10 ms·
Interesting that most of the code comments are in English.
by Zetobal 4y ago
Interesting that most of the code comments are in English.
- altmind 4y agoi've seen more comments in russian than in english. what's your numbers?
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoLingua franca with all their contractors most likely.
- pshirshov 4y agoNot at all. People preferred to use english to feel some connection to the world. That was mostly psychological. A Silicon Valley cargo cult if you wish. Also the company always avoided any use of external contractors.
- viraptor 4y agoI think you're reading to much into this. It's easier to not switch languages in one task. If you're using an English-based programming language and English libraries/frameworks, you're not going to name your own variables in a different language. Comments most often follow that too. Any time I see someone attempt that, it's extremely distracting.
- pshirshov 4y agoNot really. I've attended a meeting on the subject where people decided to use English "not to be loosers" and I've heard similar stories from other teams and departments.
- viraptor 4y agoAnd what do they understand by "not be losers" in that case? What are the main ideas behind it?
- pshirshov 4y agoSomething like "if someone can't read English he is a bad engineer, if you write comments for bad engineers, you either are a bad engineer or a loser". I've heard things like "we should grow up and use English". They wanted to be an "elite" in contrast with russian-speaking "peasants". The rational decision to use English was often motivated irrationally and was not about switching keyboard layouts. There were numerous discussions on the subject. That is hard to analyze, I'm not a psychologist.
- timka 4y agoThe OSS community that I grew up in speaks English and the software world is largely based on English. I really enjoy reading nicely written source, well commented in good English, with concise naming (again in English). And we're forced into a situation where programming languages are based on English. And I also enjoy even more writing not purely technical higher level documentation in Russian, expressing general ideas and approaches. Russian developers with little or no experience in international environment often suck even at naming things in proper English, especially methods/functions. How many times have I seen grammar errors in APIs? But some of those guys are really great engineers who just aren't that much into spoken languages. Some of them aren't great writers even in Russian. Yes, sometimes the source they write will certainly insult someone else's sense of beauty. But is there anything we can do about it? We can do something but still some people just aren't good at languages. I think we should just accept that it and stop worrying. And those whose sense of beauty is being insulted should think why they choose to use their knowledge and abilities as a weapon against their teammates or as a decoration to create a false sense of superiority. Pretty sure many of them do this out of their inner insecurity or because of attachment (unhealthy perfectionism, insulted sense of beauty). Also I think that projectional (structural) editors may change this situation or at least give us some insights on how natural languages affect the way we structure our software.
- jeltz 4y agoInteresting. I have never seen that attitude here in Sweden. If only Swedes are present we speak Swedish despite all our documentation, code and comments always being written in English. Could be due to all Swedes in tech (while most Swedes have good English it is not universal outside tech) being able to speak good English so there is no reason to show off.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoProgramming languages aren't really based on English. I'd say they are farther from English than English is from Proto-Indo-European.
- viraptor 4y agoThey use English keywords, English documentation, English reference to the standard library, until recently were mostly restricted to English alphabet, and their development is mostly discussed in English.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoRight, English uses some Proto-Indo-European words too. And Go designer compained that byte[] isn't English enough, so they did []byte, which is apparently perfectly English.
- int_19h 4y agoPeople prefer to use English in software engineering contexts because most terminology is English anyway, so even if you're talking in Russian, you're still коммитишь чейнджсеты с багфиксами для релиза and so on. While most technical terms have nominal translations, they're usually so unwieldy that even people who are aware of them don't use them. But if they try to, others will have a hard time understanding them. And if it's going to be half-English either way, might as well just do it all in English. If nothing else, it saves time switching keyboard layouts.
- timka 4y agoIn mid-00's I used to be frequent at a pub that was popular among expats and oil and IT industry professionals. I met a guy from the US there who was a professional translator and interpreter. He once told me that when he has to translate a business letter he finds Russian really cumbersome but when it comes to poetry he finds Russian so beautiful that English will never sound close to that. Also he gave me his copy of Stephenson's Snow Crash. When I complained that it was so hard to read he answered that for him reading Lermontov is also a struggle. What a guy!
- int_19h 4y agoHighly inflective languages are generally better for poetry because you can make so many more things rhyme with some creative effort. Having a lot of similar sounds (like all the hard/soft consonant pairs) also helps.
- xwolfi 4y agoAnd poetry is so much more than the rhymes: it could be that this person didn't really know English poetry as well as Russian poetry, or that he was more easily impressed by exotism. I read French natively and have been living in English for 10 years and can now read Snow Crash-like stuff, and English always amazes me more than French, just because it can be so much richer than I'll ever produce myself, stuck to my French roots. So if I read at random this in English: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43844/she-walks-in-beauty https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43844/she-walks-in-be... and this in French: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Contemplations/R%C3%A9ponse_%C3%A0_un_acte_d%E2%80%99accusation https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Contemplations/R%C3%A9pon... , I can feel a mysterious beauty in English maybe I can't feel in a French poem, while the French one explodes in meaning, makes me think more than contemplate. Rhymes are like a little funny exercise in poetry to add some music, but really far from the goal, or so I hope. I feel it's one of the many inputs: you have the rhymes, the rhythmic internal divisions of the stanza, the symmetry between them across the text, and you can add lots of little funny meta-meaning by reversing meaning in two halves of two successive stanzas, stuff like that. A poem is just a text that does more than transfer information at the first level, but does it on many more. English, Russian or French, they can all do it.
