We were backbenchers in our college: Creators of Bhailang
Last week, a toy programming language created by two software developers caught the eye of the developer community online and went viral immediately. Known as ‘Bhailang,’ Aniket Singh and Rishabh Tripathi’s programming language has the word ‘bhai’ in every instruction of code. This simple and hilarious premise left social media users and other software developers in splits. Bhailang was written in TypeScript and combines the word ‘bhai’ or brother with the remaining part of an instruction. The code begins with a ‘hi bhai’ and ends with ‘bye bhai.’ If a code runs successfully, the programme responds with ‘Shandar Bhai’ in green as the output. A variable is defined in Bhailang with the syntax ‘bhai ye hai,’ while to implement a loop, the syntax ‘jab tak hai bhai’ is used. To describe a positive output, the language uses colloquial words like ‘sahi,’ and to describe a negative output, it includes words like ‘galat.’ In a chat with Analytics India Magazine, the two friends spoke about how it was still early days when they had thought of Bhailang. “The idea behind Bhailang goes back to our internship days in 2019 when we were in our third year of college. We were working in a company for a winter internship. Rishabh and I used to joke about a programming language which behaved like Bhailang, which led to the creation of this language,” Singh explains. Singh and Tripathi have been attached at the hip since college. Both are graduates in B. Tech, Computer Science, from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, or MANIT, in Bhopal. “We were backbenchers in our college,” Singh says. The duo ended up doing their first internship at the same company. Singh says that the two have always made a great team, “We have always tried to create something that is both fun & useful. Even back in 2020, we had created proximo.pw, which is a web app for video conferencing.” Written in Golang, Proximo used WebRTC with signalling and authentication servers. Singh states that the two are always on the lookout for anything exciting that catches their eye for their future ventures. Bhailang, he says, was a long time coming. “Back in the days when this idea popped in our minds, we didn’t take it seriously. At that time, we thought that creating a new language is a tedious & complex process,” he notes. It was during the pandemic that it all came to fruition. He says, “We were just reminiscing about our good old college days in December last year when the idea for this language resurfaced in our mind, and this time around, it didn’t look so daunting to us, so we went for it.” https://twitter.com/CodingFizz/status/1505170220092395521?s=20&t=BUftMogRDE1gVXq-pcpylw The two ended up learning quite a lot from the project, to their surprise. “From a tech perspective, we learned about creating a recursive descent parser, an interpreter, and how a programming language actually works,” Singh stated. While initially, they didn’t have any plans to expand this language any further, they decided to turn it into something meaningful after the immense response. The two ended up opening a GitHub repository inviting people to make their own contributions to it. The toy programming language’s website also has a playground feature where users can try their hands at writing commands using phrases that are generally used among friends as syntax. But that’s not all. Bhailang has spurred other developers to come up with their own versions of the language. Singh mentions that they themselves had come across the Kannada and Tamil versions. Taken aback by how quickly Bhailang caught on, the two say they underestimated just how much people love relatable and quirky things. They say, “Initially, Bhailang was only intended for our friend circle, but their response encouraged us to share it on some other platforms also, like Reddit, Twitter & LinkedIn. We felt overwhelmed by the response that we got.” Going by the interest that the language has generated, Bhailang could easily become a fun way to introduce coding to beginners. “We received some very interesting use cases of this language like one person tweeted that he taught his 13-year-old sibling coding using Bhailang,” they add. Student-run hackathons like ‘Hack in the North’ opened Bhailang-themed competitions and held sessions with Singh and Tripathi to encourage young student coders.
The toy programming language’s website also has a playground feature where users can try their hand at writing commands using phrases that are generally used among friends as syntax.
Discover 'Bhailang': A funny toy programming language created by two software developers. 'Hi bhai' and 'Jab tak hai bhai' are the two syntaxes used in Bhailang code to define variables and implement loops. #bhailang #AniketSingh #RishabhTripathi
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Poulomi is a Technology Journalist with Analytics India Magazine. Her fascination with tech and eagerness to dive into new areas led her to the dynamic world of AI and data analytics.