Coding in Other (Spoken) Languages

Question

This is something I've always wondered, and I can't find any mention of it anywhere online. When a shop from, say Japan, writes code, would I be able to read it in English? Or do languages, like C, PHP, anything, have Japanese translations that they write?

I guess what I'm asking is does every single coder in the world know enough English to use the exact same reserved words I do?

Would this code:

If (i < size){
    switch
        case 1:
            print "hi there"
        default:
            print "no, thank you"
} else {
    print "yes, thank you"
}

display the exact same as I'm seeing it right now in English, or would some other non-English-speaking person see the words "if", "switch", "case", "default", "print", and "else" in their native language?

EDIT - yes, this is serious. I didn't know if different localizations of a language have different keywords. or if there are even different localizations at all.

Sarajane

Corollary question: Are there any mainstream languages out there whose keywords are not in English (even if the language was originally invented in a place where English is not a native language)? – Staghound

This question reminds me of a conversation I had once with a (foreigner) who thought that God's main language was English thus other people ought to learn it so that their prayers could be understood. (I do not mean to be rude, interesting question nonetheless) – Metallography

And I thought God was omnipotent! – Jola

God only knows one language. It is a obscure dialect of a now extinct Mesopotamian village. This is why he doesn't answer your prayers and why bad things happen to good people (he just gets so confused). – Hurry

I'm amazed that this question (and the accepted answer) is so highly rated... Makes me wonder how many question like that keep floating in my colleagues head. Well at least, you have the courage to ask it, so +1 for that. – Swayne

Oh, and now that I've read some of the answers... Good question. I always assumed that there localized versions of computer code, but come to think about it, certain conventions would be a nightmare to implement (right-to-left or vertically-oriented direction) and others would just be tough to accommodate (specifically: lines in PHP end with a semicolon. This is based on Western-custom of ending complete clauses with a semi-colon. Imagine trying to localize for punctuation customs. Maybe even having the cool Spanish leading mark). – Hurry

Code with APL and you won't ask yourself the question :) – Gild

here is an almost real programing language you'll have fun learning: nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8. it is my native language but even me I won't be able to learn it. too late my mind only process algorithms in english now :) – Vibraphone

This similar question has an interesting answer that mentions several programming languages whose syntax uses non-English words: Are there any coding languages that are not in 'English'? – Hijack

Non-English-based programming languages - Wikiwand – Hijack

Answer 1

If I understood well the question actually is: "does every single coder in the world know enough English to use the exact same reserved words as I do?"

Well.. English is not the subject here but programming language reserved words. I mean, when I started about 10 yrs ago, I didn't have any clue of English, and still I was able to program simple things by learning the programming language, even when I did not know what they meant ( in English ). As a matter of fact this helped me to learn English.

For example. I know to do an "iteración" ( iteration of course ) I had to write:

 for( i = 0 ; i < 100 ; i++ ) {}

To me, the "for", the ";" and the "++" were simple foreign words or symbols. Later I learned that "for" meant "para", "while" meant "mientras", etc. But, in the meantime, I did not need to know English, what I needed was to know was "C".

Of course when I needed to learn more things, I had to learn English, for the documentation is written in that language.

So the answer is: No, I don't see if, while, for etc. in my native language. I see them in English, but they didn't mean to me any other thing that they meant for the programming language in turn.

Is like switch statement in bash: case .. esac. What Is "esac"... for me the end of the switch statement in bash.

I guess that's what we call "abstraction"

Bundle

By the way, 'esac' is just case backwards. I couldn't tell if you pretended not to know to make a point or not, but I could see how that would be confusing for non-english speakers. – Ecdysis

For sure, as fi is of if, but, at some point, the only meaning they have is "you end a switch statemente by writing 'esac'" ... Is not they are confusing or not, but they don't mean anything in english. But they have a meaning in C or bash, or pascal. That's the point. We learn the programming lang. – Bundle

Note hat in Excel, that macro are translated in the local language, and "if" becomes "si" in French, which make the tools absolutely unusable. – Swayne

You were always going to get the best answer from a non-native English speaker. I'm Scottish and learning English was difficult for me too ;-) – Witticism

+1 When I started programming I did not even know how to pronounce goto properly. But later, when I learned what it meant, it put a smirk on my face. – Martijn

Answer 2

In the Java language some methods must be named (at least partially) using the English language because of the JavaBeans convention.

