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Comment by iExploder | Hacker News Reader

not sure about specifics in training but I had quite a lot of fun reading regular c++ code with variables in english only to scroll and find pages of comments in foreign language like russian or japanese...

another fun with languages happens when coders for whatever reason insist on naming their variables using fusion of english and other language, such as "HornyWidget" (horny means upper in my language)

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MPlayer is originally a Hungarian project and IIRC the code suffered a bit from comments being written in Hungarian, which no one but Hungarians understand.

But that was around 2002 or so. IDK if it is so today. Probably not.

even their main website was full of hungarian IIRC which was difficult for me :)

I interviewed at a Dutch company that had offices in Paris and the French programmers insisted in using French for all identifiers. Effectively it was job security for them.

I worked for a startup where the working language is French and the management mandated that all code and comments were to be written in English. Their justification was that the most likely exit would be by being acquired by an English speaking (ie American) company and that they wouldn't buy assets that couldn't be worked on by English coders.

Having worked at companies in both languages I didn't notice much difference in style. One thing that was pointed out to me is that trends and practices (TTD, agile etc.) take longer to reach the francosphere and that French companies are always X years behind their Silicon Valley contemporaries.

A Dutch company I worked for had much of their legacy code with Dutch words throughout. It was rather challenging to onboard international non-Dutch colleagues.

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