Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Language design & goals

  • Han is a Korean-language programming language with a full Rust-based toolchain (lexer, parser, AST, interpreter, LLVM backend, REPL, LSP).
  • Current design is mostly “English-like syntax with Korean keywords”: SVO order, f(x) notation, method calls like 목록.추가(값) rather than fully Korean SOV grammar.
  • Keywords and methods use real Korean words (e.g., 함수, 만약, 추가, 삭제), not transliterations, to keep code readable to Korean speakers.
  • Error messages, REPL, and tooling are in Korean, which goes beyond simple macro-based keyword substitution.

Hangul, typing, and tokenization

  • Hangul is visually dense (syllable blocks), but experiments with GPT-4o showed Korean keywords use more tokens (2–3) than common English ones (often 1).
  • Reason given: BPE tokenizers are trained on English-heavy corpora, so English keywords are highly compressed; Hangul syllables are not.
  • Commenters note Korean’s keyboard layout (consonants on the left, vowels on the right) enables very fast, rhythmic typing; far more efficient than Japanese/Chinese input for code.
  • Some discuss Hangul’s design and ease of learning, though deeper historical/phonetic details are often forgotten even by natives.

Non-English languages, ecosystems, and tooling

  • Many ask why non-English programming languages aren’t more common. Suggested reasons:
    • Inertia and global collaboration: English keywords yield the broadest audience.
    • Ecosystem lock-in: libraries, docs, OS APIs, error messages, Stack Overflow, and research are overwhelmingly in English.
    • Input method friction for some scripts (e.g., Japanese) and ASCII expectations in tooling.
  • Several note that keywords are a tiny fraction of the difficulty of programming; the real barrier for non-English speakers is English-only documentation.
  • Others argue localized languages and tooling (including Excel-style translated functions and Scratch’s language-agnostic representation) help learners.

Korean-specific linguistic issues & proposals

  • Native speakers point out subtleties:
    • Verb stems usually require endings; naive translations of English imperative verbs can sound awkward.
    • Pluralization is weaker in Korean; explicit plurals often read unnaturally.
  • Some suggest future versions could more deeply exploit Korean grammar (true SOV structures) rather than merely translating English-like forms.
  • Hanja/Chinese-character keywords are floated as a compact notation, but younger Koreans rarely know them, and Hangul’s purpose was to avoid that burden.

Reactions, critiques, and related work

  • Many praise the project as inspiring, educational, and culturally interesting, especially for Korean learners and students.
  • Skeptical voices worry about fragmentation and reduced interoperability if such languages became widespread; others counter that experimentation and “art projects” are valuable on their own.
  • Related efforts mentioned include Korean languages like Nuri and Yaksok, Chinese and Arabic languages, cuneiform-based experiments, tokenizer adaptation for Ukrainian, and custom encodings (e.g., Serbian YUTF-8) to improve token efficiency.