4 ms·

Sure, everybody has 'rights' but if I were to come across a workplace in my country where programmers were using much of our native language in the code I would

by cjfd 7y ago

Sure, everybody has 'rights' but if I were to come across a workplace in my country where programmers were using much of our native language in the code I would consider it a red flag and I would expect to find amateurish practices in other places as well. The thing is that English is the lingua franca of programming and that ASCII is the lingua franca of source files. The highest quality manual that you are going to find is in English and stack overflow will answer your questions in English. Also, various tools are going to respond to non-ASCII characters in various ways which may not always be the most pleasant. You are bound to get yourself some problems that you would not have gotten otherwise.

Sharlin 7y ago
Sure, you could consider it unprofessional, but I'd wager that the large majority of all professional programming is done in languages other than English. The tooling issue is an "is vs. ought" problem. In 2019 full UTF-8 compatibility is not a feature anymore; on the contrary, a lack of support is a bug.
- lenkite 7y ago
  Do you have any citation on that ? From what I know the vast majority of all professional programming is done in English. Even companies like SAP that had a lot of programming in German have shifted to programming in English.
pasabagi 7y ago
I'm an english native speaker, so on the one hand, I'm glad english is so common in programing. On the other, I can't help but wonder, aren't other languages actually better for the job at hand? Chinese, Japanese kanji, or to a lesser extent, Hangul, all have this kind of awesome mix of concision and expressiveness. I'm not really a language guy, but I've been tempted to learn chinese just for this reason. It also has a really cool feature of being much easier to read than to write - which makes a certain level of 'reader-first' coding practice built into the language itself. You could cut down on the number of sigils, line noise, even play around with different ways to organize source code (there are, for instance, palindrome poems written in chinese that use two dimensions, which would be basically impossible in english).
aarroyoc 7y ago
For me it seems bad to design some systems in English like public administrations software or following a law very closely (there are even no translated concepts in things like taxation and legal system) and data exchange formats should be in the language it matters (for example, all electronic bills in Spain are XML with entities in Spanish), so if you want a 1:1 mapping you need to use native language.

by cjfd 7y ago

Sharlin 7y ago

Sure, you could consider it unprofessional, but I'd wager that the large majority of all professional programming is done in languages other than English. The tooling issue is an "is vs. ought" problem. In 2019 full UTF-8 compatibility is not a feature anymore; on the contrary, a lack of support is a bug.

lenkite 7y ago
Do you have any citation on that ? From what I know the vast majority of all professional programming is done in English. Even companies like SAP that had a lot of programming in German have shifted to programming in English.

pasabagi 7y ago

I'm an english native speaker, so on the one hand, I'm glad english is so common in programing. On the other, I can't help but wonder, aren't other languages actually better for the job at hand? Chinese, Japanese kanji, or to a lesser extent, Hangul, all have this kind of awesome mix of concision and expressiveness. I'm not really a language guy, but I've been tempted to learn chinese just for this reason. It also has a really cool feature of being much easier to read than to write - which makes a certain level of 'reader-first' coding practice built into the language itself. You could cut down on the number of sigils, line noise, even play around with different ways to organize source code (there are, for instance, palindrome poems written in chinese that use two dimensions, which would be basically impossible in english).

aarroyoc 7y ago

For me it seems bad to design some systems in English like public administrations software or following a law very closely (there are even no translated concepts in things like taxation and legal system) and data exchange formats should be in the language it matters (for example, all electronic bills in Spain are XML with entities in Spanish), so if you want a 1:1 mapping you need to use native language.