Do all programmers speak english?

Статья
01/24/2005

I got in a little discussion with a colleague tonight about how many non-English speaking developers are using the .NET Framework. He asserted “all programmers speak English”… The general jest behind his argument is that developers tend to pick up English if they learn to program in an “English” programming language such as VB.NET or C#. So, I’d love to find out if he is correct or not. I’d like to hear from non-English speaking developers and maybe see some examples of VB.NET or C# code written in a non-English language posted in my comments to this post. So please (translate) and forward this post…

Comments

Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I write english pretty averagely <- like you see.

But when it comes to talking out loud, I do it well in my mind, but it just comes out as bunch of mumbo-jumbo out of my mouth.

What comes to the subject, quite few c# sample codes I have seen have had foreign language comments, sometimes even variables. Personally I'd prefer if everyone in the world had English atleast as a second language. But that would be all too easy wouldn't it.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I have a friend whose from italy. His brother programs in italian as does he when he's working in italy. Its fun to see.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
Sometimes i use danish in my code, but generally i prefer English in my code.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I often use italian in my code (even if I prefer english):

public void SalvaConsumo(Consumo consumo)
{
if (VerificaConsumo(consumo))
{
Consumo tempConsumo = _consumiManager.CaricaPerId(consumo.Id);
if (tempConsumo != null) // Aggiorno
_gestoreConsumi.Aggiorna(consumo);
else // Inserisco
_gestoreConsumi.Inserisci(consumo);
}
}
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
man,I speak Chinese~~~
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
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Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I do use English in my programs, despite on I'm living in Ukraine. But probably I'll try to use my own language. You'll need some cyrillic fonts to read this code :)

class Ющенко {
string статус;
public Ющенко( string статус) {
this.статус = статус;
// президент
}
}
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
To reiterate the last poster, I often use norwegian in my code even if I prefer english :) Here is some code written with norwegian variable-names from some randomly selected test-code. Hope it doesn't get too garbled.

string sti= "D:\somePath";

int linjeTeller= 0;

foreach( string fil in Directory.GetFiles( sti) )
{
StreamReader filLeser = new StreamReader(fil);
string innhold = r.ReadToEnd();

string[] linjer = innhold.Split( new char[]{ 'n' } );

linjeTeller+=linjer .Length;
}
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I am Japanese. I would like to use Kanji-character to programming. But it isn't possible to use multi-byte characters for variable or function name. So many Japanese programmers use English their codes therefore they can't speak English well.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
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Anonymous
January 24, 2005
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Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I write all code and comments in english... The idea behind it is that I can not be sure if the code will be maintained by someone who speaks polish and that I have to be more focused when writing comments in foreign language, so they're more thought over.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
My english is so so, but every developer has to know a few of english at least: too much example and solutions are still untranslated. If your question was "is VB language translated" the answer is: "luckly NO"! VB is "a cross-cultural language" based on english. I never heard about a serious programming language with words different than english: you're lucky it's the american cultural hegemony!
If your question was are there developers that are speaking about developing in other languages then come on:
http://blogs.ugidotnet.org/
blogs of the largest european community about dotnet (it's italian and here we write Italian of course).
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
My english is so so, but every developer has to know a few of english at least: too much example and solutions are still untranslated. If your question was "is VB language translated" the answer is: "luckly NO"! VB is "a cross-cultural language" based on english. I never heard about a serious programming language with words different than english: you're lucky it's the american cultural hegemony!
If your question was are there developers that are speaking about developing in other languages then come on:
http://blogs.ugidotnet.org/
blogs of the largest european community about dotnet (it's italian and here we write Italian of course).
Anonymous
January 24, 2005

1. Would the international coders here say that they prefer the .Net exception messages to be in English or to be translated to their own language?

2. Do the .Net Design Guidelines make the code easier to read?
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
JD: 1. Leave them in English, please, unless they're intended to be shown to the user.

And for the love of Gates, give us access to the predefined messages so that I no longer have to redefine them in my own resource files to construct exception messages!

