Disappointed by the heavy reliance on English for programming, computer scientist and designer Ramsey Nasser created a new coding language in Arabic
Why did you design a programming language that uses the Arabic alphabet?
Studying computer science at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, I was struck that every coding language I have ever learned was in English. I wanted to start a dialogue about our dependence on English in modern programming.
What is it you want to draw attention to?
People have a tendency to see programming languages as immutable, but the opposite is true. The tools we use are built by men and women and are laden with the assumptions they make. This new language is meant to remind people of that and challenge some of those assumptions.
You have said this was an aesthetic project as much as an engineering one.
To programmers, coding languages are aesthetic works. We use words like ugly, gross, elegant and beautiful when talking about different languages. To me, this language, ﻗﻟب (pronounced alb), is a work of conceptual art. It is a celebration of the tradition of aesthetics in language design.
How big a difference do you think a programming language really makes?
Creating this has shown me that the problem is much bigger than coding languages. You have mountains of code and systems written in English that we use every day. Graphics libraries, audio frameworks – they all use labels like “appendChild” and “setVolume”. These are just concatenated English words, and they are baked into graphics cards, browsers and operating systems.
So should we change them? And how?
To create a truly Arabic coding experience you would need to rewrite the last 40 years of software engineering from scratch in Arabic, which is impossible. And that would just mean that non-Arabic speakers are excluded instead of non-English speakers. It moves the problem, it doesn’t solve it. The truth is, we can’t maintain a full programming experience in every natural language – you would have to translate all existing software and all new software as it came out. It’s not sustainable. I don’t know what the solution is, but I see this project as the beginning of my inquiry into what it might be.
How has ﻗﻟب been received?
In the Middle East people were excited about being able to seriously program in Arabic. But then I had to deliver the news that our dependence on English is so deep that an all-Arabic coding experience is simply not possible. The reaction from the West has been more varied. Some have called it provocative and exciting; others have discussed the technical implications at length.
Why do you think it’s important to make coding more widely accessible?
I feel that coding has the potential to be a medium of self expression. I had always perceived code as an abstract tool for thought, but this project has reminded me that it comes with significant cultural baggage. To teach the world how to code, do we first have to teach the world to speak English?
Ramsey Nasser is a computer scientist and designer based in New York. He recently developed the first Arabic programming language, ﻗﻟب (pronounced alb)
This article appeared in print under the headline “One minute with… Ramsey Nasser”