Especially in Mandarin & Japanese speaking countries – for example: how does variable & function naming work if the language primarily consists of symbolic characters?
In: Technology
Code is mostly written in English around the world.
Comments and output may be in foreign languages, but the stuff in the code itself tends to be in English.
This is in part due to the collaborative nature of coding. Even if your code is never worked on by anyone but yourself, chances are you still reuse bits of codes from other projects and find solutions to problems on the net that you incorporate.
If you actually do open source, making everything in English becomes an obvious solution.
If you code for a corporation and your stuff is supposed to be maintained by others later doing it in a language everyone can understand makes sense.
Also most people simply have fallen into the habit after a lifetime of learning from examples in English.
Of course there is nothing keeping you from creating variables etc in your own native language and it sometimes happens, but it is not the norm.
Most coding environments at this point are fully unicode capable so you don’t need to limit yourself to ASCII. You can use Umlauts and Greek and Cyrillic and even Asian characters if you want.
In theory there is nothing keeping you from having all your variables be emojis.
I would not recommend it though.
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