This convention requires that a property X be established via a pair of getX() and setX() methods. Here in French-Canada, where some developers are obliged to code in the French language this leads to the following travesty:

interface Foo {

  Color getCouleur();

  void setCouleur(Color couleur);
}

Quidnunc

Oh cripes! Bureaucracy wins again! :( – Liba

yeah, in French schools they teach you to to it that way to. That's so suck that the students never use what they did in class to code in the real world and quicly lean by themself to write it in plain english. – Swayne

At my uni some lecturers used Finnish in example code, and the result was generally even more awkward, even if I understood their principled reasons for that. Fortunately, "in the real world" that's almost unheard of (at least in the private sector). English FTW (as far as programming goes). – Hessian

@Jonik: At least you didn't have to argue about ASCII/extended charset. In some places (here), there used to be a large debate on naming your identifiers a) in English, b) in Czech without accents, c) in Czech with the accents (most of which you can't type without Czech keyboard layout, wonderful for maintainability by anyone else). – Mongeau

@Piskvor, actually if you do use Finnish names, there's a similar dilemma about whether to use special chars (äöå) or replace them with a & o (and if you do use them, you're likely running into charset problems). But yeah, fortunately I haven't had to use Finnish in code for at least 7 years. :) – Hessian

@Jonik: Oh. Goes to show how much I know about Finnish language ;) Yup, much easier to code in English when the the team is one Czech, one Turk, one Bulgarian and one Dutchman :D – Mongeau

I've used Portuguese for variables and procedures in some programs. An advantage of doing so is that my Brazilian collaborators and I clearly distinguish user-defined things from the system predefined ones. – Epaulet

Answer 3

I'm having trouble finding references, but I'm reminded of three stories.

A Lisp hacker defends meaningless functions like "cdr" and "car" by comparing them to programming in your non-native language: http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg01171.html

When Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz") started developing Ruby, he used english keywords even though he was writing all the documentation in Japanese!. There was no English documentation for Ruby for a couple years, and very few Americans using the language. But now it's a world-class language, and it the fact that it was born in Japan is only of historical interest. If the language had been using keywords in hiragana, it would have had a much more difficult time gaining popularity.

I read an essay once -- maybe someone else can find it, Google is no help today -- that suggested that translating keywords was misguided because the words aren't actually English-- they're jargon. Not only do (to use the examples above) para and pour not quite have the exact meaning that for has in English, to non-programmers the phrase "for loop" is jibberish. Even Americans have to learn a new meaning. So to translate the words's superficial meaning into another language is more like making a cross-language pun rather than actually being helpful.

Eminent

Answer 4

I really have not thought too much about programming in Japanese before, but here we go, using the question's code sample.

Using only the language statements in Japanese with the variables in English:

// In Japanese, it makes more sense to put the keywords/modifiers as
// postfix expressions rather than prefix expressions.
(i < size)か {
     (l[i])は {
     1だ:
         「もしもし。」を書く;
     省略時値:
         「いいえ、いいですよ。」を書く;
     }
} ない {
     「はい、ありがとうございます。」を書く;
}

Manna

The dot commas to (;) I guess.. =D – Arbitrage

Actually I was thinking that if you were able to code in Japanese you could use stuff like →　定　問　上　下　不　as special words, could you imagine a lisp in Japanese? (定　rember (→　(a lat) (問 ((空？　lat) (引用 ())) (又　... – Metallography

If you're going to write in postfix, you may as well make it a Forth dialect, ね? :-) – Paleolith

will this even compile?? :\ – Ruckus

Answer 5

As many people already pointed out, in most programming languages you just have to learn a few keywords, so it doesn't matter that much if they're in English (or a language other than yours, for that matter). It's just a symbol you associate with some construct. For instance, in VB you have "THEN", which in many C-style languages would be "{" and it doesn't make a big difference in readability (well, at least that's how I see it, being a Non-English native speaker).

But where things can sometimes get hairy, and where the choice of (natural) language matters is in naming identifiers. If the names of variables, functions, classes, etc, don't have a meaningful name for you because of a language barrier, following even the simplest code can be rather challenging.

I remember someone once gave me a short snippet of Actionscript taken from some blog. The names were in German and since I don't speak a word of that language, stuff could have been called var_123, var_562 or func_333 as well (and probably it would have been easier for me to remember the names or at least to have a chance of spelling them right without copying and pasting). Since this was a short, self-contained snippet, I used an online translator to give those vars and functions meaningful names in my native language (Spanish) and after that, everything was clear. The point is that the code was actually simple, but I was only able to make sense out of it without too much (unnecessary) extra effort just when I overcame the language barrier.

