First Klingon Programming Language Created

David Winter pointed me to the homepage of Var'aq, a new fully-functional programming language presented completely in Klingon! There have been many fanfic stories exploring all the various cultures in science fiction, but as far as I am aware this is actually the first programming language created for such a culture.

According to creator Brian Connors, the language is intended as "a speculative glance at what a programming language on a Klingon computer system would look like". The name Var'aq doesn't actually mean anything in Klingon, but sounds like it might be named after a famous Klingon scientist, similar to the human programming language Pascal.

At the moment, the language is still very much under development. The project's web page states that about half of the spec has been implemented at the moment, already allowing sample code to be created. Some sample code snippets included with the language include code to print out the entire text of a song called '99 Bottles of Bloodwine', and of course code for the classic simple first program, displaying the text "hello, world" (or literally "What do you want, universe?" in Klingon).

Currently, the official var'aq homepage includes the qeylIS release (named after the first Klinon emperor) of the current version of var'aq, as well as some documentation that should help you get started using the language. It also includes a Frequently Asked Questions document, and a form to subscribe to the development mailing list.

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