How do people from non-English speaking countries write code?

Question

Especially in Mandarin & Japanese speaking countries – for example: how does variable & function naming work if the language primarily consists of symbolic characters?

In: Technology

Answer 1

With Engrish. /s

Seriously speaking, sometimes you might see pinyin / romaji in function naming but most of the time variable and function are kept in simple and perhaps slightly odd English. Comments are mostly in Japanese or Chinese unless the team have enough SEA/Indian/Western population. Programmers normally have a basic understanding of English and you just need the keywords anyway.

Source: worked with mainland Chinese codebase before, currently working in a Japanese company. Documentation-wise we use both English and Japanese and we depends on machine translation tools for people who cannot read both.