alt Hacker NewsYes but also no. The thing about software is that 90% of it is not culturally bound. If you're writing, say, some tax reporting tool, a grammar reference, or something religious… sure, it makes sense to write that in your language. So, yeah, C should support that.
However, everything else, from spreadsheet software to CAD tools to OS kernels to JavaScript frameworks is universal across cultures and languages. And for better or for worse (I'm not a native English speaker either), the world has gone with English for a lot of code commons.
And the thing with the examples in that post isn't about supporting language diversity, it's math symbols which are noone's native language. And you pretty much can't type them on any keyboard. Which really makes it a rather poor flex IMHO. Did the author reconfigure their keyboard layout for that specific math use case? It can't generically cover "all of math" either. Or did they copy&paste it around? That's just silly.
[…could some of the downvoters explain why they're downvoting?]
Replies
> […could some of the downvoters explain why they're downvoting?]
Because you made false assertions ("And you pretty much can't type them on any keyboard").
When I was doing a lot of Physics simulation in Julia, I had a Vim extension which would just allow me to type something like \gamma, hit tab, and get γ. This was worth the (minimal) hassle, because it made it very easy to spot check formulas. When you're shuffling data around in a loosely-described space like most of web dev, descriptive function and variable names are important because the description of what you're doing and what you're doing it too is the important information, and the actual operations you're taking are typically approximately trivial.
In heavily mathematical contexts, most of those assumptions get turned on their head. Anybody qualified to be modifying a model of electromagnetism is going to be intimately familiar with the language of the formulas: mu for permeability, epsilon for permittivity, etc. With that shared context,
1/(4*π*ε)*(q_electron * q_proton)/r^2 is going to be a lot easier to see, at a glance, as Coulombs law
compared to
1 / (4 * Math.Pi * permitivity_of_free_space)*(charge_electron * charge_proton)/distance_of_separation
Source code, like any other language built for humans, is meant to be read by humans. If those humans have a shared context, utilizing that shared context improves the quality and ease of that communication.