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by saint-loup 2120 days ago
Are there any attempts to have it both ways?

Like, the source code stays in English but my IDE translates keywords to and from my language.

3 comments

That's exactly how Excel does it.

Personally, I don't like it. I prefer English function names.

However, the most annoying thing about Excel localisation is that the behaviour of CSV import/export changes depending on the OS locale setting. It doesn't even let you override it. You actually have to change the OS settings to get the English behaviour.

Might be wrong on this one but I thought that I had heard that this was not the case in earlier versions and if you opened a German excel file on a computer set to English it would fail.
If you made all keywords fit one character or so and allow selective installation of dictionaries, that would probably also decrease source code form size significantly! That would be great even if you never were to use any language other than English. I’ve played with APL a bit and found out that one can configure Emacs to replace APL’s cryptic symbols with English words using this: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PrettySymbol

APL is however not a language that one would consider using seriously.

Emacs also has prettify-symbols-mode, which by default replaces lambda with λ, but can do a lot more - it can make Python look like this! http://www.modernemacs.com/img/spacemacs/python-code.png

     that would probably also decrease source code form size significantly! 
I feel like, out of all the challenges facing software development today, "source code size" is probably not in the top 10,000 =)
Excel does this for function names. If you open a file in your localized copy all the names are translated.