Since then, I've switched to using English for naming identifiers. Whether you like it or not, it's the "koine" for programming, engineering and generally technical stuff. Most of the APIs are written in English and so is most documentation (and probably the best resources you can find are in English as well). As a nice aside, it keeps your code more coherent with the code you're likely to be interacting with, and I think it tends to be more compact and succinct than other languages like Spanish (which otherwise would be my natural choice).

Of course, if you can't understand at least some English, the problem remains the same, so it's not a perfect solution. But, given a number of developers from many different countries, chances are that the common language for them to communicate (through code and of course other means) will be English. So, choosing English is perhaps the best option, even though it would be not the perfect solution to this problem.

Stringhalt

Yeap. A minor problem with this is when the coder does not how to proper write english vars names. The worst I've seen is "String employiNeim" hehe ( nahh just kidding ) but I've seen things really close to that before. – Bundle

For a non-native English speaker, you have a surprisingly strong command of the language. Congrats, English is a very strange beast, even for us native speakers. – Winifield

Answer 6

The programming language defines keywords and standard class names, and it's best practice to give user defined types, variables and functions also English names (as a non-native speaker I can tell ;-).

So yes, if all is well, you'll be able to read the code.

However languages like Java and Perl allow the full Unicode set for identifiers, so if somebody writes his class names in Kanji, you'll likely have a problem.

Update: For Perl there's a joke module that allows you to write Perl in Latin. But it's really just that, a joke. Nobody uses things like this seriously.

Second Update: The idea of localized programming languages isn't that ridiculous. Excel's macro language is localized, but luckily it's stored in one canonical language (English) in the file, so the localization is just a layer on top of the normal thing. Such things only make sense for small "programs", for "real" programs it becomes hard to maintain.

Penile

Answer 7

Actually there are some Non-English-based programming languages (Wikipedia)

I'm Norwegian but I've allways used English for all code except output (ignoring some silly code from school). Actually I usually write everything in English and then translate it to my native language, using gettext (or something).

Ingenerate

Answer 8

I am British and a problem we often run into is the American/British spelling clash. This often occurs with programming related terms such as Initialise() or Initialize(), Analyse() or Analyze() etc. This can (has) lead to problems trying to overriding methods, and is sometimes difficult to spot.

Since the framework (in our case C#) was designed by Americans, we found that it is best to be consistent and use American spellings. We even adopt Color.

We have a mix of nationalities in our development teams and most non-British people tend towards American spellings naturally.

Tut

Answer 9

Taking this to the next level, what about being able to substitute symbols?

After seeing languages like Brainf**k and Whitespace I thought of making a language like this: it'd be identical to C except you use closing braces to open, opening braces to close, swap the meanings of + and -, * and /, ; and :, > and <, etc.

The concept is nothing more than a gimmicky altered C compiler. But, like thinking of keywords differently, it challenges you to rethink some basic assumptions if you've never thought of such things before. Ex:

int foo)int i, char c( }
    int six = 2 / 3:
    int two = six + 4:
    if )i > 0( }
        printf)"i is negative"(:
    {
{

Focus

This is one of the most horrifying things I have seen in my life. – Aflame

Answer 10

The only language I saw localized is Excel with its macros. If you try to sum a column using an Italian version of Office you have to write SOMMA(A1:A10) and not SUM. That's a shame.

By the way, just because it's fun, here's how your code should look like with Italian keywords:

se (i < size){
    commuta
        caso 1:
            stampa "hi there"
        normalmente:
            stampa "no, thank you"
} altrimenti {
    stampa "yes, thank you"
}

Vesica

Answer 11

I'm in a French team developing a software system in C#. Despite the fact that the programming language keywords are ostensibly English, I imagine that you would have great difficulty reading the code as all the function names, variables, code comments, database tables and columns, technical specifications, protocols and so on, are all in French, including those lovely accented characters ç, é, è, ù, etc. I'm not even certain if the system would even run elsewhere due to localisation bugs, such as relying on the comma to be the default decimal seperator.

Otherwise, WinDev is a popular programming platform in France, and its programming language WLanguage has keywords in either French or English, see and example here : link text

Reduplicate

resharper will catch any locale specific crap :) use the 1 month test to clean your code base. – Trey

Answer 12

AppleScript was once available in French and Japanese dialects. I do not know why it was withdrawn.

