logoalt Hacker News

zabzonktoday at 2:43 AM3 repliesview on HN

i've always given the advice "program in english, comments, variables, function names, everything", and "always use a uk/us keyboard unless you absolutely have to enter localised strings, and even better get someone else to do that"


Replies

AnonCtoday at 3:18 AM

I’ve seen before that this is not followed in certain cases, such as the entire development team being in a specific country where some or many team members don’t know English (well enough). As an anecdote, I’ve seen a team in a large multinational company (US origin) in Spain that used function names, variable names, database table names (and column names), log message text and many other things in Spanish. English was only for the language keywords because that’s what the compiler would accept.

mbork_pltoday at 4:23 AM

I've been working with a codebase for a very specific domain where hardly anyone even knew the English terms for the domain-specific things (and some of them probably didn't even exist - highly localized customs etc.). No point in using English then.

cmwelshtoday at 3:08 AM

China disregards that and there is an absolutely massive ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software out there if you can read and write their code.

show 1 reply