4 ms·
It's clever, right up until you come up against the fact that many languages don't have uppercase/lowercase (e.g. Japanese) - and now you have to add an extra h
by kstenerud 2y ago
It's clever, right up until you come up against the fact that many languages don't have uppercase/lowercase (e.g. Japanese) - and now you have to add an extra hack to work around your original hack.
Any time you add a clever hack that re-uses something you don't control directly (Unicode, file names, existing data formats, implicit behaviors of a system - or even explicit since you don't control who will change it later, etc), you're making a mistake that will come back to bite you eventually.
In fact, I dare to say: Any time you think you're being clever, you're not.
Most of the design mistakes of go were made under the assumption that all complexity can be reduced. There are certain kinds of complexity that can only be moved around, not reduced (e.g. init, os-specific compilation, packaging and such).
- aatd86 2y agoI wonder if users of other alphabets really use their alphabet to code in roman based languages. I mean, even the keywords are not transcribed, right? I guess they could probably prepend a v or V to their variable names? And especially if the code is to be shared with an international community? Wondering.
- mardifoufs 2y agoI've never seen that happen. English is my third language and the only time I've seen people talk about programming in other languages was either when referring to very old esoteric prog languages, or in English speaking forums ironically enough. It happens and I've seen code written in french for example but it's considered an anti pattern almost everywhere. I guess sometimes it makes sense for constants or context dependent variable names but again, still very rare.
- pjmlp 2y agoI was once brought into a PowerBuilder project, during the discovery phase due to my French skills more than anything else, and naturally was cheaper than getting an external translator. Everything except API calls was in French. I also have seen enough code during my lifetime with comments, and occasionally code as well, in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German.
- mardifoufs 2y agoThat's interesting! Was it an older code base? I know France also has a few "domestic" platforms, I just didn't think about it for some reason. It's also probably a lot more common in anything that intersects with BA or that encodes "real life" rules. The other exception is comments, I also still comment my code in french whenever I need to refer to a design choice or whatever since we discuss them in french usually! I think your first point is exactly why it's not as common as it used to be (imo, I don't have any stats to back this up!). It makes hiring people, or getting support a bit harder, especially if you need consultants for example. Plus the docs are very often in English anyways...
- pjmlp 2y agoYes, going back to the PowerBuilder vs Visual Basic vs Delphi glory days.