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> In our experience non-ASCII characters are pretty rare in code. Many development teams chose to use English as the primary development language Is this true

• utrack 5y ago
  Yep, pretty much (Russian here)
• afavour 5y ago
  It is. The way it was explained to me, all the APIs you use are in English so naming variables in your local language is futile at best and would just require constant context switching. I remember many moons ago MooTools announced international API translations as an April Fools joke. It did make me wonder if there’s an interesting programming experiment to be done there… but I’m a native English speaker so I’m not best positioned to know!
  • mijamo 5y ago
    Not my experience. Plenty of codebases have variables in local language in France Germany and Sweden (where I have experience). I actually have encountered a lot of problem with English codebases in those countries as they often try to translate regional concepts that are not directly translatable. This is particularly annoying when it comes to administrative stuff where one English word can refer to different local concepts (ex: geographical divisions of the territory) and translations always clumsy. I have even seen nasty bugs come from there, where a "county" had a different meaning in different places of the code as different teams had different idea of what a county was but didn't discuss it.