Programming, the desi way

Most Indians have learnt the concepts of mathematics in their local language. So why should programming be any different?. The TeNet group (Telecommunications and networking group) at IIT Chennai is aiming to do just this by creating a system that allows a programmer to enter code in ASCII but generates error messages in the language of his/her choice. Srikanth R P reports

A majority of India’s population lives in villages. India also boasts one of the fastest growing bases of developers in the world. But there are no synergies today between these two statements. However, if the efforts of the TeNet group at IIT Chennai take off, expect a quantum leap in the developer population of India—rural folk would be able to get into software development. The TeNet group has created a system based on Linux that allows a programmer to get error messages or comments in the language of his choice for the code he has written. That means a programmer can write code in ASCII and see comments or error messages in Kannada or Tamil, for instance. As comments and error messages are not in English, a would-be programmer can learn the basics of software development just like mathematics is grasped.

All a programmer has to do is set the second language to say, Tamil, while booting the system. The entire system becomes bi-lingual in ASCII (the international standard) as well as ISCII (the Indian standard for languages). While the code has to be written in ASCII, all the comments (the non-operational part) can be written in Hindi. When a programmer compiles his program, the system spews out error messages or comments in Hindi. While this concept is followed in China and Japan, this is the first time such a system has been developed in India.

Says Dr Hema A Murthy, “Although word processors and spreadsheets are available in Indian languages, empowerment can happen only when our rural folk get into software development. This was the main reason behind our effort. Our hope is that such efforts can lead to outsourcing of software development from the metros to rural areas.” The effort from the TeNet group, which is headed by the visionary Professor Jhunjhunwala is a revolutionary step as it can help in bringing marginalised sections of society into the mainstream.

Currently, the team has managed to enable support for languages like Hindi and Tamil. But both Dr Hema and Professor T A Gonsalves say that supporting other languages is simply a matter of populating configuration files that are loaded at runtime. Enabling this support at runtime is a significant achievement since it is difficult to enable support at the OS-level for all Indian languages, given the variety of fonts and encoding schemes that are in use. Explains Dr Hema, “Our focus has been primarily to ensure that an application behaves in a consistent way, independent of the language. This requires separation of an application into two parts :

• The basic functionality of an application (for instance, a word processor)
• Language resources—key resources result in the display of characters in language and font. This ensures easy deployment of applications in multiple languages.

By enabling support at the OS-level, applications that run on top of the OS inherit the modified OS interface (for graphics). Some applications come with internationalisation support, so the team just has to add configuration files with corresponding Indian language strings to replace English strings. For applications that do not come with internationalisation support, the team has modified the source to support internationalisation. The team has also solved one of the major problems involving multilingual applications—as support is provided at the OS-level, it enables simultaneous deployment of applications in multiple languages. Additionally, existing applications can work with Indian languages. Till today, Indians have learnt programming using only one language, English, which is a foreign one, and have yet emerged as one of the best in software development. Now think of the impact if Indians from the non-English backgrounds (18 official and about 800 unofficial language speaking communities) get involved in software development.