MURAI stands for MURAI Urai Rumus Akal Ilham. Urai means to disentangle. Rumus means to formulate. Akal means reason as in human is bestowed with reason. And ilham means inspiration. Those are Malay words. MURAI, in a phrase, means to disentangle and to formulate with reason and inspiration. Murai is also a species of songbirds.
MURAI is a mother-tongue programming language preset to Malay's keywords and messages. The programming language is designed for those who think in non-English such as Malay. Malay is an official language in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei. Malay is spoken by 290 million people. MURAI is meant to be as powerful as other programming languages. The reasoning behind developing another programming language, MURAI, is that no single programming language can cope with software entropy. All human languages will never converge into English. Future software designs will not be necessarily in English. New programming languages will emerge to fit into new system thinking. Even though it is considered late in the race, MURAI is still within the era of programming language evolution.
This repository is purposely written in English so that English-thinking programmers can participate in developing MURAI because we have yet to evolve non-English or Malay-thinking programmers. In fact, MURAI development is strictly encoded, commented and documented in English.
MURAI is a dialect of Lisp with C structure. It looks like a C language embedded in Lisp parentheses, and behaves mostly like Lisp. There are only two major high-level programming language families - Lisp and C. Lisp has the simplest form and notation. And C introduced structured programming. MURAI takes the advantages of both worlds.
Nowadays, system performance is generally scalable. The main challenge of a new programming language is adaptability. MURAI was designed for minimal system requirement. Most cheap or free shared web hosting services will be able to run MURAI. No dedicated server or virtual machine is required. Yes, MURAI can be used to develop web applications.
Most shared web hosting services allow Apache, PHP and MySQL. They are constraints but sufficient to run web applications. Hence, MURAI was developed using PHP for the sake of adaptability. MURAI is an interpreted programming language that can run all PHP functions. MURAI programmer does not have to learn PHP.
Keep novelty and supremacy arguments aside. In the realm of Malay (and perhaps in other non-English human languages) there is no main-stream Malay programming language. In fact, there is not even a remotely-known Malay programming language (anyone may argue on this one). MURAI is a long-term experiment to create a Malay programming language, and other international programming languages. All approaches must be simply practical and predictable from square one.