On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 23:57:01 UTC, Peter Williams wrote:
> On 30/05/13 08:40, Entry wrote:
>> My personal opinion is that code should only be in English.
>
> But why would you want to impose this restriction on others?
>
> Peter

I wouldn't say impose. I'd say that programming in a unified language (D) should not be sabotaged by comments and variable names in various human languages (Swedish, Russian), but be accompanied by a similarly 'unified' language that we all know - English. It is only my opinion though and I wouldn't force it upon anyone.

On Thursday, 30 May 2013 at 08:32:01 UTC, Entry wrote:
> On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 23:57:01 UTC, Peter Williams wrote:
>> On 30/05/13 08:40, Entry wrote:
>>> My personal opinion is that code should only be in English.
>>
>> But why would you want to impose this restriction on others?
>>
>> Peter
>
> I wouldn't say impose. I'd say that programming in a unified language (D) should not be sabotaged by comments and variable names in various human languages (Swedish, Russian), but be accompanied by a similarly 'unified' language that we all know - English. It is only my opinion though and I wouldn't force it upon anyone.

But programming IS a human tool, and thus, subject to human language.

Also, I don't see how a programming language is any more unified than, say, a library.

While you wouldn't force it on anyone, would it also be your opinion that putting a French book in a french library be a sabotage of the world's librarial institutions?

On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 22:42:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/29/2013 3:26 AM, qznc wrote:
>> Once I heared an argument from developers working for banks. They coded
>> business-specific stuff in Java. Business-specific meant financial concepts with
>> german names (e.g. Vermögen,Bürgschaft), which sometimes include äöüß. Some of
>> those concept had no good translation into english, because they are not used
>> outside of Germany and the clients prefer the actual names anyways.
>
> German is pretty easy to do in ASCII: Vermoegen and Buergschaft

What about Chinese? Russian? Japanese? It is doable, but I can tell you for a fact that they very much don't like reading it that way.

You know, having done programming in Japan, I know that a lot of devs simply don't care for english, and they'd really enjoy just being able to code in Japanese. I can't speak for the other countries, but I'm sure that large but not spread out countries like China would also just *love* to be able to code in 100% Madarin (I'd say they wouldn't care much for English either).

I think this possibility is actually a brilliant feature that could help popularize the language oversees, especially in teaching courses, or the private sector. Why not turn down a feature that makes us popular?

As for research/university, I think they are already global enough to stick to English anyways.

No matter how I see it, I can only see benefits to keeping it, and downsides to turning it down.

On Thu, 30 May 2013 11:36:42 +0200, monarch_dodra <monarchdodra@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 22:42:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 5/29/2013 3:26 AM, qznc wrote:
>>> Once I heared an argument from developers working for banks. They coded
>>> business-specific stuff in Java. Business-specific meant financial concepts with
>>> german names (e.g. Vermögen,Bürgschaft), which sometimes include äöüß. Some of
>>> those concept had no good translation into english, because they are not used
>>> outside of Germany and the clients prefer the actual names anyways.
>>
>> German is pretty easy to do in ASCII: Vermoegen and Buergschaft
>
> What about Chinese? Russian? Japanese? It is doable, but I can tell you for a fact that they very much don't like reading it that way.
>
> You know, having done programming in Japan, I know that a lot of devs simply don't care for english, and they'd really enjoy just being able to code in Japanese. I can't speak for the other countries, but I'm sure that large but not spread out countries like China would also just *love* to be able to code in 100% Madarin (I'd say they wouldn't care much for English either).
>
> I think this possibility is actually a brilliant feature that could help popularize the language oversees, especially in teaching courses, or the private sector. Why not turn down a feature that makes us popular?
>
> As for research/university, I think they are already global enough to stick to English anyways.
>
> No matter how I see it, I can only see benefits to keeping it, and downsides to turning it down.

Now if only we had the C preprocessor:

#define 如果 if
#define 直到 while

(Note: this is what Google Translate told me was good. I do not speak,
read or otherwise understand chinese)

-- 
Simen

On Thursday, 30 May 2013 at 09:36:43 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
> What about Chinese? Russian? Japanese? It is doable, but I can tell you for a fact that they very much don't like reading it that way.
>
> You know, having done programming in Japan, I know that a lot of devs simply don't care for english, and they'd really enjoy just being able to code in Japanese. I can't speak for the other countries, but I'm sure that large but not spread out countries like China would also just *love* to be able to code in 100% Madarin (I'd say they wouldn't care much for English either).

