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Comment by jnurmine | Hacker News Reader

The Wikipedia list does not mention Tampio, an OO language where programs are written in proper Finnish: https://github.com/fergusq/tampio

As an example, here is kertoma.itp (an example routine to calculate a factorial):

  Pienen luvun kertoma on
      riippuen siitä, onko se pienempi tai yhtä suuri kuin yksi,
      joko yksi
      tai pieni luku kerrottuna pienen luvun edeltäjän kertomalla.
  
  Luvun edeltäjä on se vähennettynä yhdellä.
  
  Olkoon pieni muuttuja uusi muuttuja, jonka arvo on nolla.
  
  Kun nykyinen sivu avautuu,
      pieneen muuttujaan luetaan luku
      ja nykyinen sivu näyttää pienen muuttujan arvon kertoman.

It sounds basically like a small part of a mathematics lecture.

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The article also does not mention that not only Excel Formulas are localized, but VBA was localized in Office 95 as well [1].

This is German VBA:

    Funktion VorherigerGeschaeftstag(dt Als Datum) Als Datum
        Dim wd Als Integer
        wd = Wochentag(dt) ' Wochentag liefert 1 für Sonntag, 2 für Montag usw.

        Prüfe Fall wd
            Fall 1
                ' Auf Sonntag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zurückgegeben
                VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 2
            Fall 2
                ' Auf Montag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zurückgegeben
                VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 3
            Fall Sonst
                ' Andere Tage: vorheriges Datum wird zurückgegeben
                VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 1
        Ende Prüfe
    Ende Funktion

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications#...

The localisation of Excel goes even further. If I send a normal CSV file (that is, one containing values separated with actual commas and newlines) to an American, their Excel can open it.

If I send the same file to a fellow Dutchman, their Excel can't.

Excel, for some obscure reason lost in time, decreed that the Dutch do not, in fact, separate their comma-separated values with commas. We use semicolons. No one seems to know why Microsoft thinks we apparently do this. That means that a normal bog-standard CSV file won't work by just double-clicking it or opening it in Excel.

That's right: a Dutch comma-separated values file must have semi-colons according to Excel.

LibreOffice meanwhile works with anything you throw at it, in any language, of course. It'll just ask you about the separators, defaulting to commas.

It does now, so I guess someone has added it. :)

Which reminds me of 10+ years ago when I worked for a consultancy and often on site with one of its main clients. Both were originally Finnish but by then very large multinational enterprises.

Occasionally whilst doing some archaeology investigation of some internal libraries or old systems you encounter an ancient Java (or worse) library using Finnish class and methods names.

Usually confused the heck out of all of us as there never were a Finnish speaker on any of the projects I was on, and I was there for 6 years. But as much as a decompiled java program you can guess what it does, though not what it intended to do...

Using non-English in programming may have made a little sense when they were a smaller Finnish only company, but 10+ years later, many mergers and acquisitions etc and it really did not make sense any more .:)

Considering the offices I worked for them in Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen the development teams was all a mix of nationalities (Scandinavians, English, Belgian, Italian, Polish, Indian) using anything but English would have been silly by then.

Among natural-looking programming languages, my favorite currently is ArnoldC: https://github.com/lhartikk/ArnoldC

https://i.imgur.com/XGB5oLG.jpg

This is absolutely amusing. Seems that the creator of the Tampio language has created several esoteric languages, one of them being domain specific language Retki for writing interactive fiction. It is also based on Finnish language. https://www.kaivos.org/projektit.html

This is great. Google translate even turns it into meaningful English. And just as you observed, it comes across as someone explaining the process.

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