This page intends to show the origins of Nuru, its purpose, what it can be used for, what it should not be used for and the potential future of the programming language.
This language is the direct child of a programming language called "Monkey Language" made by Thorston Ball. He wrote a book titled "Writing An Interpreter In Go" and the core of the language is based on his book.
With the knowledge I gained from his book, I saw an opportunity to write a Swahili Programming Language, which would not just be a translation of an already existing one, but an actual standalone interpreted language that can be built from the ground up, where everything can be customized from the syntax, its abilities, its standard library and more.
Now one may wonder, why a new programming language when there are many other much better programming languages in existence. The answer is, it is a Swahili programming language. And this is significant for two reasons:
- Many are unable to learn programming due to the language barrier. Almost all programming languages in existence are in English and thus a non English speaker would have to first learn English before they can learn a programming language. This makes the effort twice as difficult and Nuru, a native Swahili programming language, intends to make the process of learning programming languages a bit easier.
- Secondly, even if no one does use this programming language, then at least we can say "We do have a fully functional Swahili programming language", and as a person who grew up in Tanzania, this does give me pride.
Nuru does not intend to replace any existing programming language. In fact, it does not intend to be used in production at all. Nuru intends to be an educational programming language, a programming language that will make it easy for anyone to get into the world of programming without knowing English. It intends to be simple enough to be taught to kids in primary and highschool and allow them to build interesting tools with it.
Nuru also hopes to be used by hobbyists and experienced programmers, where by they will find it easy to write scripts in Nuru that will help solve their various tasks or build interesting projects with it. As a matter of fact, someone already made a sudoku solver in Nuru.
While being simple it also intends to be fully functional. Other than having all the core features required by a programming language, Nuru also has an extensive standard library that will make performing common tasks much easier. Thus, it intends to bring the best of both worlds, simple to use with a lot of features.
Nuru's philosophy is to keep things simple. Everything in Nuru should be consistent and intuitive, from its syntax to the keywords used. On the matter of keywords, Nuru intends to provide keywords that are simple and intuitive that can easily explain what the function or library is for. A more detailed guide on the Nuru's syntax and the proper way of writing Nuru will be provided in the near future.
Nuru is also community driven. We listen to our community and do our best to implement on the feedback we get from them.
Nuru's performance is worse than python. It has been authored by someone with very limited knowledge in programming. Thus, it is advised to never use Nuruin production code where by any kind of mistakes are critical. Nuru is still very immature and should only be used for educational and hobby projects.
The main challenge we have in Nuru is in naming keywords. Since this is something new, there are lack of words that fully describe common programming words. However, we do intend to try our best to select the best keywords, and we often consult with our community when choosing a word.
It is still too early to know how Nuru will evolve, or the way in which the community will use this language. However, what is certain is the core developers will do their best to provide a language that will be enjoyable to learn and code in. We listen to our community and hopefully we will soon have a large number of developers contributing to the language.
We also hope to see games and GUI applications written in Nuru in the near future... God willing.
I am very grateful to the reception of this project, we now have over 150+ downloads and its barely been a month. We hope to fulfill all your expectations and provide something that you will all enjoy to use. We also ask you to bear with us when we make mistakes and correct and advise us on areas where we can do better. I am also grateful to Thorston for writing such an amazing book, and I would recommend anyone who'd want to learn how programming languages work to read his book.
And finally, I thank Allah for granting us the ability to learn and giving me the ability to make such a project.