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I know of a very popular London startup who's entire database is in Spanish due to the initial dev work being outsourced to a development company in Spain. All

by orf 8y ago

I know of a very popular London startup who's entire database is in Spanish due to the initial dev work being outsourced to a development company in Spain. All table, column, and procedure names are in Spanish. A refactor is too risky and they are growing too fast, so all the engineers have to pick up basic... programmer Spanish? That's a more literal example of not being able to understand the codebase I guess.

kjeetgill 8y ago
I can't wait to repeat this story at parties! I once tried to dig into the source of a game in Java witten by a French programmer while I was in Highschool. I was able to glean how to use Image APIs from it but the code as a whole left me mystified. It's been 10 years, I wonder if I could crack it now.
j1elo 8y ago
I'm spanish and loathe spanish-written code. It looks so unprofessional to the eye. Luckily in all spanish companies I've worked on they had an english-only policy for the code and comments. This was because the companies didn't discard that foregin devs could join at some point in the future and friction should not come from a lack of Spanish skills when reading /writing code. It made however for some funny comments from people who didn't really know their way to prose writing in English.
- hadrien01 8y ago
  At my company we're finally trying to write code in English (much to the despair of way more developers than I would have expected), but one serious difficulty we've encountered (appart from people that don't know how to write correct sentences...) is translating domain-specific terms. Either it seems like bad translation, or it's not understandable at all. I don't know what the solution should be in that case? Keep domain-specific terms in French?
  - arp242 8y ago
    I've also ran in to the reverse problem: mixing English and Dutch in confusing ways. For example, a common naming pattern in is `GetFooByID()`, `GetFooByName()`, etc. I think it makes sense to stick to that, but if `Foo` is a non-English word it just gets confusing/inconsistent, especially because in some cases you would translate Foo and other cases you don't. On the other hand, translating domain-specific terms can also be very confusing. For example at my previous position we built a rental contract system that was very specific to the Dutch rental system/laws. We translated everything to English, but a lot of stuff is just funky because it's a specific Dutch term without a real English translation (for example names of specific laws/procedures). My advice is to give up, destroy your code base, and become a sheep herder. You're screwed no matter what.
  - wingerlang 8y ago
    My bother worked in this situation, they kept the domain specific words in the local language because translating would be difficult.
  - j1elo 8y ago
    I'd say if it's a country-specific thing with domain terms that one would need to learn and know anyway to do the work, even if the programmer was foreigner... then keep those terms without translation. It will be less confusing.
- informatimago 8y ago
  Using national language in code bases is indeed bad, if you want tomhave them sold to foreign companies or contributed to by the international community. On the other hand, it may be good if you want to avoid this. I guess, not a lot of the sources developped in China is hacked on by non-chinese, or easily spied on by foreign powers...
jcul 8y ago
I had something similar with German. The company paid for us all to have German lessons which was nice.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
In the mid-2000s, I inherited a code base that was supposed to recommend nearby points of interest (coffee shop! pizza place!) based on your zip code. It had been written by a contract programmer in India who naturally didn't understand how US zip codes worked. That was interesting. (He also didn't understand how functions worked, but that's another matter...)
otras 8y ago
One of my first dev jobs years ago was at a non-technical company that had outsourced some previous development work, and the resulting HTML templates had all classes and styles in Spanish. The first "encabezamiento" class name (Spanish for "header") threw me for a loop, but luckily the patterns were similar enough!

by orf 8y ago

kjeetgill 8y ago

I can't wait to repeat this story at parties! I once tried to dig into the source of a game in Java witten by a French programmer while I was in Highschool. I was able to glean how to use Image APIs from it but the code as a whole left me mystified. It's been 10 years, I wonder if I could crack it now.

j1elo 8y ago

I'm spanish and loathe spanish-written code. It looks so unprofessional to the eye. Luckily in all spanish companies I've worked on they had an english-only policy for the code and comments. This was because the companies didn't discard that foregin devs could join at some point in the future and friction should not come from a lack of Spanish skills when reading /writing code. It made however for some funny comments from people who didn't really know their way to prose writing in English.

hadrien01 8y ago
At my company we're finally trying to write code in English (much to the despair of way more developers than I would have expected), but one serious difficulty we've encountered (appart from people that don't know how to write correct sentences...) is translating domain-specific terms. Either it seems like bad translation, or it's not understandable at all. I don't know what the solution should be in that case? Keep domain-specific terms in French?
- arp242 8y ago
  I've also ran in to the reverse problem: mixing English and Dutch in confusing ways. For example, a common naming pattern in is `GetFooByID()`, `GetFooByName()`, etc. I think it makes sense to stick to that, but if `Foo` is a non-English word it just gets confusing/inconsistent, especially because in some cases you would translate Foo and other cases you don't. On the other hand, translating domain-specific terms can also be very confusing. For example at my previous position we built a rental contract system that was very specific to the Dutch rental system/laws. We translated everything to English, but a lot of stuff is just funky because it's a specific Dutch term without a real English translation (for example names of specific laws/procedures). My advice is to give up, destroy your code base, and become a sheep herder. You're screwed no matter what.
- wingerlang 8y ago
  My bother worked in this situation, they kept the domain specific words in the local language because translating would be difficult.
- j1elo 8y ago
  I'd say if it's a country-specific thing with domain terms that one would need to learn and know anyway to do the work, even if the programmer was foreigner... then keep those terms without translation. It will be less confusing.
informatimago 8y ago
Using national language in code bases is indeed bad, if you want tomhave them sold to foreign companies or contributed to by the international community. On the other hand, it may be good if you want to avoid this. I guess, not a lot of the sources developped in China is hacked on by non-chinese, or easily spied on by foreign powers...

jcul 8y ago

I had something similar with German. The company paid for us all to have German lessons which was nice.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

In the mid-2000s, I inherited a code base that was supposed to recommend nearby points of interest (coffee shop! pizza place!) based on your zip code. It had been written by a contract programmer in India who naturally didn't understand how US zip codes worked. That was interesting. (He also didn't understand how functions worked, but that's another matter...)

otras 8y ago

One of my first dev jobs years ago was at a non-technical company that had outsourced some previous development work, and the resulting HTML templates had all classes and styles in Spanish. The first "encabezamiento" class name (Spanish for "header") threw me for a loop, but luckily the patterns were similar enough!