What Is Lingdong? The Classical Chinese Programming Language That Compiles to JavaScript and Python

Recently, a programming project written in Classical Chinese (文言文) has attracted widespread attention on Chinese social media. Even Liu Qun, a senior researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, praised the project, calling the new developers "formidable".

The project, named Lingdong , was developed by a senior Carnegie Mellon University student. It can compile to JavaScript or Python and provides an online editor. On GitHub it has earned over 7 K stars and 324 forks, topping the daily GitHub Trending list with more than 4 000 stars in a single day.

Below are some usage examples. The classic "Hello World" program in Wenyan looks like this:

吾有一數。曰三。名之曰「甲」。
為是「甲」遍。
    吾有一言。曰「「問天地好在。」」。書之。
云云。

When compiled to JavaScript, it becomes:

var n = 3;
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
    console.log("問天地好在。");
}

The output is:

問天地好在。
問天地好在。
問天地好在。

A more complex example implements the Sieve of Eratosthenes to find all primes below 100. The Wenyan source (truncated) is:

var 埃氏篩 = () => 0;
埃氏篩 = function(甲) {
    var 掩 = [];
    for (var _rand1 = 0; _rand1 < 甲; _rand1++) {
        掩.push(true);
    };
    // ... (algorithm continues) ...
    return 諸素
};
var _ans7 = 埃氏篩(100);
console.log(_ans7);

The compiled JavaScript prints the list of primes up to 97.

Several syntax tables are provided in the original article (shown in the images below), illustrating variable definitions, operators, arithmetic, and function definitions in Wenyan.

Installation is straightforward: clone the repository, give the built wenyan.js executable permission, and run it. Example commands:

chmod +x wenyan.js
./build/wenyan.js examples/helloworld.wy -o helloworld.js

The project also offers an online IDE at http://wenyan-lang.lingdong.works/ide.html , where users can experiment without installing anything.

The author, a senior at Carnegie Mellon University graduating in 2020 with a Computer Science degree, has several other open‑source projects related to Chinese culture, such as generative Chinese landscape painting, age‑progression videos, and calligraphy conversion tools. More information can be found on his personal site https://lingdong.works/ .