Ossie

Probably because it was hard to share code in an Internet era... VBA was translated too. Bad idea. – Hamman

Answer 13

There are some languages that have translated keywords. Excel formulas, for example. If you write some calculations in a spreadsheet, this will be in your language.

Fortunately, this is not a general practice, and even non-English speakers like me thank God that there is a standard language for keywords :

• it's easier to share you work.
• it prevent documentation from becoming a bigger nightmare that it already is.
• English words and sentences are usually short and syntactically pragmatic. In literature, Latin languages are much more beautiful, but for technical stuff, English rocks.

And where to stop ? Can you imagine a C in ancient Greek ?

Keywords must stay in one language, and well, it started with English, let it stay that way. This could have been worst (Asian language ?). And so we have to write methods and comments in English. Ok, more work for us, but at least the international code base stay congruent.

There is, however, one case where using native language method names and comments can be a good practice : in third world country. I'm going to Senegal in some months to manage a Django project. Senegal have a huge analphabetization rate, and therefor it's already great that they spead energy in improving they programming knowledge. French is the native language here, so it would be inefficient to force them to learn computing AND a new tongue at the same time.

BTW, that would be your code with French keywords :

Si (i < taille) {
    cas par cas :
        cas 1:
            afficher "salut"
        défaut:
            afficher "non merci"
} sinon {
    afficher "oui, merci"
}

Not that translating the keywords have nothing to do with translating the strings. Of course, we have "hi, there" translated in our language. European coders even tend to use I18N much more than American sot their service can reach a wider audience.

Swayne

Answer 14

In several VBA project I've worked on (yes, very early in my career) we had to detect the version of office which was installed on the user's machine and change the formulas used in the speradsheets accordingly.

As i program in portuguese"SUM" would have to be translated into "SOMA" and so on and so forth. I just can't imagine the necessary work to make this happen in several languages. Has anyone else suffered with this problem?

Protist

Answer 15

Don't make fun of this. Some years ago, Microsoft had announced G# (German Sharp) - C# with German keywords and API. Of course, it was an April Fools joke, but the entire site about that looked so real and professional (and was on microsoft.com). Scary.

At work, we use two field bus systems, both developed in German-speaking countries, which have a scary mix of German and English for identifiers, including some lovely false friends. It's a mess.

No, English keywords and identifiers are fine. Though some might argue if it should be Color or Colour :)

Antinomy

Answer 16

Well, As others pointed-out, the keywords and system calls would likely remain in English.

However, understanding the keywords of the language is only a small part in understanding the code. Variable names, function names and comments all risk being in the native language of the author.

Edit: I just flashed-back to my youth where I went in the mapping tables of my TRS-80 built-in BASIC to switch the keywords to French. I could change all the keywords but I couldn't make any of them larger. Made for funny programs.

Apostatize

Indeed. "We'll just use [insert local language] for everything from variable names to comments - it's just a tiny app, who'd change it?" Several years later, elsewhere: "Yes, there ARE comments. If I only knew what '// Meg tudom enni az üveget, nem árt nekem' means..." (lang changed for emphasis) – Mongeau

I remember in college someone had gone into DOS and changed some of the commands and messages to be obscene, and it still worked – Macroscopic

Answer 17

i've seen VBA translated into spanish-like commands. it's one of the ugliest things ever seen. i would be ashamed to have something like this on my computer.

PD: i happen to think that spanish is a much nicer language than english; but translating is WRONG

Forepart

I don't know if it is still the case with newer ms-office versions, but the older ones couldn't execute scripts that were written for a different localization. – Throaty

The only way that English is "better" than Spanish is that English has a larger vocabulary, so it's a little shorter to write in. I would hate to learn English as a second language; Spanish is much more logical! – Stillas

Spanish (as most languages) has a vastly larger vocabulary than English; but English makes it easy to invent new words and still be understood. That makes it very succinct and easy to use on technical issues. Also, English is much more imperative and favors simple sentences (if anything, to avoid ambiguity), maybe that makes it more 'natural' for procedural programming. Also note that I would never say that English is "better" than any other language; but BASIC is based in English, translating it results in an unreadable mess. – Forepart

"Spanish (as most languages) has a vastly larger vocabulary than English": not true. English is well known to have more words than any other language, approx 250,000 vs 100,000 for Spanish – Pyrophotometer

One of the lessons here is purely commercial; you cannot sustain support for localizations into languages where the VBE-programming community is probably less than 1,000 individuals worldwide. Microsoft did this in the 1990s, and then quickly retracted. Some of the lessons carry over into much bigger communities, such as Spanish. For one thing, you cannot share your script with people who don't have the same localized version of the language. – Slay

Answer 18

Here in Australia we still need to spell colour like color. However, I do find it annoying when other (Australian) developers, working on an Australian project, decide that internal variable names need to be spelt the american way.