2. Yes, insofar as common guidelines are generally better than none. I'm not aware of any guideline specifically that makes code easier to read, though.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005

I'm commonly using Ukraine/Russian
2. agree with Chris Nahr

Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I'm a french developper.

Most of time, I'm using English in my code but, If I need to develop an application with some of my friends, I prefer to use French :)

Bye.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
From Belguim (French-speaking environment), but my origin is Serbian...

As for the question from the title... First, it is difficult to get proficient in programming without English, because literature, examples, APIs, docs are mostly written in English. Yes, there is all of that in other languages, but not as much/good/whatever as in English. I'd say, one learns English in order to learn programming. Fact of life, no need to get excited about it. So, yes, "all programmers..." at least a little bit (at least, they read it :-))).

On "what language should we use in our code"... I was told at the university that one should use identifiers etc in English, to facilitate reading of the code. Why? To avoid subconcious translation when reading/writing! I agree 100%. It certainly is tiresome to read such code. In my experience, from both Serbia and Belguim, code is written in English. Comments, not always. maybe because they require greater proficiency in English?
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
One thing is sure: getting some code with non-english variable/comments is a pain!
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
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Anonymous
January 24, 2005
(French speaking Belgian, who worked for several years in Norway, is now working in Denmark, but did also work for some times in the USA).

I use English because the only good computer science and SF books you can find are written in that language.

I actually LEARNED English mostly reading computer science and SF books. How is that? The funny part of the story is that reading books don't give you a clue about pronouciation.

This has been a great source of joy and happiness when I was in the States. You say poTAto, I say POtato. You say MAYTOD (method), I say MISSOD.

How comes that, you English speaking guys, can't be consistent regarding phonetics, uh? Well, French is not consistent either (but, hey, it's FRENCH after all). Because of that you guys FORCED me to watch and listen to CNN. That's tough.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
(continued and more to the point)

A good (?) reason for using English is purely estethic. I don't like seeing mixed languages statements like:

/* Where are my French accents, by the way? */
while (compteur < 100 && nonTrouve(entree))
{
entree = entreeSuivante(entree);
cout << entree.nom << entree.prenom;
compteur++;
}

Another one is that, English (or a subset of it http://jeanpaul.nerriere.free.fr ) has become the de facto "Esperanto" for programmers around the world.

So, for exceptions thrown, I would hate to see the corresponding error messages in French. The only messages that should be shown in French are the end users ones. And I should be the one who decides on that.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I think that exceptions for "end users" MUST be written using their native language. Or probably both English and native language. Or you can write complicate msgs in English and simple user-friendly using native language of the end user.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
The short answer to the question is "no".
Obviously, non english-speakers won't be reading this post, and english-speaking developers tend to make use of english forums-newsgroups-blogs, so it's difficult to american and english developers to be aware of the thousands of developers that can't even read english.
But I can tell you for sure that the sentence "¿Dónde puedo encontrar esta información en español?" (Where can I find this info in spanish?) is pretty common in any spanish programming forum :-) (and I guess that this is true for other languages too).
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
good question, good topic, interesting answers.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
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Anonymous
January 24, 2005
definitly no, not all speak english.
But the more important thing is, that complex things can be better understod if i read it in my native language
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
Hmm... Well, asking the question in a English blog isn't going to bring you far, is it?

I can assure you: most of the programmers don't speak English. Take Spain for example, I'm quite sure most of the people who program there don't speak English. So the answer would be no: for sure, not all the programmers speak English. Let alone that they would be able to understand, let's say, any complex SDK or so.

Now this was funny (I'm happy to be able to read Cyrrylic ;) - hit: think Ukraine):
class Ющенко {
string статус;
public Ющенко( string статус) {
this.статус = статус; // президент
}
}
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
My code is totally written in English (even comments) but i must admit that in some cases finding English counterpart for some terms is quite difficult.
I saw many lines of code entirely written using Italian words, maybe because many Italian developers don't understand English (strange but true)
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I've had my code translated into five different languages, so there must be demand for it. What's funny is to see is sometimes when the expository prose has been changed to (say) German, but the comments remain in English.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I'm french-canadian.

