Especially in Mandarin & Japanese speaking countries – for example: how does variable & function naming work if the language primarily consists of symbolic characters?
In: Technology
This reminds me of the horror of helping someone with some Excel crap where all formula functions were translated to local language.
Pretty much everyone I know writes code using English names for variables classes etc. Sometimes variables have native names because there’s no universally recognised translation and trying to use one would do more harm than good…
Mostly they write the same way people in English-speaking countries do. You don’t have to know very much actual English to be able to code (programming languages are by nature a lot smaller and *much* simpler than any natural language, especially English) so the barrier to entry has generally been thought to be relatively low. Programming languages *have* been made that use keywords and structures from other languages, but by and large they haven’t really caught on, partly because they haven’t managed to get the support of the English-speaking community of programmers.
In more recent times, prigramming languages have started supporting Unicode in their code files. Thus, even in languages where the code uses English words, comments and annotations can be written in any language. This isn’t perfect, but it helps a lot.
I work at a web dev company in japan and all tge coders learned the english terms for coding. Sometimes i explain the reason/meaning why its called something and theyre always surprised the word actually means what it does.
We always half-joke that its easier for me (native) to learn coding than it is for a Japanese person who doesn’t speak english (and “its not fair!”) lol
Worked for a JP company with a global exposure. They used english terms for things they need to name, but with japanese comments here and there. of course there are typos every once in a while. Not sure if that’s also the case for purely local IT companies
I am a native Hebrew speaker, I learned English in the public education system and it was enough for coding.
Even people in China that don’t speak English, are still familiar with the alphabet and are comfortable using that system of symbols. Perhaps it would be appropriate to compare to the way you we know about Roman numerals even though we don’t speak Latin.
I don’t need to speak Korean to order Bulgogi at a restaurant.
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.
They write the commands themselves in English but they can name the variables or comments whatever they want. That means that they could also use emojis for them if that’s what they like.
But there are regulazsomr pieces of news where they identify the source of mailicious code (viruses) by using the variable names and comments
as a software developer in germany i can say there is a bit of debate. The programing language itself is in english. however the variable names and comments are debated. Some developer (me included) say that because eveything else in in english, we should continue this and make all our names and comments in english. Other people say that it is easier for germans to understand if its all in german. that leads to some companies doing it in german and some in english. sometimes you can even see both in one codebase.
edit: i just looked it up. there is accualy a programming language in german. its called DDP (Die Deutsche Programmiersprache) wich translates to “the german programming language”
We just do it in English most of the time, it’s the most professional approach.
However in university projects, I really enjoyed having variables names etc in polish – I immediately could tell what is part of language/library and what is my code.
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