
Can we work together to create an interface so that Processing code can be written in Irish?

Comments

  • internationalisation files are here:

    https://github.com/processing/processing/tree/master/build/shared/lib/languages

    they only appear to be for things like the menus at the moment.

    having parallel methods with irish names is probably impractical. i can't think of a way of doing this which doesn't involve copying a lot of code. (i speak as someone who wishes they'd allow 'colour' as well as 'color')

    and the reference is HUGE.

    actually, the three examples you choose are all JAVA keywords...

  • edited July 2016

    Hi Koogs,

    thanks for your reply!

    The reference is huge, but I think we should nearly see the size of the task as a resource rather than an obstacle (ie. 'a way in' for the non-programming-but-Irish-speaking-community).

    Is "parallel methods" the way to do it? Like, can I "just"

    1. make a fork of the whole processing language
    2. go through the classes finding and replacing the keywords and method names;
    3. test we haven't broken it,
    4. Put it back up on Github as Processing.gael?

    If that's possible, who's permission should I seek?

    *edit

  • This would be a huge task, but rather than forking the whole thing, here's how you'd get started:

    Processing has a preprocessor that converts its language modifications (the 'color' data type, adding 'public' to methods, others) into straight Java code. You'd want to make your own version of that code, which lives here: https://github.com/processing/processing/tree/master/java/src/processing/mode/java/preproc

    You could build upon the pde.g file to create something that converts all those keywords from Gaelic back into English, and things would run just fine from there.

    Such changes could be handled as an extension of Java Mode, by subclassing the PdePreprocessor file to use your modifications, and making a GaelicMode class that extends JavaMode.

    Unfortunately, nobody has had time to write up how Modes are built, but you can check out the source of the other Modes that are out there (Android, Python, and others) to get some clues. The structure of a Mode package follows the way that Libraries and Tools are set up, which you can learn more about here: https://github.com/processing/processing/wiki

    Sorry to not have more complete resources for this, but this is the approach, and perhaps some others can give you a hand with getting started on it. Good luck!

    P.S. Back when we were developing DBN (the predecessor to Processing), we native languages like this were a priority (for the reasons you outline). We wound up making a version of DBN that you could code in German, Italian, Spanish, and even Japanese and some others. At the end of the day, there was almost no interest in these variants. The feedback I got was that 1) anyone writing code has to deal with so much English anyway, having to use English keywords was the least of their problems, 2) Folks learn from code examples being available, so as soon as you're working in a native language, you're walling off the community of people that can help or be helped by your code (See Stackoverflow and others for long discussions about issues like this). 3) In the case of a language like Japanese, typing the native version of the commands was actually more tedious than the English versions, since keyboards have an English bias. We were pretty disappointed! As a result, we didn't pursue it further in Processing, though a lot of effort has gone into localization/internationalization of the PDE itself and also the reference, since that gives us the most utility for the limited amount of time that the volunteers can devote to the project.

  • Thank you! I'll give it a shot.

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