|
Even though India is cruising on the IT highway, there is still a large
section of the Indian population on the other side of the technological divide,
owing to socio-economic barriers. With a large chunk of the Indian public not
well versed in Englishthe language of ITall efforts to bridge this digital
divide have failed to yield the desired results.
The Hindawi Programming System is possibly the first development platform
that allows non-English medium literates to become software producers without
the need to master English. What perhaps makes Hindawi unique is that while
localized application interfaces allow people to become software consumers, the
ability to design programs in ones mother tongue makes them software producers.
An Arabic origin word, Hindawi is used to describe all regions, people, and
languages across the Indus River. The term finds references in the works of Amir
Khusro. The word was chosen as it was considered to be the most appropriate for
denoting all the languages of India, says Abhishek Choudhary, an IT
professional who, along with Sweta Choudhary, developed Hindawi.
Talking about his innovative software, Choudhary says, Hindawi is
essentially a free open-source software that allows programming for all types of
technology in a persons mother-tongue ranging from beginners languages to
super-computing, control-systems, and robotics.
Hindawi has support for auto-translation of code and documents to allow
global marketability of the deliverables produced using Hindawi tool-chain.
Since the technology is mapped to the International Phonetic Alphabet, I expect
the results to be replicated globally and am actively pursuing this target, he
adds.
I remember trying to get some small programs to work out in Hindi, as long
back as 1995, as a member of the computer club at St Josephs College (school
department), Darjeeling. We would mainly work in DOS then, and the method of
representing Devanagri script in the text-mode without using extra hardware was
developed by me in 1996. This is what we now call APCISR. Around those times, I
had started visualizing a transliteration-based mechanism for achieving
language-independent interfaces, he says.
During his engineering degree project, he built a platform for experiments in
autonomous and cognitive robotics and successfully prototyped it for one-fifth
of the cost of the existing platforms. He soon realized the value this software
could hold for Indian students and started creating a Hindi interface for the
robot. This effort led to the creation of the open source projectsFreeBot Angel
and Romenagri Transliterationby early 2004
Romenagri Transliteration formed the basis of achieving human language
independence in programming languages, and led to the development of the first
version of Hindi systems programming languages. These were released on August
15, 2004 under the name Hindawi and were based on FreeDOS and DJGPP. Hindawi was
then ported to Linux in 2006.
Initially, Choudhary had to face hostile reactions when it came to the
project. People initially, during the release of the first version in 2004-05,
would deny that such a thing was actually required and would refuse to believe
it, he recalls.
The other major problem was the non-availability of professions of Compiler
Design Systems programming since these were niche areas. Moreover, the
appreciation of the problem was not there. However, the non-cooperation from the
peoples end more than made up for the assistance he received from the companies
he worked for during the development of the Hindawi project.
The Architecture
Most compiler systems accept only 7-bit ASCII. Hindawi allows Hindi or Indic
programming language source code to be processed by such compilers. There are
very few compilers even today that support direct compilation of extended
character sets or wide characters, as required by Unicode. Hindawi, therefore,
allows non-English programming languages to be constructed for all the existing
computing platforms including resource constrained embedded systems.
Hindawi allows the translation of source code and documentation into English
and hence allows global marketability of deliverables (executable programs)
produced using Hindawi tool-chain. It includes the APCISR, which is a mechanism
for displaying variable width Indic scripts of the Brahmi family on fixed width
text mode consoles. If one looks at todays Indic platforms, they can display
Indic once the graphics mode has been started, say X-windows.
True localization, however, requires Indic display at all levels of
functionality such as at the BIOS levels; especially for stuff such as device
drivers and systems programs, it is irrelevant whether the code was written in
Indic or traditional programming languages. In such cases, it becomes imperative
to have human language independence.
Overall, Hindawi is the first such successful effort and has provided a
proof of the concept of feasibility and validity of such systems. The
programming languages landscape of the future will be free of human
language-based biases. Hindawi has also proven the possible coexistence of
traditional and non-orthodox programming platforms on the same system.
 |
|
The word, Hindawi, was
chosen as it was considered to be the most appropriate for denoting all
the languages of India
Abhishek Choudhary, an IT
professional who, along with Sweta Choudhary, developed Hindawi |
A method has also been developed for smart rendering of North Indian
scripts in text-mode without the need for any extra hardware components. The
complete system, including the design of the Indian vernacular understanding
robot, has been made open-source with the objective of meeting the financial
objectives through support services. This shall allow low procurement costs for
Indian vernacular development systems, and make the maintenance of the
programming system a community effort. This would also allow the system to be
used for pedagogical purposes.
Social Implications
Hindawi offers means of sociological movements in terms of unleashing untapped
intellectual potentials from the backward areas of developing nations. A rough
estimate of 600,000 villages in India implies 600,000 cottage industry-level
software production houses, which could be translated into the creation of 6 mn
ICT jobs.
On the financial front, Hindawi will be sustained through support services
and licensing of non-GPL parts for commercial development. The demonstrations
can be downloaded from the authors website while CDs of the complete system is
made available on request at a marginal cost inclusive of the cost of material
and posting only.
Even as the complete system, along with the design of the Hindawi-based
intelligent robot, has been made open-source in order to tap into the vast
vernacular literate manpower potential in ICT. The copyright for Hindawi has
been retained by the authors organization, in conformance with GNU General
Public License V2, in parts that utilize GPL software.
Hindawi is essentially an effort toward cultural preservation. With the
porting of Hindawi to the about-to-be-extinct languages such as Sharada, a sense
of self-revival may be instilled in the original speakers of these languages.
The Hindawi System is a part of Choudharys 20:20 vision, of making IT a
cottage industry. And Hindawi today is a vibrant FLOSS community with highly
active participation in India.
Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in
Page(s) 1
| 
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Twitter