- gspetr 4y agoAt first I wanted to give a serious reply, but then I saw your (very aptly chosen, given the context) username and found myself wondering if HN rules allow parody accounts... However, I'll give one for those who've missed the irony: It's considered gauche to have ubiquitous non-english comments. Pretty much the only kosher use case is when you have to warn people not to modify otherwise bizarre looking code because of either regulatory, legal, or domain-specific reasons, and listing them in their native language makes more sense, since developers are not legal experts and translating them into English is not in the job description if the app is solely for domestic market.
- aflag 4y agoIn many places I worked at in Brazil people will just write everything, even variable names, in Portuguese. That came down to the developers not speaking English at all. Who considers it gauche to have software written in non-English? The Russians you mean? I certainly find it perfectly acceptable and even desirable depending on the contributor's English fluency.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoPortuguese is still latin, isn't it. I suppose much of it is similar to English. Imagine if everything was, say, ελληνικά.
- aflag 4y agoYeah. I can see how that could be more difficult. Usually programmers will stick to ASCII in Portuguese, even though technically there are some non ASCII characters in the language. I can only imagine it's much more troublesome in Cyrillic. Anyway, my point was just that not writing comments in English is common practice in some corners of the world
- gspetr 4y ago>Who considers it gauche to have software written in non-English? 2x BigCo's I've worked at, with 1-5K IT staff. Yandex is xbig though, with 5K+. >That came down to the developers not speaking English at all. That sounds implausible and not very sane, unless of course you're working for something very static like the government, and the tech stack you're using is set in stone. Imagine that you're using a popular library and decide to update your dependencies, who's going to read the change logs & the documentation? Sr. Architect? If you have a security issue and the only writeups are in English, who's going to be trusted to implement a fix correctly if the people can't understand what the problem is in the first place?
- winddude 4y agoSo you can confirm they are legit? Anything look exciting?
- SXX 4y agoWhile I personally haven't worked at Yandex I can certainly say they are legit. I have a lot of friends who worked there and a lot of intranet URLs in documentation are legit.
- splix 4y agoIt's inconvenient to switch the keyboard layout each time you write a comment.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoNew AZERTY also has Greek in addition to Latin, but sadly not Cyrillic (might be a nice project ?) https://norme-azerty.fr/en/ https://norme-azerty.fr/en/
- aquarin 4y agoThere are many "Cyrillic" variants.
- mepian 4y agoI'm not sure if any large company in Russia doesn't write code comments in English.
- timka 4y agoWhen I was learning C++ in late 90s in the university the DOS environment I was using didn't have the i18n configured properly. My teacher noticed that I was trying to use Russian transliteration for comments and she suggested to 'just use English'. That solution didn't seem obvious to me at all. Also some other day she suggested someone else to install Linux at that student's home PC. I followed that advice too and learned a good bunch much of my English by reading man pages.
- luciusdomitius 4y agoIt is not really - if standard libs, APIs and frameworks are in English, it is either this or some weird 50%/50% mix, which is often ambiguous. It is a rather standard practice in all non-english speaking countries.
- xwolfi 4y agoIn France we're more 100% or 0%. You have people who really really want to use English and end up mistranslating most of the business logic in confusing spaghetti of almost-English and false friends, and you have people who tell you that to avoid being outsourced to India, we should comment everything in French. I worked on a spaghetti of bad English long enough that when I started having some power, I made us switch to use French everywhere, even variable names: this sounds awful at first, but then, a miracle door opens and you can sit down with your business expert and read through the logic with him and understand what was made and how it fit what he expected (since, ofc, he speaks no English whatsoever), even hours after having coded it and you already started to forget ! If I had to work again in a French company, I'd only use English if we were all perfectly fluent, otherwise it's just a mess, you have people, I don't know how they even learned programming, who know little to no English at all whatsoever writing variable names and comments in something so confusing and that no French reverse-translation can ever salvage.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoWorked 20+ years in German companies, all code and all comments were English, long before remote work (as it is today, all of my coachees have now mixed teams).
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoAnother reason is encoding confusion. If the text is not ascii, then you somehow should guess its encoding. For compatibility reason a lot of tools and editors may default to an old codepage instead of utf-8 (they may respect utf-8 if you have a bom), add to this legacy code already written in who knows what encoding. Is it a windows codepage? DOS codepage? Linux? ISO-8859? If you guess encoding wrong, you can corrupt text.
- moonchrome 4y agoProgramming languages are based on English, idioms are given English names - mixing in other languages is the worst of both worlds.