From the weird department: the Wenyan programming language

A few days ago I stumbled on the programming language Wenyan, designed by Lingdong Huang, a programmer–artist from CMU.‍^[Note 1] Unlike most programming languages in use today, Wenyan does not try to pass off as resembling English: programs written in Wenyan are written completely in Chinese characters.

Wényán, of course, is 文言 (ˌmɐnˌjin), or Classical Chinese.‍^[Note 2] Not only are Wenyan programs written in Chinese characters; they are in fact pretty much actual, grammatically correct Classical Chinese.

Here is an example of what a Wenyan program looks like (I kid you not), pulled straight from the example file “factorial.wy”:

吾有一術。名之曰「階乘」。欲行是術。必先得一數。曰「甲」。乃行是術曰。
	若「甲」等於一者。
		乃得「甲」。
	若非。
		減「甲」以一。名之曰「乙」。
		施「階乘」於「乙」。名之曰「丙」。
		乘「丙」以「甲」。名之曰「丁」。
		乃得「丁」
	也。
是謂「階乘」之術也。

施「階乘」於五。書之。‍[Note 3]

This is what the program means, quite literally:

I have a method‍[Note 4]; call it ‘factorial’.
If [you] want to run this method, [it] must first receive a number, namely A.
Then, running this method means:
	If A equals one,
		[the] result [is] A.
	If not,
		decrease A by one, name it B;
		Apply ‘factorial’ to B, name it C;
		Multiply C by A, name it D;
		[The] result is D.
Such is [the] method called [the] ‘factorial’.

Apply ‘factorial’ to five. Write it [out].

If you have a background in computer science, you might notice the English translation look awfully like pseudocode; but the Chinese source text is not pseudocode, it’s actual, executable code.

Many years ago, the Japanese also created a programming language that used Japanese characters, but I don’t know what happened to that language. I also don’t know how closely it resembled actual Japanese, but this one is pretty close.