Concatenation is a fantastic example of why multilingual code will require native speakers to ensure its usability in the future. When programming in English, we use (seemingly) minor things like capitalization, punctuation, and spacing to ensure that our desired meaning is communicated to computers.
It is of the utmost importance that these formats and decisions are consistent throughout code to ensure that it can actuallyrun, as just one missing hyphen (-) can throw an error or “bug.”
Now imagine taking a programming language, e.g. JavaScript, that uses CamelCase in its formatting. Then, attempt to create a translation to Telugu (తెలుగు), one of the many languages that has no option for capital letters… The solution will need to be creative.
It is clear to me (& all of us @Legesher) that such a decision should not be made by a large language model or a human that only speaks English, but rather by someone who understands the target language, how people actually use that language, and what the most natural solution might be. These processes and decisions all work together to help preserve the functionality, usability, and meaning.
Legesher Language Packs 📦 Released Today!
Last week we released the Corpus and the Canon. Today, we are releasing Legesher Language Packs 📦, the shipped vocabulary itself. They're the localization layer for code: the fixed vocabulary of a programming language in another natural language.
We are starting with our 51 supported languages in Python, and can’t wait to add more. Each one is currently tagged as “experimental,” but will move forward through native-speaker review to “reviewed,” and then to “official.”
Every reserved word in a programming language's grammar (keywords, builtins, exceptions, error messages) is compiled into a Language Pack that, when used by Legesher, lets code run in any language and compile all the same. Each Language Pack will also be versioned as they get updated, so that you can always be sure that you are using the most up to date version of each pack.
Language is Wild: While writing this newsletter, I was thinking about all the different meanings of the word “run” in English. According to the Oxford Dictionary, there are ~645 distinct meanings of the word run, making it one of the most complex words in English!
That’s all for today, folks. Up Next: the interface that draws all these datasets’ together for those of you who are itching t|o help strengthen your language’s presence in Legesher.
Pleasesubscribe to our newsletterto stay up to date with our upcoming releases & check out the Legesher Language Packs 📦hereon Hugging Face.
All the best, Josh @ Legesher
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