The Howdy Glossary

Qalb is an Arabic programming language developed by Dr. Ossama Othman at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The language enables the use of Arabic — adding Arabic keywords and symbols — to write programs that can be executed on a computer. This facilitates computing education for students whose primary language is Arabic while also providing a tool for Arab-speaking professionals who prefer working in their native languages or want to introduce coding concepts in their communities using familiar terminology and logic structures. Qalb has been designed with simplicity, making it suitable for teaching introductory programming courses at schools and universities, where it can help overcome barriers caused by linguistic differences when learning technical topics in non-native languages.