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I think it's beyond nationalism. Programming is done in english because its the common tongue, and the world in which programmers grow is distributed and quasi-
by AYBABTME 12y ago
I think it's beyond nationalism. Programming is done in english because its the common tongue, and the world in which programmers grow is distributed and quasi-borderless, so there's interest in using a tongue common to all. There's no point in not writing code in english, it's a self defeating endeavor.
I'm from a non English speaking nation and I originally used an non-standard US layout, although I changed to US layout when I realized doing otherwise was an exercise in futility.
- pluma 12y agoSure, but China is a walled garden. English may be the lingua franca of programming, but China is large enough (and isolated enough) that Chinese programmers can likely get by without using English at all.
- kuschku 12y agoEven in Germany a lot of people and even companies write code in pure German, using purely German comments and variables. (Luckily German has only 7 additional codepoints compared to ASCII).
- pluma 12y agoYes, although I think universities are partly to blame. Somehow lots of professors seem to think writing code in German makes it more science-y (probably because algorithms are generally expressed in German pseudo-code too).