It depends honestly.
Key words like If, Match, Else, From, This ,etc will be in English, but variable names can be in any Unicode language as the var name gets converted to machine code after compilation.
That one is mostly language agnostic.
Oh my god
Also air traffic control and commercial aviation radio communication are in English, worldwide.
Maritime radio has a lot of French in it
For handling international traffic under ICAO rules, ATC is indeed supposed to be done in English.
But if we take a look at some of the terminology in aviation, the French words cannot be ignored. Mayday and pan-pan are from the French venez m’aider and panne.
When radio silence is required, a station might command “SEE-LONCE” but this comes from the French word for silence. Though I think this is a rarity in aviation.
And then outside of aviation radio, the French left their mark on aircraft parts names: fuselage, empennage, aileron.
I wrote variable names and comments in Spanish when I started as my English level back then was very low.
Once my English improved and started to use English documentation and tutorials I just switched to write in English.
In my previous job I worked at software consultancy, I had coworkers who wrote code in Spanish but it wasn’t the norm.
Currently I work for an international company, the team is Spanish but we have to write everything in English as it can be shared with teams in other countries and audited by international organisations.
When AI tools were allowed, a lot of people use them in Spanish, it generates code with comments in Spanish. I had to reject a lot of PRs from the same guys over an over because everything must be in English.
I use British English in variables for the word “colour”. It’s actually kind of useful because I can tell when it’s my own variable and when I’m interacting with something else.
The real deal isn’t the language barrier but the keyboard layout. Most special characters usually used for coding are just perfectly at hand when using the US layout.
At one point i started buying US keyboards set with the US-int layout, which i find easier to use than ES and latam.
This, I switched my keyboards to US layout, and since I learned a bit touch typing , having the laptop with ISO es_ES is not of a big deal having the symbols not matching the input layout.
For Mac it is a bit shittier, I don’t get used to the way to introduce the Ñ with its US int.
On Linux, I didn’t managed to set the US int, only US so I don’t have either Ñ nor the possibility to add accents. It might be easy but I didn’t look for it either.
Not sure if thus is just bazzite with KDE/wayland, but i found today if i hold n i get the option for ñ/ń. Hold i and you get ì/í/etc. Similar to mobile keyboards on phones.
i’ve seen both. there is german program code with german variable names and german comments. yeah, it sounds about as strange as it is.
// diese variable beschreibt den luftzug an den messrohren var trötflöte = lese_zahl_aus(datenbank);but it’s rare. most people who work in IT in germany will write english variable names and english comments.
In my experience it’s more common in industrial (plc) and embedded software. Where people don’t have to work in large teams.
what does “plc” mean here?
Programmable Logic Controller
Removed by mod
It’s super common if it’s any sort of open source project because the collaborators can be anywhere and English is a good baseline.
IIRC one of the big tasks when Star Office became Open Office (later Libre Office) was translating a bunch of the German comments to make the code more accessible.
I’m sure I’ve seen some majority french code bases as well. There are certainly academic hypervisors out of China which have comments in Chinese kanji.
In Chinese, they’re “hanzi”.
Or you can just say “Chinese ideograms”
Thanks. Are they related? I don’t understand any Asian languages myself but I do recognise difference in for example the Korean symbols and Japanese ones. But Japanese and Chinese ideograms look very similar to my ignorant eyes.
Yes they are very related.
Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese loaned the symbols from China when they began writing their languages. However Japanese uses two moraic writing systems in addition (Hiragana and Katakana), Korean has later switched to a syllabic one (Hangul), and Vietnamese switched to a latin derived alphabet. Those are probably what you recognize as distinct.
Where and when they use or used Chinese symbols the meanings per symbol are or were not consistent in the languages, as separate drifting of meaning and reforms of the writing system occured over a long period.
The symbols are called 漢字 in traditional Chinese and 汉字 in simplified Chinese, the are called 漢字 in Japanese, it used to also be 漢字 in Korean, now in Hangul it is 한자, in Vietnamese it was 漢字 and is now Chữ Hán or Hán tự.
As you can see they used the Chinese name for the Chinese ideograms. But they all say it a little differently. Hànzì in Mandarin, Kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, Chữ Hán or Hán tự in Vietnamese. But it all means “Han” “characters”, with “Han” referring to the Han dynasty of Chinese rulers here.
