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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

The most likely German candidate would be 'sonst', which would be both in common use and short enough for a programming language keyword. E.g. the most likely option for 'if-then-else' is 'wenn-dann-sonst', assuming that German-origin theory is right of course.

One thing that's mostly forgotten today is that German had a very rich 'corpus' of wonderful nerdy computer science words up until the 1990s which unfortunately has fallen out of fashion. Nowadays it's a pretty terrible 'pidgin dialect' when Germans talk about programming and computers to each other (to a point where it's much less awkward to just speak English in the first place lol).

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Not sure what the original German version was, but

falls-dann-sonst

would be more correct, since "wenn" is temporal, like the English "when".

Many Germans often use these wrongly in everyday speech, but mathematicians like Friedrich L. Bauer probably wouldn't.

Yeah, but "wenn-dann-sonst" rolls better off the tongue ;)

As a German, my experience is that the typical use of "wenn" is more often synonymous to the English "if", rather than the English "when". The meaning of "wenn" is contextual. Using "wenn" to for conditionals is not a mistake of everyday speech but rather a feature of the language.

The other German word "falls" is sometimes also translated as "if" but it carries a slightly different connotation. In typical use "falls" is used for an unlikely condition: "falls es morgen regnen sollte" -> "if it were to rain tomorrow". If "wenn" was used instead of "falls", the connotation would be more like a 50/50 probability. In the end, the if/when split of English is really not the same as the falls/wenn split of German. For computer programming "wenn" would likely have been preferred by German programmers.

I always understood "falls" as "in case" (as in, preparing for a slightly unlikely outcome), but my German is weak.

Yeah, you can expand "falls" to "in dem Falle, dass".

Interesting. As a native speaker I always thought that "wenn" for the conditional case was only colloquial, but I couldn't find any real evidence for that. So, you are right about that and also about what you said for "falls".

> since "wenn" is temporal, like the English "when".

Nope, "wenn" is both "if" and "when", it's not limited to time.

Nitpick: "wenn" is both temporal and conditional, whereas "falls" is only conditional, therefore it is considered good style to use "falls" if you want to make totally clear what you mean. It is, however, perfectly fine to use "wenn" for a konditionalen Nebensatz.

I worked on a GIS system in a german speaking company, it was very confusing, it was mostly programmed in english, apart from the things we we’re modelling, which had extremely specific and often long german names.

Also the rest of the remainder-case definition looks like a typical mathematical "Fallunterscheidung" in German.

Fall a1): Es gilt ... falls x < 0,

Fall a2): Es gilt ... falls x = 0,

Fall a3): Es gilt ... sonst.

Definitely have seen it written like that in mathematical proofs, you can even leave "Es gilt" and just write your proposition. On paper I would probably have placed a Halmos after sonst due to muscle memory lol.

Also if you threaten somebody with an "or else..." it works the same in German "sonst..."

As a non-native speaker of both English and German, I feel a little difference in usage. I liked this bit of slop:

‘The most significant nuanced departure is that "sonst" can mean "normally," "usually," or "in general," contrasting a specific event against a baseline of normality. "Else" cannot do this.’

There is an etymological root to ‘sonst’ that is also the root of English ‘thus’. The German explanation would fit well in this story (but indeed no evidence presented).

Hmm, to me as native speaker, 'sonst' has pretty much only one meaning which is pretty much exactly 'or else'. There's a longer and 'more archaic' version 'ansonsten'.

Forgive me for trying it out on you:

“Er trinkt heute Kaffee, sonst trinkt er nur Tee.”

It's often used for more immediate 'consequences', like "Ich muß los, sonst verpass ich meinen Zug" (I need to leave, otherwise I'll miss my train).

Still remembering the Kellerautomat from my CS class...

EDV - maybe a less glitzy term for "tech" - is still used occasionally by Gen-Xers.

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