Physiognomy

Answer 19

Your question is an interesting one with regard to Perl because it's syntax is designed to follow (English) natural language. I wonder if that makes it more difficult for non-English speakers...

Of course, Perl and Perlers refuse to play by conventional rules. Mad scientist Damian Conway wrote the Lingua::Romana::Perligata module which uses the black magic of source filters to allow you to write Perl in latin!

Tricyclic

I don't think so. The probe is that even though you know english, you cannot say while( cond ) jump_to: label ... to Perl. I mean, like a goto or something. – Bundle

most of perl's 'natural language like' idioms like "open() or die()" are quite natural for me as a german speaker. i guess english and german are similar enough – Chinkapin

Answer 20

Filemaker's scripting language is localized. The scripts (and data!) are stored in a terrible "sorta canonical" form.

So if you write a script in the American version, then open it up in the French version, all the keywords and built-in function names will be in French. But why won't it run?! Aha! The French version uses "," as the decimal point, and therefore to avoid ambiguity uses ";" to separate function arguments -- where the American version uses "." and "," respectively. This conversion you have to do yourself.

So you work through the incredibly bad script editing interface (you can't write scripts as text files) to fix all these things. It runs! Great! The results are all wrong! Oh no! Aha! The Jan-7-2004 date you entered in the American version is being interpreted as July-1-2004 -- apparently dates are not only displayed but stored in locale-dependent order. Am I kidding you? No.

[Note: Filemaker 8 and 9 may be sane -- I only ever worked with 3 - 7.]

Faith

Ouch! Sounds like you should post this to thedailywtf.com – Kitchens

Answer 21

When I was a kid we went to France, and in a museum we went to, I remember finding a display which showed you how to write computer programmes. The language was some kind of BASIC variant and I distinctly remember it using POUR instead of FOR, and so on. I was 7 years old and had only just learned BASIC, and it seemed completely natural to me that the French would have their own dialect like this!!

I guess it may have been LSE that I saw?

Hhour

Answer 22

Generally speaking, most programmers adapt to the English form. I learned to program when I was 7 years old and only spoke Hebrew (which is right to left) and with no english, which made it quite a fascinating experience.

The problem you would usually get is with documentation, variables, and function names. I have seen my share of variables in other languages using english alphabet.

The only language I'm familiar with that actually got translated was good old Logo (still amazing to this day).

Perrins

Shalom Uri, There is also the Hebrew Programming Language (HPL) on Sourceforge. Like LOGO, it's aimed at young computer users. – Androgen

Answer 23

in Italian

se (i < dimensione){
    scegli
        caso 1:
            stampa "ciao"
        mancante:
            stampa "no, grazie"
} altrimenti {
    stampa "sì, grazie"
}

To confirm the worries of some previous poster I've seen a Fortran code with a macro include to translate all the keywords from English to French. Allow me not to continue on this.

I also had to work with a code simultaneously containing identifiers in Italian, German, English and French, not only because it was developed in many different places, but also because the main developer thought it was fun and helped him not to duplicate identifier names (of course, with a routine 2000 lines long....)

Glary

Answer 24

I read a lot of code, but the problem always is at variable/method names and comments, if they are commenting their code on their own language, using a language special characters like Japanese or Cyrillic, we are in trouble! but the keywords I think they will stay in English as they are.

Brodie

Answer 25

It would be pointless, IMHO, to i18n a language syntax. It would just kill any sort of portability.

The only exception are educational languages, such as LOGO. They were designed for ease learning, so portability is not an issue.

Pires

When you have a larger audience, such as people who write down formulas in Excel or creating small effects to their presentation you have to consider implementing i18n for "reserved" words... – Protist

Answer 26

I think WordBasic was localized. WordBasic was used to write macro's for in Word before VBA was used.

If I remember it correctly, only WordBasic written in the English version would execute on all localized version. If you would write a Dutch version, you could only execute it on a Dutch Word.

Qua