Making coding accessible to non-english speakers - UBCHacks 2017
Won 'Best Hack Submitted on a .tech Domain'
In the developed world we often take our access to technology for granted but there are many groups in the developing world and even in isolated, marginalized communities in our own country who strugggle to gain access to technology. For many of these already disadvantaged groups, there is yet another barrier to success.
Most, if not all, of the common programming languages in use today are created with english syntax and for the members of those communities who are not english speaking, this is huge disadvantage for entering the coding community. With prolingua, we would like to offer a simple programming language that can easily have key syntactic terms given in multiple languages. For a list of languages we currently support, please see the language_support folder!
Prolingua is a programming language that currently supports looping and conditionals as well as simple expressions and variable assignment. Our compiler compiles Prolingua code into Python code that can be run from the Python 3 interpreter. The compiler itself is written in Java 8 with ANTLR parsing and lexing.
In the future we would like to support function definition, file IO, as well as the map-filter-reduce design pattern. We feel that this would give Prolingua programmers the tools needed to automate many tasks and provide a firm introduction to coding principles.