7 ms·

Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]

50 points by akkartik 14d ago

golem14 14d ago
Recte!
jdb1729 14d ago
Sic itur ad astra! I spent some time and tokens generating these C99 applications and libraries all in classical Latin: https://github.com/jdb19937/apotheca https://github.com/jdb19937/apotheca. They all build with this C99 compiler + arm64 assembler + linker toolchain https://github.com/jdb19937/ccc https://github.com/jdb19937/ccc (CCC = 300) which is included. But my favorite one of these repo is the 100+ test cases https://github.com/jdb19937/corpus https://github.com/jdb19937/corpus that I used to iterate the compiler to bootstrappability. Nota: README.md ignorandum est. Anglice scriptum est ad barbaros ineruditos pecunia emungendos, lege LEGEME.md.
- wcarey 12d ago
  How did you compose the Latin? It seems... not very classical both in word selection and grammar. For example, /* Est c consonans (non vocalis, non spatium, non littera non-Latina)? */ seems a word-by-word translation of English words into Latin words ignoring the structure and syntax of classical Latin. Perhaps it ought to be something more like: /* Estne c litera consonans (neque vocalis, neque spatium, neque litera linguae aliae)? edit: On reflection, notes on the return values of boolean functions probably ought to be some sort of utrum ...an construction.
  - jdb1729 12d ago
    One way I felt the prerogative to influence it was in choice of vocabulary, for example "files" are plicae, non fasciculi, brevity FTW. I have a (private) CLAUDIUS.md file where I accumulated such guidance. Frankly I can't really tell where it lies on the spectrum of classical to vulgar, my memories of reading Cicero and Pliny have faded quite a bit, but I understand your point about the barbaric word order (next expeditio I'll take this into account). But it was still a worthwhile campaign in terms of refreshing that knowledge. Salve!
    - wcarey 11d ago
      Oh - this is llm generated. That's disappointing, but not surprising, and explains the bad grammar and style. On the spectrum of classical to vulgar, it lands in the "just plain incorrect" bucket quite frequently. Case usage, word choice, syntax, it's got it all. Whatever llm did this needs to spend some more time with Bennet.
      - jdb1729 11d ago
        Ita, feedbackum acceptum! Thanks for taking the tempum to check it out, also to whomever gave the astra!
mrkeen 12d ago
C already has vel and aut operators, but now we can name them as such!
- deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
not-so-darkstar 12d ago
When he started reading latin in a japanese accent I lost it
mpyne 12d ago
Perl was there decades ago: https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/L...
- hotelsacher 12d ago
  Came here to say this :)
- asveikau 12d ago
  The perl $, @, %, etc. being compared to declensions is amusing. I feel like you need to know something about perl and latin (both considered outdated) to get this joke. For those who don't: in perl, the same text identifier can have a different meaning depending on these prefixes, i.e. $foo is scalar, @foo is array, %foo is a hash (dictionary). Likewise latin (like most old indo European languages) has a bunch of suffixes to indicate what is happening with a noun or adjective: is it a subject, direct object, possessive, used as a tool or location, etc.
- TZubiri 11d ago
  > If you have to ask "Why?", then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either. Saved to shortcuts
Muromec 12d ago
One thing he missed out on is using genders to represent variables of different types, having three `temp` variables with different names, comparators that take valueA, valueB et cetera.
teddyh 12d ago
From: hermann@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (Michael Hermann) Subject: Programmming awards Date: 10 Feb 89 At Calgary, the computer science department has an award called the Williams Cup (as in old stained coffee cup), which is given yearly to the student who hands in the most imaginative rendition of a regular programming assignment. Anyway, as the story goes, the cup was awarded to a student who'd done a desk calculator assignment. Seems that the prof hadn't specified that you had to do it in decimal, so his/her program did math with _roman_numerals_. The clincher for the award must have been his/her programming style, since of course, the documentation was in _latin_. — <https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/computer.folklore.from.net.rumors.html https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/computer.folkl...>
JuniperMesos 12d ago
Seems inaccurate to claim that "America" broke the Nazi's Enigma code - most of that work was done at Bletchley Park by British codebreakers, was it not? Of course Britian is still an Anglophone country and certainly lots of pioneering computing work in general was done in English by either Americans or British people, so it doesn't affect his broader point.
- owisd 12d ago
  It was actually first cracked by Marian Rejewski at the Polish Cipher Bureau and the details were handed over to Bletchley Park at the start of the war.
purpleleaves 12d ago
Cast some spells!
jonjacky 12d ago
This guy lost me right at the beginning. He says that we write software in English because the USA won World War II with the help of the Colossus computer to break codes. Then he shows a picture of ENIAC, and suggests it was also used in World War II codebreaking. This is completely wrong - it was the British who used computers to break codes during that war. Colossus was built for that purpose by the British. ENIAC was built in the USA but did not become operational until after the war and was not used for codebreaking. I quit watching after that. I don't trust anyone who garbles well-known history that badly to tell my why we should write software in Latin. Instead, let this other guy tell you why you should write software in Latin -- and show you how! He's the real deal - he programs in C89 with Latin keywords, by using the C preprocessor: https://github.com/farant/rhubarb/blob/main/docs/old/latina.h.md https://github.com/farant/rhubarb/blob/main/docs/old/latina....
- sbmthakur 12d ago
  Such corrections become even more important in the age of LLMs where we're gonna see more fake stuff. I honestly thought this is some kind of a joke but it turned out be a talk.
- jolmg 12d ago
  > Don't use nomen as a variable name. Seriously. It's a macro for typedef For all the warnings so far about not using nomen as a variable, wonder why not just do "typus_definire", since both "type" and "define" are Latin-derived...
- kalb_almas 11d ago
  Absurd. There's about a million times more English text in the world than Latin text (so far). In 1000 years, English will be much better understood than Latin and it's not even close. Write software in English.
  - jonjacky 11d ago
    In 1000 years, people speaking what they will call English won't be able to understand the English we are writing today, any more than you can understand the English of 1026 -- it was a different language then, now called Anglo-Saxon. BUT the Latin of 3026 will be the same as the Latin of 2026, 1026, ... and 26.
wendelandrady 12d ago
this guy lost me as he started lol!
glimshe 11d ago
Hoc tempus perditum est
erelong 11d ago
I thought of doing this in a kind of Lisp as it's been said to be like latin by analogy (PG?) Didn't get around to it though as it would be another layer to go through when coding as I thought you'd have to translate the latin to whatever programming language you're using in English Maybe LLMs might make it easy to get such a thing going for AI assisted coding in latin going forward though