I think Japanese is the only language who loaned them and is still significantly using them. Only texts for children or learners would typically be written fully in Hiragana and Katakana, normal daily written language will have most concepts represented by Kanji, modern loanwords and foreign names in Katakana, and Hiragana for particles and some verbal endings etc for inflection.
The Chinese invented the Chinese ideograms.
The script-less Japanese adopted them, but they didn’t fit their language well on their own. So, they created hiragana (a syllabary) to be able to properly write their own labguage. A Japanese sentence typically comprises Chinese ideograms and hiragana.
Later, both the People’s Republic of China and Japan simplified their ideograms, but not in the same way, and the Chinese went much further.
So, now, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao use the traditional hanzi.
Japan uses their kanji, somewhat simplified.
And the PRC, Malaysia and Singapore use the simplified hanzi.
South Korea uses hanja which is virtually the same as traditional hanzi. And North Korea completely abandonned the Chinese ideograms.
As a native Dutch speaker, Trötflöte sounds hilarious.
Most popular programming languages have English-language keywords and that can’t be changed, so we certainly have to learn those.
How we learn to name symbols (variable/function names), that obviously depends on the programming course. But most real-world code has most symbols written in English with the possible exception of business-specific terminology that the business doesn’t use in English. The same is true of comments.
Never even heard of a programming language in Danish. Even the ones invented by danes are in english.
It’s for educational use, but myresnak is a programming language entirely in danish ;)
As somebody with a friend who speaks Chinese as their first language, I know she often uses non-English file names, variable names, etc.
It’s still standard Python and C++ though (and excellent code at that!), nothing esoteric.
much easier to look for guidance for coding in english instead of my native language, syntax makes more sense too. Though personally i would wish more stuff was properly translated into finnish instead of english slowly gnawing at it.
That’s probably fair, but I would also worry that anything coded in Finnish would be trying to find a way to kill me for not respecting its personal space.
I’m a native Spanish speaker, it depends on the language and the person.
Spanish has very few diacritics, so it’s quite understandable in ASCII (áéíóúüñ). But I guess it would be a lot harder in other languages like Czech or Vietnamese.
When I program for myself or in public repos, I tend to code everything in English, but when I have to do projects with classmates at my university, I usually do it in Spanish because they are not great at English.
Many programming languages support Unicode nowadays
Russian here.
For the most part, it’s all English. Not even romanized Russian in variable names, although that happens sometimes. Comments are mostly in Russian, though. Depending on the company and whether it has to deal with countries where Russian isn’t as widespread (e: which is not a lot of companies these days), that English can be a little difficult to understand once you start applying English language logic to it as opposed to basically writing Russian poorly translated to English. It’s fine if the variables, classes and method names are short and offer little room for stringing words together, but anything complex poses risk of producing something that will be difficult to read without heavy Russian background and developed English skills (at both comprehending and producing).
However, there is a number of Russian-based programming language. I am fortunate to have never worked with any one of them. One of them is 1C:Enterprise, which is also a sizeable business for automation software and such.
Here’s what it looks like. I can spot a couple of English words there, though. And having learned programming through English and English only, I actually find it more difficult to read, because Russian-native developers still often refer to things in English, even if there’s a word for that same thing in Russian - it’s just that much part of your programming work.
That’s so trippy
About every programming language is based on English. Names for functions, objects, variables are based on personal, project, or company preferences. In reality you’ll find these only in two languages as far as I’ve seen in the last decades: either English or Chinese. I’ve seen German and, sadly, French, but they are outliers.
No chance, hungarian has non-ascii characters(ő and ű), digraphs(cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs) and a trigraph(dzs). Also generally how the language works is pretty disadvantegous to coding and tech. English has maaaany useful one syllable imperatives(get, click, etc), even with doors irl its often in english whether you pull or push cause hungarian doesnt really have these completely stateless verbs. One thing that did exist back in the day was people coding in german but i only know a single person who still does this.
We always code in English at work. Using our native language for programming is generally frowned upon.
I teach my students to just code in English from the start. Not all languages/compilers/linkers/whatever handles the Danish characters ‘æ’, ‘ø’, and ‘å’ all that predictably, most companies will require you to use English for international collaboration, and besides most documentation is in English anyway. Last reason is why I urge my students to just use English versions when available. Some FLOSS translations are crap, and you can’t just copy paste an error into askjeeves and get an answer.
The only thing that has to be in Danish is Excel automation, because for some bizarre reason Microsoft translated
allsome of the functions. I say some because I’ve seen functions in English that just wasn’t available in Danish Excel.
