RetroFedDo non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language?
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TheImpressiveX
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Preferably in English. Nothing is worse than reading code with a mixture of languages. Although false friends can also be quite annoying.
What should you do if you inherit a project where they are already mixing languages because they just copy pasted from tutorials?
Exacerbate the problem by using your own style that’s not been used before.
The only solution to having too many standards is always to add another new standard. /xkcd
TBF, USB C is an example of that approach actually working.
It’s tradition!
What does “false friends” mean?
In a nutshell, words that look the same / similar but with different meanings in their respective languages, making it pretty confusing.
Like homonyms or something different?
False friends usually aren’t homonyms since the word comes from different languages.
To give an example: an English speaker might look at “rare auto” (Dutch) and might translate it to “rare car”. But “rare” means “weird” in Dutch. So rare is a false friend in this case
Edit: an example of a false friend that is a homonym is “horloge” in French and Dutch. They are pronounced and written the same, but it means “clock” in French but “(wrist)watch” in Dutch
Edit 2: just a writing mistake :)
The Dutch word for “who” - wie - is the same as as the German word for “how”.
Nastiest false friend I know because it’s a very common use word in both.
The more you know! German as a Dutch speaker has always been a bit of a special language (I’m assuming the other way around as well).Like some words are similar (like gevonden/gefunden). Which makes sense, but then some German composite words sound funny. Because we do understand what a bahn (baan) and hof (also hof) mean. But we call a bahnhof a station.
That’s cool about “rare” in Dutch. It’s the same in Spanish. “Qué raro” means “How weird.” So that’s a false friend for English, but an accurate one between Spanish and Dutch!
Damn that’s cool!
There are many false friends between French and English. Off the top of my head:
“Enregistrer” in French both means to record or register something and to save a file, but you can’t use the English word “register” for both.
“Défense” in French both means defense and prohibited, but you can’t use the English “defense” for both.
As others stated, it is when two words in different languages are similar phonetically/graphically.
They are called false friends because they seem familiar and you expect to mean the same as with other words that are pronounced similarly in two languages and mean the same. False friends not just mean different things but they sometimes can change the phrase in a bad way.
Note: The following examples are with Spanish from Spain, they might be different in other Spanish speaking countries.
In English Alice and Bob had a conversation, in Spanish they had an argument.
Bob is a person who acts with prudence and thinks carefully in English, in Spanish he is a guy who is easily affected by feelings.
I had an English teacher who told the same anecdote about false friends and her sister. She was in UK and the batteries for the remote died, so she went to a convenience store and asked if they had them.
The thing is that in Spanish we only use battery (batería) for the ones that are not meant to be replaced regularly, like the car battery, the laptop battery, etc. The replaceable ones (even the rechargeable that take the same shape), are called pilas. So in the anecdote, the sister told the woman at the store very confidently “Do you have piles?” (haemorrhoids, for the ones who doesn’t know).
I don’t know how real the anecdote was, but it fulfilled its purpose to make us aware of these situations.
Words in two different languages that sound the same but don’t have the same meaning. Real example from my last work: The German word for “topic” is “Thema”. So our programmers called the database field and variables “theme”.
They are annoying even if you write in English. One such example is “library”.
In Spanish, there are two words: “biblioteca” and “librería”.
Library = biblioteca
Book shop = librería
When speaking about programming libraries, everyone says “librería” because it’s just easier to translate that way. But it just feels wrong every time.
A funny one is Pizza Hut. “Hut” means “hat” in German. And since the Pizza Hut logo kind of looks like a hat many Germans believe that they gave it a German name in Germany. So they pronounce it in a German way and if they were to talk to an English speaker they might say Pizza Hat in an effort to translate.
Considering that their roofs tend to look like this, that’s a very reasonable understanding. Pizza Huts look like they’re wearing a hat!
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.
but it’s rare. most people who work in IT in germany will write english variable names and english comments.
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.
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
No, your controls are cursed! It stands for “Pretty Lame Computer”
Context
There is a YouTube channel called cursed controls which calls them that.
As a native Dutch speaker, Trötflöte sounds hilarious.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolittle_(programming_language)
Whitespace programming language
Oh my god
That one is mostly language agnostic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, which is not a lot 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
Everyone should code in Armenian. Why? Because it would be funny.
