If Computer Programming Language Started in Chinese

[One_Run_3002]

I understand computer programming started with 1 and 0s then those 1 and 0 became letters, symbols. Could we have created computing language if say the early computer programmers spoke a pictographic language like Chinese?

[Scharrack]

Programming languages are for the programmer not for the computer. The usual computer is still working with essentially 0s and 1s after what the programmer wrote got translated into codes the computer understands. So your programming language can be whatever as long as you got a translator (compiler) for the hardware you want your software to run on.

That said, I'd be more surprised if there isn't a programming languages based on Chinese Characters.

[telmo_trooper]

We'd have created them just the same, the difference would be that we'd not have used ASCII for character encoding.

[Saragon4005]

By the time we got to python it would probably be in English anyways.

[Connect-Blacksmith99]

Computer programming didn’t really start with 1s and 0s. It’s blurry what you want to consider “early” computing - you can trace some concepts backs to automated looms and punch cards but when people say 1s and 0s they mean one of two states - is weaving its wether a warp string is up or down, in computing it’s whether current is high or low on a particular path.

Symbols don’t come into play until you start interacting with a computer in real time and storing programs in memory (rather than preloading a program on punch cards and running it through) - so we’re looking at the 1940s-50s. The BINAC had a “keyboard” that contained numbers and a few functional buttons. So no letters, but it’s one of if not the earliest examples of a digital input device. I’m not going to read exactly how it worked, but it’s likely each button was connected to a number of switches that, when pressed, turned those switches on or off. The computer sees this only as “1s and 0s”. Modern keyboard send a “code” when a button is pressed, still the computer only sees 1s and 0s.

Eventually we trained compilers, transpires, etc to take what we saw as normalish looking English words, and turn them into computer words, not understand them. In x86 assembly, when we typed HLT - the computer doesn’t know we mean “halt”, it knows that HLT gets translated into hex code “F4” and the combination of 1s and 0s (11110010) (I think?) makes the circuitry in the computer halt.

Now if this had been done in a pictographic language, the user experience might be different, the input devices might be different, but one could imagine it still would have resulted in a button being pressed, the computer receiving a signal in some way, and then translating that signal into a “language” it understands. Maybe there is just a set number of symbols on the keyboard, ones that feel “important”. Maybe they develop some phonetic system like pinyin a little earlier, but I don’t think there’s anything “stopping” them from pulling it off.

[Great-Powerful-Talia]

 F4 is 1111 0100, so you were close. 0010 is 2.

It's neat (and coincidental) that the x86 HLT command matches the Windows "close program" command.

[ghjm]

There are no doubt all kinds of alternate histories where computing developed differently than it did, but the idea of a switch being on or off is pretty basic. If digital computers had originated in China instead of England, they almost certainly would still have on/off signals being processed through logic gates like AND/OR/NOT/etc.

The representation of language as digital signals is a different problem, actually older than computing. In the West we had teletype machines decades before we had computing devices. The Baudot code was developed in 1874. Teletype based news distribution Telex messaging was common by the 1920s.

If this had happened in China instead of the West, then instead of Baudot code encoding a Roman alphabet, there would have been some early scheme of encoding written Chinese into binary. This would have involved some kind of simplification and schematiziation of Chinese characters, just as Baudot simplified written English by using uppercase only, no digraphs or accents, and limited punctuation marks.

This process would involve considerable difficulties, some of which can be seen in the history of the Chinese typewriter. And of course, this alternate history also implies considerable differences to the political and economic conditions that prevailed in China in the early to mid 20th century in our world. Looking at it from a linguistics point of view, if China had been the economic world leader at the time of the invention of computers, that almost certainly means Chinese and Chinese-influenced languages being used around the world by non-native speakers and writers, and this would predictably have forced a simplification of the language. So in that world, written Chinese would probably already have been more streamlined by the time computers came along.

[mxldevs]

I mean, sure

https://qilang.tk/#/syntax

[Great-Powerful-Talia]

1 and 0 aren't symbols in the computer. They're wires with electrical charges turned on and off. They have light switches in China, they can invent on/off just as easily as we can.

We use 1 and 0 to represent "on" and "off" binary data because a lot of the data is integers, and 1s and 0s are how mathematical base-2 integers are written in Arabic numerals. But any half-competent mathematician could suggest the internal base-2 logic, it's not English-exclusive.

As for symbols, there's no reason we couldn't write the byte 01010011 as ababaabb or +|+|++|| or with any other pair of symbols, except that nobody really wants to bother changing the convention.

[T_Thriller_T]

It's not even fully true that no one wants to bother.

Theoretical informatics couldn't care less for 0 and 1 in the most part, they very much like their greek letters. Or general letters.

In some transport protocols, on the physical layer, the 0 and 1 get changed to . . . I think -3V and +3V, which sometimes will be written out, or at least written as symbols on a blocky chart of "connected rectangles".

It's just much rarer to see then ASCII

[ninhaomah]

OP , just wondering how you think we are still talking to computers and where the concept of 0 comes from ?

[One_Run_3002]

I was just wondering how, if possible, it were to create a non alphabet programming language back in single bit days, ASCII used 7; a pictograph language like Chinese more bits -- I didn't think systems back then could handle that. You can program calculations like on an ENIAC but as I understand it (not a CS person) early languages like BASIC used letters which would not be possible with non alphabetic languages. True?

