OT: Programmers whos first language is not English

[Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz]

On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 11:21:36AM +0000, Stephen Horne wrote:
> One thing I'm considering is the use of a non-ASCII source code.

Be aware, you face a terrible death.

> I'm quite curious what other people think about this kind of idea -
> particularly people whose first language is not English.

Your ideas periodically appear somewhere around me, both
in unofficial and official proposals even from well known
organizations. The result is that these ideas suck, and I talk from
seing failing projects, not from personal preference:

1) You may need special tools depending on your language, forcing
people to a specific environment.

2) Code written in a language looks bad mixed with another
one. Where's the advantage of using a keyword in your native language
when 85% of the code is calls to a library written in english you
don't have control over?

3) You prevent people not able to speak the language from
contributing it. Certainly this happens with english too,
but nowadays it is the lowest common denominator for computer
programming. Esperanto might want to change that, a herculean effort,
an even then it's not your native language.

4) It doesn't matter what language you choose: soon programmers
start using abbreviatures in function/variable names which don't
mean anything even to other native programmers.

Your idea is nice in that the source code would store the identifiers
and the editor would show them in your preferred language. The bad
thing is that it won't be able to do that with the function/variable
names a programmer will write.