Nigerian programmer Karounwi Anuoluwapo has created a programming language, Yorlang which enables programmers to code in the native Nigerian Yoruba Language.
Karounwi, a computer science graduate from the Federal University of Abeokuta (FUNAAB) delved into programming in 2012 and currently works as a software engineer with E-commerce giant Konga.
Yorlang, a concrete step to making digital Inclusion a reality is a simple and basic esoteric language designed to help beginners relate with programming syntax in their native tongue. It is designed to aid their learning and not to replace the standard commercial languages that they will eventually need to know.
Speaking with Innovation Village on the motivation behind the creation of Yorlang, Karounwi said, “A friend on a tech group I belong to thought it would be cool to have popular programming statements like ‘bawo ni aye?’ (Hello World), ‘gbewole’ (import) and I agreed. I set out to build it because I think it might be useful in the ways already mentioned in the previously given answers.”
Speaking on how Yorlang works, Karounwi said, “Like every other interpreted language, Yorlang depends on a few components to work well. They include the input stream, lexer, parsers, interpreters and the state machine.
“The whole operation starts with the input stream whose work is to read in characters one after the other, then the lexer identifies a sequence of characters called tokens so it can confirm that it is a valid input symbol in the Yorlang language, then the parsers make sure that the sequence of tokens matches the grammatical rules in Yorlang by building a tree data structure and finally the interpreters evaluate the generated tree nodes. After all of these, the user can see the results on the screen.”
According to Karounwi, there have been a few challenges creating and sustaining Yorlang, one of which is the challenge of having a clean architecture that reduces complexity while handling a lot of recursive processes.
He also disclosed that Yorlang has gotten community support. There is a video tutorial in Yoruba made by someone on how to get started with Yorlang while there are other persons contributing to add more features to the source code.
Looking forward, Karounwi revealed that the future plans for Yorlang will still revolve around the reason why it was created (i.e to aid beginners so they can relate with coding syntax in their native tongue). “So as I add other features like object-oriented programming, it will be with that purpose in mind,” he said.