Since i am a consultant, my coding language will always be the same as my client. Afterall, he's the one that will be maintaining my code when i'll be gone.

So it is either all in french or all in english (except for the framework). I prefer english since all names will be shorter. But even if i prefer english, there's still a advantage at coding in french: the difference between our classes and the framework' classes are much easier to see.

Anyway, i think that we should always write code in the language we get paid for, wich is probably the one known by those who maintain the code afterward.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I have to agree with Dan (and with Xavi). We used to have a sign in the wall stating "Mi lenguaje nativo es el español. No deseo declarar variables en inglés." (My native language is spanish, I don't want to declare variables in english). In that particular group everybody understood english, but it is fairly common to see programmers that don't here (Argentina)... and I could never understand how they get any information, how they read exceptions, how they read documentation, etc. I think they understand their language of choice, and the few phrases they need in their everyday life...
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
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Anonymous
January 24, 2005
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Anonymous
January 24, 2005
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Anonymous
January 24, 2005
dutch-english mix;-)
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I'm just happy that all the feedback is in english here:P
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
Dutch developer here, using dutch / english mixed in programming.

Comments mostly in dutch variables / function names mixed dutch english depending on projects / existing code etc.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I realised I only mentioned a guy who used to work for me (not anymore for precisely the reasons I mentioned) and not my own practices:

English all the way, if possible. There are a few cases where I have to use Dutch because the terms in the business logic have no direct equivalent in English (at least, my dictionary doesn't give me anything usable).
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
Excellent synopsis! Looking forward to hearing more. Indeed, Agilent and Teradyne have little to gain from OpenStar at this point. Their intent is probably to understand it early on and develop an internal strategy to be able to quickly embrace it at the point where their market share is threatened by those who do. But, the force working in the opposite direction is that semiconductor technology is VERY difficult to predict and any standard created today is in real danger of being obsoleted by the demands of the future.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
I'm norwegian, and I've always detested seeing comments and variable names in Norwegian. Everything I write uses english.
Anonymous
January 24, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
I'm belgian living in Italy, so I usually speak italian. Generally I use to code in english for the following reasons:

1. the framework is in english, then have mixed languages in the application is confusing

2. the english words are less verbose than italian (usually), then the code is more compact and maintenable

3. technical english is a must for every developer. Most of the documentation is in english.

My 2 cents.

Pierre
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
I'm belgian living in Italy, so I usually speak italian. Generally I use to code in english for the following reasons:

1. the framework is in english, then have mixed languages in the application is confusing

2. the english words are less verbose than italian (usually), then the code is more compact and maintenable

3. technical english is a must for every developer. Most of the documentation is in english.

My 2 cents.

Pierre
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
An odd one:
Some time ago a friend of mine showed off with an interesting version of VB6. The funny part was that along with the UI some "smart people" translated the syntax of the language into Russian (mind you it was not a very legal version). Fortunately I didn't get a chance to work with that one. Imagine what it would be like to have people switc to the regular version of VB.
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
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Anonymous
January 25, 2005
IIRC Excel translated its macros into the local language, creating a huge mess, where you had to keep several versions of the same code to support your users. And it was actually more difficult to use the localized version due to the fact that languages don't translate directly, word to word to each other. Most programmers realize it's just simpler to stick to English as even bad English is a lot better than using their native language in the source code.
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
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Anonymous
January 25, 2005
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Anonymous
January 25, 2005
I'm a Swede and even though I had regular English classes in school, for the longest time I thought "WEND" as in "WHILE...WEND" from BASIC was a real English word.

