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I'm not disagreeing with you because sometimes it's just project requirements - but as a developer in a non-English-speaking country - the idea of writing code

I'm not disagreeing with you because sometimes it's just project requirements - but as a developer in a non-English-speaking country - the idea of writing code in a non-English language is ridiculous to me. Programming languages and standard libraries are written in English, programming terminology is invented in English, the international community adopted english as a defacto standard, almost all third party APIs expose English interfaces. Every time I've seen a project written in my native language it's been ridiculously hard to follow because the terminology is translated in various ways (there's no official or even widely used terms because hardly anyone uses native language in SW development and CS outside of academia) and it's a mish mash between languages since everything not written in the project (along with language keywords) is written in English. I don't usually take a hardline stances on things but this is one thing where it would be 100% a dealbreaker for working on a project.

runarberg 7y ago
Sure one should stick with English when working on an industrial standard codebase that many people on the western hemisphere will work on. Unless off course these folks are limited to the southern continents where Spanish or French might be more appropriate. And outside the western hemisphere where off course if the code base is unlikely cross, say, outside the Chinese borders, where Mandarin would be more appropriate. Then there are non-industrial standard codebases, say a hobby project. I’m sure that somewhere in Guinea-Bissau there is a 17 year old learning Python at this moment, really happy that they can write Portuguese special characters as variable names in python 3 (if only the documentation had been translated to Portuguese). Just because English is the appropriate language in by far the majority of cases, does’t mean we should deny the possibility of not using it.

runarberg 7y ago

Sure one should stick with English when working on an industrial standard codebase that many people on the western hemisphere will work on. Unless off course these folks are limited to the southern continents where Spanish or French might be more appropriate. And outside the western hemisphere where off course if the code base is unlikely cross, say, outside the Chinese borders, where Mandarin would be more appropriate. Then there are non-industrial standard codebases, say a hobby project. I’m sure that somewhere in Guinea-Bissau there is a 17 year old learning Python at this moment, really happy that they can write Portuguese special characters as variable names in python 3 (if only the documentation had been translated to Portuguese). Just because English is the appropriate language in by far the majority of cases, does’t mean we should deny the possibility of not using it.