Western Armenian or Eastern Armenian?
Idk. I was just talking out of my ass. I don’t know how they are different.
So you’re saying everyone should code out of their ass.
better than vibe coding
Never even heard of a programming language in Danish. Even the ones invented by danes are in english.
We always code in English at work. Using our native language for programming is generally frowned upon.
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
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.
I quit my degree in computer science in 2018 after studying for two years, but I remember that it was a big focus on using norwegian for variable names.
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.A mix. In uni we learned algorithms in pseudo code and that was always in native language. Actual coding was typically English, but older professors often did it in their language.
Hedy is a new programming language designed for pedagogy that can be localized to different languages.
https://hedy.org/
Online: everything in English for me, except for some explanations sometimes but that’s just at random as I’m a hobbyist/amateur.
Offline (a course I did): explanations in Portuguese (Brazil), we learned Portugol (programming language that uses Portuguese keywords) as an introduction then switched to C.
You’ll be surprised to learn that WinDEV can be programmed in a ton of diferent languages. I mean the instruction set and all. It feels dirty to read code written in french, and that’s my mother tongue. What a shit show. Only ‘logo’ for kids in primary school makes sense to have in their native language. EDIT : mostly french or English actually https://pcsoft.fr/wlangage.htm
Came here exactly for this comment…
Windev is probably one of the worst possible programming language out there, look at this !
This is from their official documentation
Les accents dans le typage de la variable quoi, Kill me!
I learned English before learning Programming, but there are localized programming languages targetting learning like Portugol https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugol
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.
Coding is all done in the language of the code… if, and, or, for, include, except, etc. It’s not exactly a vast array of words you need to know to be able to code.
Also, I can only speak for Sweden, but I started learning english in third grade. These days they start in kindergarten. Basic stuff, days of the week, 1 through 10. But still.
Are you coding in basic? Look at the std libs for any modern language and there is a plethora of words to learn to program effectively.
Only in the very beginning people use anything besides english
There have been some interesting attempts to translate languages, but generally at most you would get phoneatically local names using English characters for functions and variables, etc.
Well we learn to code in the programming language that the teacher choses, not in any natural language at all, so neither English nor our native languages.
But all significant programming languages that I know do have reserved control words that are taken from English. Maybe that is the direction of your question?
Then no, mostly we don’t use specifically crafted or preprocessed programming languages just to have control words recognizable as words in our native languages. We just learn the English-based control words as features of the programming language, if we don’t already recognize them.
As for the variable names and natural language comments embedded in the code, that we create, that varies. I’d say as soon as interlingual collaboration or code sharing is a possibility, people will go for English in my experience. And I suspect that people who have gone for English before tend to stick to English even in their private use.
This is also related to learning materials, documentation of language features and libraries being available to the largest degree in English.
I perceive it as easier to stick to English, rather than to code switch between natural language while I program.
Sadly, in the horrible english language
I don’t begrudge peoples difficulties with English. It has some positives like not needing gendered conjugation for objects and a fairly wide cultural exposure. However it freely steals words from other languages making it a bit of a mongrel. Also the spelling and pronunciation is entirely non-regular so the usual answer to people looking for rules to work these things out is “just know”.
it has nice things and bad things (is horrible constructed and very incontinuos in its pronunciation), like almost every natural language.
Why should they?
Code is programming language, not natural language. If they have already learned some natural English, then maybe it seems practical. Otherwise, no reason to try that.
Well, unless you specifically take steps to change how types and built in functions are called, you’re going to be writing “string” “for” and “if”
Doesn’t matter. Could be any symbols instead. The same as math symbols.
Well they’re words. Good luck typing the logic symbols on regular keyboards
&&
||
Sure.
Great. Now do integer, string and while.
I think you missed my point. My point is that it doesnt matter that in English if while string integer mean something. You don’t have to know the language to be able to understand the operation they convey, just like math symbols.
Just because some keywords are in English doesn’t mean the code is in English, variable names, function names, and comments could be respectively in latin, Russian, and Klingon.
Look up APL and Uiua programming languages.
That’s the part that the experts call “programming language”
And that’s all English. So, in order to use “programming language” , they are going to have to use some English
And those words are written in what experts call, “English”.
The only things that tend to be in another language in code are variables and strings, from my experience.