I guess a good programming language to learn English would be COBOL, don't you think?
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
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Anonymous
January 25, 2005
I was born in Shanghai, in China. We speak Chinese. Most of us write codes in English. Sometimes I add Chinese comments in my codes. Many documents and examples have been translated in to Chinese. But recent knowledge are written in English. So we force ourselves to read english documents to learn more.
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
TrackBack From:http://www.cnblogs.com/atempcode/archive/2005/01/26/97385.html
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
I am also a Chinese software developer. I think a programmer must know how to read and write in English, at least in the area of CS. Though a programmer might not be able to order meal in English for him/herself in a restaurant. :)
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
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Anonymous
January 25, 2005
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Anonymous
January 25, 2005
PS. I meant "too far". Now I can't even spell.
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
I am from Egypt. All programmers I know program in English (with a lot of spelling mistakes if they don't speak good English). Programmers don't even use Arabic version of Windows, Office and other application. They use the English version most of the time. Most web sites and applications are developed with English user interface as well as Arabic, and in many cases only English. In Egypt you must know English not only to program, but to browse the internet and use the computer.
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
Now that you mention it... I also use mostly English applications, not just developer tools (Windows, Office, FrameMaker, Photoshop). All the good resources on the Internet are in English, and translating back and forth is such a bother.
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
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Anonymous
January 25, 2005
As others have pointed out, another pro-English argument for lazy typists :-)): English is easily the most dense of all languages I've been in touch with (French, Hungarian, Serbian, Russian, Dutch, but less so there).

On a more serious note: as I said, my mother tongue is not English (it's Serbian), so I feel the "pain" of non-English people here.

But, exactly for the purpose of "internatinalization of code", it needs to be in English! Otherwise, it's limited to its linguistic origin. In this increasingly intertwined world, this won't work. So, I think we need a common denominator, and it's English.
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
I want to note that there's a big defference between 'technical-english' en natural-english. most programmers code in english and CAN understand technical-english.. but some of them (like me:P) have problems with natural-english.. And I can write better than speaking it..
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
"All the good resources on the Internet are in English, and translating back and forth is such a bother."
"...I also consider that if everyone would know English, communication would be way better."
"I consider translating the resources on the Internet in several languages a serious waste of time."
"So, I think we need a common denominator, and it's English."

It's so sad to read this...
I just hope not every developer to be so culturally limited.
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
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Anonymous
January 25, 2005
Hi,
i´m a native german speaker, but i speak english too.
The reason why a developer has to learn english, is not because of the coding itself. It´s because of the huge benifit you can get from persons like you "at the source" in Redmond. It´s because most of the "reachable" .net programmers speak english or sit in the us. that´s why english is so necessary.
Anonymous
January 25, 2005
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Anonymous
January 26, 2005
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Anonymous
January 26, 2005
Although almost all German .NET developers understand English, about the half of them prefer reading documentation and articles or attend conference sessions and webcasts in their language. So from my experience its 50%:50%.
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
Kjell, wend is (well, used to be) a real English word - http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=wend.
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
Chris:
I guess my post is more rude that it was intended to be, so I apologize.

But the senteces I quoted show a disturbing trend to consider software development as an english-only task, as english is the best know language in the world. So, following the same reasoning, any knowledge exchange made through internet should be made in english, and since any translation would be a waste of time, english will be the only mean to get any kind of knowledge or information.

I realize that this sounds kinda apocalyptic but, being a person who made the effort to learn several languages, do you know what I mean?
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
Xavi: I think I get your meaning, but I still completely disagree. The totality of human culture is far greater than technical discussions. If anything, a language used for discussing technology is going to be stifled by the subject matter.

For technology, the nuances of language are all but irrelevant, and it would be best to settle for a common standard, no matter which one. English is great, actually, because it's simple when restricted to such a narrow field.