50 points by akkartik 14d ago

Recte!

Sic itur ad astra! I spent some time and tokens generating these C99 applications and libraries all in classical Latin: https://github.com/jdb19937/apotheca https://github.com/jdb19937/apotheca. They all build with this C99 compiler + arm64 assembler + linker toolchain https://github.com/jdb19937/ccc https://github.com/jdb19937/ccc (CCC = 300) which is included. But my favorite one of these repo is the 100+ test cases https://github.com/jdb19937/corpus https://github.com/jdb19937/corpus that I used to iterate the compiler to bootstrappability. Nota: README.md ignorandum est. Anglice scriptum est ad barbaros ineruditos pecunia emungendos, lege LEGEME.md.

wcarey 12d ago
How did you compose the Latin? It seems... not very classical both in word selection and grammar. For example, /* Est c consonans (non vocalis, non spatium, non littera non-Latina)? */ seems a word-by-word translation of English words into Latin words ignoring the structure and syntax of classical Latin. Perhaps it ought to be something more like: /* Estne c litera consonans (neque vocalis, neque spatium, neque litera linguae aliae)? edit: On reflection, notes on the return values of boolean functions probably ought to be some sort of utrum ...an construction.
- jdb1729 12d ago
  One way I felt the prerogative to influence it was in choice of vocabulary, for example "files" are plicae, non fasciculi, brevity FTW. I have a (private) CLAUDIUS.md file where I accumulated such guidance. Frankly I can't really tell where it lies on the spectrum of classical to vulgar, my memories of reading Cicero and Pliny have faded quite a bit, but I understand your point about the barbaric word order (next expeditio I'll take this into account). But it was still a worthwhile campaign in terms of refreshing that knowledge. Salve!
  - wcarey 11d ago
    Oh - this is llm generated. That's disappointing, but not surprising, and explains the bad grammar and style. On the spectrum of classical to vulgar, it lands in the "just plain incorrect" bucket quite frequently. Case usage, word choice, syntax, it's got it all. Whatever llm did this needs to spend some more time with Bennet.
    - jdb1729 11d ago
      Ita, feedbackum acceptum! Thanks for taking the tempum to check it out, also to whomever gave the astra!

