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Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

It's a great point, but I think as long as most programming languages are chiefly written in English (I think?), the web will still be "English".

Which I guess is a question I am curious about - how widespread is foreign-language programming language use? Like, instead of "while" it's "正在", etc.?

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As a data point, when I worked in Japan, most of the code was written in English (variable names included - the language was mostly Java or PHP), with heavy commenting in Japanese. Granted, this may have been swayed from the fact that they often worked with Indian developers, but also, a lot of technical language in Japanese is adopted from English. Popular languages there are the same as anywhere else - Ruby's creator is Japanese, and a high school student I know there was being subjected to COBOL.

There is a Japanese programming language, Mind, which is a stack language written entirely in Japanese, though I don't think it ever gained popularity. It's kind of sad there hasn't been more exploration into this - there's a lot less impedance mismatch in going from Japanese (or Korean) to postfix than there is going from English to prefix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...

I find English much more suitable for naming programming "objects" then Cyrillic languages. I think it's due to the lack of case system, tendency to short wording and even ability to short these already short words further.

I wonder would it be simple to name program "things" in Japanese?

Well, the accent in on the content, not on the means by which websites were created.

Code I have encountered that was made in France most often used French variable names and comments, and documented in French if required otherwise. It shows that the language in which programming keywords are didn't influence those programmers enough to change the language in which they were thinking. (If that's the argument you are trying to make)

The code and comments I've seen in Finland have always been in English. France is probably an exception, as they value their own language a lot.

As another data point, in the Netherlands, both variable names and comments are in (atrociously bad) English.

For the record, I meant *If not required otherwise.

Why do you expect that the dominant language on the web will be the same as the language the keywords of most programming are in?

The importance of what language the keywords of a programming language is miniscule compared to what language the majority of the code is written in (standard library and such). I mean, let's say, 20-60 keywords in a language... that vocabulary is tiny compared to all the variable-names that you're going to encounter in the actual code that uses that language.

Besides, if the designers of the language actually would bother, then it seems easy for them to make the tokens/keywords of the language costumizable.

Now I'm assuming that you actually meant the programming language itself, and not the programming language and all the code that eventually surrounds it.

Anyway, this seems like saying that most taxi-drivers will speak German as long as the maintenance manual of the car that the mechanics use are written in German.

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