But what I enjoy reading in English is Shakespeare or Lovecraft, not Brad Abrams (begging your pardon). My knowledge of French enables me to read Balzac, and my knowledge of Latin enables me to read Cicero. Those are constitutents of culture that I'd like to experience in the original -- not some French programmer talking about .NET (just to use an example). For those subjects, language doesn't matter and we might as well use English.
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
Wow -- I am right up there with Shakespeare and Lovecraft.. very cool ;-)
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
I think there's more finnish devs that communicate in english than english that talk finnish. So english it is. Or you prefer finnish?
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
hDrummer, I'm glad to see Ющенко's status is president too.
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
(and my deep apologies for the double post earlier, must've been sticky finger syndrome or something).
Anyway,
The slightly interesting thing about "wend" is that its past tense is still in frequent use: "went" (which originally was not part of "go" at all). Which I'm sure gave rise to lots of anguish for English language students.
Something very similar happened in French, where the descendants of Latin "esse" and "stare" were fused, whereas Spanish and Portuguese kept them separate (in both languagees as "ser" and "estar" respectively).

OK, that's enough of my relapse into language geekdom: for purposes other than writing code, the simple fact is that most people find it easier to understand a language other than their own than to express themselves clearly in it...so it depends a lot on your audience and how comfortable you are with the target language. If you're comfortable with English and have a reason to use it, that's fine, but someone who is not confident in English shouldn't feel compelled to use English when communicating with an audience of people who understand that person's native language well.

(I like reading French language websites such as www.codeppc.com, www.c2i.fr and www.pdafrance.com, because they expose me to technical vocabulary and jargon that I'd otherwise have no idea of (especially since most of it didn't even exist when I was a student). Good practice too).
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
Xavi, as I said: "I consider translating the resources on the Internet in several languages a serious waste of time.".

That's because instead of translating an article, or a tutorial sentence by sentence, this time could be spent doing something more useful like writing a whole new article on a different subject.
Furthermore, not being a native English speaker, I frequently see some technical books translated in my native language.
I must say I'm very confused by translated terms like 'structure', 'class', 'mirroring', 'instance', 'method' inside programming books. At least in my language, the equivalent to a technical term like that is very odd, and sometimes you figure out very hard that the author is referring to a method or to a constructor, for example.

Maybe computer translators will get smarter and smarter and hopefully there won't be necessary for people to translate (at least) technical documents to other languages.
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
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Anonymous
January 26, 2005
On any open source project there should always exist an agreement on the language to use to enable foreign programmers to understand/modify the code. Also in our international team at work we agreed to use english (working in the german slang speaking Liechtenstein). If the code is only local to a company that do not any international business then the natural language must not be an sometimes implicit) agreement. All the agreements I have seen yet are: use "english" overall, then later localize the UI and visual strings.<br><br>Just for fun: this.статус = _consumiManager.CaricaPerId("Müller");
Anonymous
January 26, 2005
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Anonymous
January 27, 2005
I've often wondered how foreign programmers (where the decimal point is represented with a comma) type in numbers in the source code. In other words, does the compiler recognize numbers such as 4,56 or does a decimal point always have to be a dot "." in source code.

Just something I've occasionally pondered.
Anonymous
January 27, 2005
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Anonymous
January 27, 2005
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Anonymous
January 28, 2005
I've had to maintain code written by German, Japanese, Russian, and Israeli programmers, and sometimes combinations of the above. No, they don't all speak English, I can tell you first-hand.
Anonymous
January 28, 2005
Joseph: Programming languages have a formal grammar that defines acceptable numerical input formats, and any formal grammar I've ever seen requires a dot/period for decimal numbers.
Anonymous
February 01, 2005
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Anonymous
February 01, 2005
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Anonymous
February 01, 2005
The best thing ever happend was that we ordered the devlopers to write everything in english - but they used german, polish, hungarian and english.
Anonymous
February 04, 2005
Does an Italian computer speak Italian? Brad Abram's blog gets hectic when he asks for sample .NET code in any language. The comments delve into some interesting discussions about the "universal language" of code, the hegemony English has in technical...
Anonymous
February 07, 2005
Please send me links or your comments.

I will start hiring in March.

Will compensate for placements.

Regards,

Stuart P Lindow
stuart.lindow@imsicorp.com
www.imsicorp.com
Anonymous
February 19, 2005
I'm from Russia :)
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Do all programmers speak english?

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