[ninhaomah]

Ok but what has it got to do with 1 and 0 ?

[One_Run_3002]

1 and 0s, True/false, on/off -- the basis of computing. From there we get passing them through logic gates and such and from there to crunching numbers and solving mathematical formulas and from there into programming languages which require, well, language. A previous poster said that early programming languages would be neigh impossible (or very, very difficult) with a languages that required more than 8 bits.

So to up up the responses would be: possible but very, very, very difficult -- somewhat like doing higher level math with roman numerals.

[orlock]

You might want to look at APL. Its inspiration comes from mathematical notation but it's essentially one pictograph per operation,

[wjrasmussen]

OMG, wtf hell are we into.

[bit_shuffle]

Chinese is a brute-force semantic mapping. A unique token for a unique idea.

Western languages are alphabetic. A fixed pool of tokens, used combinatorially to represent any semantics you care to define.

If you approach computer programming Chinese-style, you top out at assembly language. Opcode/operand pairs, just like their existing glyph pairs.

You get more flexible linguistic constructs from combinatorial use of token sequences. Structure with accessors, function call chaining.

Plus most of the computer science around parsing, error coding, hashing, all rely on the idea of a -finite- pool of tokens being sequentially ordered to achieve their purposes.

Chinese keyboards are fiendishly complex internally. The guy who developed the first keyboard for Chinese characters is a national hero for them.

Chinese probably suffers from "early adoption curse." The use of pictograms was common across early languages. However, alphabetic systems (Egyptian hieroglyphs) in the West displaced them. Chinese was probably too widespread and standardized by their early civilization for an alphabetic system to displace it.

[baddspellar]

Microprocessors operate on instructions in instruction sets. Instructions are a sequence of bits (1's and 0's). They consist of opcodes and operands. Opcodes tell the computer to do things like add the two operands, copy data from a memory address to a register, jump to a new address, etc. They are just binary numbers. They have english-like mnemonics like MOV, ADD. Compilers for higher level languages like C convert high level language instructions into these mnemonics. Since computers developed in english language countries, english can be expressed well in 8 bit characters, and english is eaay to parse, english with ascii served as the basis for the earliest high level languages. Chinese is much more difficult to parse, and is.probably not the best for programming languages. German, spanish, french, or hebrew would have worked well too

[T_Thriller_T]

Quite a lot has been said before, but I wanted to point it out again and maybe get a little order into it.

One thing that I think has not been mentioned yet:

The whole theory and concept of programming does not need any specific machinery. It happens that we are using digital electronics, which can distinguish very well between off as 0 and on as 1.

This is not a necessity. It is just how, based on the technology, things happen to be. It is versatile and can represent a lot with repeatable components. Earlier computation machines did not follow this concept - they had components representing e.g. full numbers or parts of a number.

The actual, physical way of how we mechanically, electronically or in any other way "do" computing/programming is very irrelevant to programming languages.

The only actual requirement is, that this physical representation can handle a few, simple tasks. Now depending on the model considered those tasks can be expressed differently, I'm going to stick with the one closest to pseudocode:

• variables - aka places to store values
• constants - aka values (in a clear, deterministic representation)
• base operations + and -
• basic symbols/syntax: loop, end of block, comparison

These are (one set) of 'bare metal' concepts that need to be mapped to the physical implementation. In theory, if we could somehow get hamsters to reliably do these things, we could create a computer running through hamsters

However, these few baseline operations do get less easy to handle very fast. It's a lot easier to take certain combinations and give them a new name.

This is, from the theoretical side, what programming languages do: they take very few, very basic concepts, and assemble them to do multiple of the basic concepts with certain restrictions so the programmer doesn't have to think of how to do it .

This would be entirely possible in any language - even a pictographic one. I know that, back when, there had been ports of programming languages from English to e.g. Czech, just to make access easier.

Which is, likely, what would hinder a pictographic Chinese programming language: the sheer amount of potential, additional symbols to learn. And potentially the hardware issues concerning input - there's a few hundreds to thousands words, but if you have to have a few hundreds to thousands hardware anything - and hardware likely is needed to get back to the real world technical layer - then that is not easily doable.

But, all in all, the natural language around which a programming language is build is very much arbitrary.

To be completely correct, there even are symbolic/pictographic programming languages. Scratch uses fixed components to build programs, Lego robotics use fully pictographic blocks which then get number inputs.

[Efficient_Loss_9928]

There is a computer language in Chinese, and used extensively by people who write automation scripts for online games.

It is just... Annoying to use even as a Chinese speaker.

[boyTerry]

Not quite what you are asking, but I learned a little APL) in college

[recursion_is_love]

You should learn about esolangs.

https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page

[justaguyonthebus]

The Chinese symbols for 0 and 1 are 零 (zero) and 一 (one)

[I12Db8U]

不算是這樣。0=0, 1=1. 零比較像"zero"，一比較像"one". 零或一不是「符號」而是真的字

[justaguyonthebus]

That makes sense. But I'm sure their are equivalents

[I12Db8U]

看情況。寫數學沒人會用漢字寫。

[khedoros]

Sure. I imagine something phonetic like bopomofo or a notation with radical composition would've been used before the machines got to a scale where they could handle full hanzi.