@spdegabrielle thanks for the comment and knowing that you notice and love the mapping files. For the past year, I've put lots of my energy into the mapping, which is the core spirit of ming-lang, and the reason I call it 'ming-lang' is because the 'ming' in Chinese means naming something, giving somebody or something a name.
Since about three weeks have already past, I've only got one comment, so I'd like to elaborate on it a bit more to see if this can provoke more discussion.
Actually, I'm imagining a programming language world formed with Chinese characters as the interface, and which interface can be easily understood by all the people around the world irrespective he knows Chinese characters or not. Because eventually, those characters would be far more different than cn chars, they are only created by using the way how cn chars are created.
let me take an example below:
the preceding picture was cited from 5.2 双和 , notice the = sign, what following it is the mapping names from racket, and also notice the names of ming, all of them share the component 彐, which means search , and each 彐 constitutes with different components to form a much more specific meaning:
刂stands for knife, which meansdelete'阝meansreturn same type and parts of the original data
And those 刂 阝 are the base rules of how to constitute chars, e.g.
http://www.yanying.wang/ming/naming-rules.html
. People who only have the experience of Western languages may have the impression that Chinese characters are complicated, but I'll say it is proportionate to the amount of information it implied. And from that point of view, those chars are really simple.
By having those features, the code would be appeared in a much more understandable way, because you can guess out the parameter and result to some degree:
check out the preceding pictures, when you see chars have the appearance of 米, you can guess out it is related to the numbers.
http://www.yanying.wang/ming/numbers.html
I'm not a language specialist, but what I can see the drawbacks of a language like English is that when you want to form out a complex similar concept (e.g. ice cream) from the base concept(ice, cream), you can not always use the base concept word, because firstly the length would be long enough for you to give it a different shape name.