What about poor guys from other country that will support that project after? English is a de-facto standard language for programming for a good reason.

On Thursday, 30 May 2013 at 10:13:46 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On Thursday, 30 May 2013 at 09:36:43 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
>> What about Chinese? Russian? Japanese? It is doable, but I can tell you for a fact that they very much don't like reading it that way.
>>
>> You know, having done programming in Japan, I know that a lot of devs simply don't care for english, and they'd really enjoy just being able to code in Japanese. I can't speak for the other countries, but I'm sure that large but not spread out countries like China would also just *love* to be able to code in 100% Madarin (I'd say they wouldn't care much for English either).
>
> What about poor guys from other country that will support that project after? English is a de-facto standard language for programming for a good reason.

Well... defacto: "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law".

Besides, even in english, there are use cases for unicode. Such as math (Greek symbols).

And even if you are coding in english, that don't mean you can't be working on a region specific project, that requires the identifiers to have region-specific names (AKA, German banking reference).

Finally, english does have a few (albeit rare) words that can't be expressed with ASCII. For example: Möbius. Sure, you can write it "Mobius", but why settle for wrong, when you can have right?

--------

I'm saying that even if I agree that code should be in English (which I don't completly agree with), it's still not a strong argument against unicode in identifiers. In this day and age, it seems as arbitrary to me as requiring lines to not exceed 80 chars. That kind of shit belongs in a coding standard.

On 05/29/2013 12:03 PM, Marco Leise wrote:
> ...  And everyone
> likes "alias ℕ = size_t;", right? :)
> ...

No, that's deeply troubling.

On 30 May 2013 18:32, Entry <no@no.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 23:57:01 UTC, Peter Williams wrote:
>
>> On 30/05/13 08:40, Entry wrote:
>>
>>> My personal opinion is that code should only be in English.
>>>
>>
>> But why would you want to impose this restriction on others?
>>
>> Peter
>>
>
> I wouldn't say impose. I'd say that programming in a unified language (D) should not be sabotaged by comments and variable names in various human languages (Swedish, Russian), but be accompanied by a similarly 'unified' language that we all know - English. It is only my opinion though and I wouldn't force it upon anyone.
>

On 30 May 2013 18:32, Entry <no@no.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 23:57:01 UTC, Peter Williams wrote:
>
>> On 30/05/13 08:40, Entry wrote:
>>
>>> My personal opinion is that code should only be in English.
>>>
>>
>> But why would you want to impose this restriction on others?
>>
>> Peter
>>
>
> I wouldn't say impose. I'd say that programming in a unified language (D) should not be sabotaged by comments and variable names in various human languages (Swedish, Russian), but be accompanied by a similarly 'unified' language that we all know - English. It is only my opinion though and I wouldn't force it upon anyone.
>

We don't all know English. Plenty of people don't.
I've worked a lot with Sony and Nintendo code/libraries, for instance, it
almost always looks like this:

{
  // E: I like cake.
  // J: ケーキが好きです。
  player.eatCake();
}

Clearly someone doesn't speak English in these massive codebases that power an industry worth 10s of billions.

On 30 May 2013 20:13, Dicebot <m.strashun@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 30 May 2013 at 09:36:43 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
>
>> What about Chinese? Russian? Japanese? It is doable, but I can tell you for a fact that they very much don't like reading it that way.
>>
>> You know, having done programming in Japan, I know that a lot of devs simply don't care for english, and they'd really enjoy just being able to code in Japanese. I can't speak for the other countries, but I'm sure that large but not spread out countries like China would also just *love* to be able to code in 100% Madarin (I'd say they wouldn't care much for English either).
>>
>
> What about poor guys from other country that will support that project after? English is a de-facto standard language for programming for a good reason.
>

Have you ever worked on code written by people who barely speak English? Even if they write English words, that doesn't make it 'English', or any easier to understand. And people often tend to just transliterate into latin, which is kinda pointless too, how does that help?