mrkeen 12d ago

C already has vel and aut operators, but now we can name them as such!

deleted 12d ago
[deleted]

not-so-darkstar 12d ago

When he started reading latin in a japanese accent I lost it

mpyne 12d ago

Perl was there decades ago: https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/L...

hotelsacher 12d ago
Came here to say this :)
asveikau 12d ago
The perl $, @, %, etc. being compared to declensions is amusing. I feel like you need to know something about perl and latin (both considered outdated) to get this joke. For those who don't: in perl, the same text identifier can have a different meaning depending on these prefixes, i.e. $foo is scalar, @foo is array, %foo is a hash (dictionary). Likewise latin (like most old indo European languages) has a bunch of suffixes to indicate what is happening with a noun or adjective: is it a subject, direct object, possessive, used as a tool or location, etc.
TZubiri 11d ago
> If you have to ask "Why?", then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either. Saved to shortcuts

Muromec 12d ago

One thing he missed out on is using genders to represent variables of different types, having three `temp` variables with different names, comparators that take valueA, valueB et cetera.

teddyh 12d ago

From: hermann@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (Michael Hermann) Subject: Programmming awards Date: 10 Feb 89 At Calgary, the computer science department has an award called the Williams Cup (as in old stained coffee cup), which is given yearly to the student who hands in the most imaginative rendition of a regular programming assignment. Anyway, as the story goes, the cup was awarded to a student who'd done a desk calculator assignment. Seems that the prof hadn't specified that you had to do it in decimal, so his/her program did math with _roman_numerals_. The clincher for the award must have been his/her programming style, since of course, the documentation was in _latin_. — <https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/computer.folklore.from.net.rumors.html https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/computer.folkl...>

JuniperMesos 12d ago

Seems inaccurate to claim that "America" broke the Nazi's Enigma code - most of that work was done at Bletchley Park by British codebreakers, was it not? Of course Britian is still an Anglophone country and certainly lots of pioneering computing work in general was done in English by either Americans or British people, so it doesn't affect his broader point.

owisd 12d ago
It was actually first cracked by Marian Rejewski at the Polish Cipher Bureau and the details were handed over to Bletchley Park at the start of the war.

purpleleaves 12d ago

Cast some spells!

jonjacky 12d ago

This guy lost me right at the beginning. He says that we write software in English because the USA won World War II with the help of the Colossus computer to break codes. Then he shows a picture of ENIAC, and suggests it was also used in World War II codebreaking. This is completely wrong - it was the British who used computers to break codes during that war. Colossus was built for that purpose by the British. ENIAC was built in the USA but did not become operational until after the war and was not used for codebreaking. I quit watching after that. I don't trust anyone who garbles well-known history that badly to tell my why we should write software in Latin. Instead, let this other guy tell you why you should write software in Latin -- and show you how! He's the real deal - he programs in C89 with Latin keywords, by using the C preprocessor: https://github.com/farant/rhubarb/blob/main/docs/old/latina.h.md https://github.com/farant/rhubarb/blob/main/docs/old/latina....

sbmthakur 12d ago
Such corrections become even more important in the age of LLMs where we're gonna see more fake stuff. I honestly thought this is some kind of a joke but it turned out be a talk.
jolmg 12d ago
> Don't use nomen as a variable name. Seriously. It's a macro for typedef For all the warnings so far about not using nomen as a variable, wonder why not just do "typus_definire", since both "type" and "define" are Latin-derived...
kalb_almas 11d ago
Absurd. There's about a million times more English text in the world than Latin text (so far). In 1000 years, English will be much better understood than Latin and it's not even close. Write software in English.
- jonjacky 11d ago
  In 1000 years, people speaking what they will call English won't be able to understand the English we are writing today, any more than you can understand the English of 1026 -- it was a different language then, now called Anglo-Saxon. BUT the Latin of 3026 will be the same as the Latin of 2026, 1026, ... and 26.

wendelandrady 12d ago

this guy lost me as he started lol!

glimshe 11d ago

Hoc tempus perditum est

erelong 11d ago

I thought of doing this in a kind of Lisp as it's been said to be like latin by analogy (PG?) Didn't get around to it though as it would be another layer to go through when coding as I thought you'd have to translate the latin to whatever programming language you're using in English Maybe LLMs might make it easy to get such a thing going for AI assisted coding in latin going forward though