The language was formally launched on Saturday evening at an event hosted by the IT firm Joomshaper in Dhanmondi, Dhaka. Potaka, which is in Beta version 1.0, is the brainchild of Ikrum Hossain, a software engineer currently with Telenor. Speaking at the launching event, Ikrum Hossain described how the inspiration for Potaka came to him from the difficulties he faced in learning programming from outside Dhaka. Ikrum and the other programmers contributing to Potaka pointed out that not understanding the English language was a big part of why many students were afraid of programming. The language can be seen at www.potaka.io . The website contains an editor with syntax highlighting, built-in Avro phonetic typing and autocomplete functions. It also hosts some learning games that the developers hope will make it enjoyable for young learners to pick up the language. A parser and some interesting examples can also be found at: github.com/ikrum/potaka . “After a stable release, we will begin accepting code from everyone. Meanwhile we encourage you to try out the code and give us feedback,” Ikrum said.