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: Translating Code to Other
(Human) Languages
and Back Again
@chimeracoder
Aditya Mukerjee
Systems Engineer, Stripe
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95%
of the world doesn’t speak
English as their first language
89%
of the world doesn't speak
English at all
@chimeracoder
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Software is eating the world
@chimeracoder
(and Javascript is eating software)
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@chimeracoder
Software is a powerful enabling force
Software reflects the people who build it
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No content
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“I would have thought it would be useful to NATO, because they had the
common verbs for the things they were going to do. And the nouns, they’d
just have to have a dictionary for things they were referring to for inventory
control…. They’d have common nouns throughout NATO, and they could
make a dictionary of common verbs and translate the program. You could
write one in English and you could translate it and it could go to [the other
language]. No problem, you’d have communication. It would be a limited
vocabulary.”
- Grace Hopper
@chimeracoder
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github.com/ChimeraCoder/koro
(koro)
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package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
if true {
fmt.Printf(“hello, world!\n")
}
}
@chimeracoder
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main
"fmt"
main(){
true {
fmt.Println(”hello, world!!\n")
}
}
@chimeracoder
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@chimeracoder
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gofmt
korofmt
@chimeracoder
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No content
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Automatic source code translation
• Bidirectional translation layers
• Localize source code as a commit hook
@chimeracoder
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Structuring Code
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Naming Schemes
@chimeracoder
readFoo()
writeFoo()
then()
(etc.)
foo ()
foo ()
()
…
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Could we do this in Javascript?
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Character encoding
Go:
• Source code is required by the language spec to be UTF-8
• Strings (and byte arrays) are internally treated as UTF-8
JavaScript:
• Source code can have any encoding supported by the interpreter
• JavaScript: Strings are internally treated as... uhhh… wait…
…what?
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@chimeracoder
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Could we do this in Javascript?
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Could we do this in Javascript?
¯\_()_/¯
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Localizing Error Messages
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type error interface {
Error() string
}
@chimeracoder
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@chimeracoder
Cannot cast parameter type from type “System.String” to
argument type “System.String”
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL
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The only thing worse than a cryptic error message is a cryptic error
message in a foreign language that you can’t understand
@chimeracoder
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Where do we go from here?
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95%
of the world doesn’t speak
English as their first language
89%
of the world doesn't speak
English at all
@chimeracoder
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Aditya Mukerjee
@chimeracoder
https://github.com/ChimeraCoder