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by Darthbuddha 705 days ago
I really think the worst problem in programming is language. If you don't speak English basically youre doomed.
5 comments

I believe you never had a pleasure to work with translated Excel commands.

https://www.excelfunctions.eu/

Thanks, I hate it.
English is the current lingua franca, so to speak, of the computing world.

If it changes to another language, then I guess I'll have to learn how to use the new language professionally, much as an opera singer might have to learn how to sing in Italian/German/French/etc.

Though there are computer languages like APL or Scratch. Or Lisp/Scheme and Forth, which are only marginally English-like (though their libraries may depend on English literacy.)

AppleScript is an interesting language which had English, French and Japanese dialects.

English helps a lot, just like Latin helps in medicine. But there's plenty of material available in eg German to get you started.

(German is just the language I have the most familiarity with. I don't know how the programming material available stacks up to other non-English languages.)

I don't think that's a bug. I think that's a rather nice feature that programmers all over the world can talk to each other. Programs are written for other programmers to read and only incidentally for a computer to execute.
I feel the same way. Modern science standardized around English and I don't mind programming standardizing around English also.
> I don't mind programming standardizing around English also.

Will you mind when everything re-standardizes around Chinese?

Given China's ongoing demographic collapse [0] it is unclear how that could happen, not to mention why.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-population...

If and when that ever happens I'll be dead by then, so no :)

But I hope humans of the future can standardize around something. It's better than the alternative.

I say dash but the military / defence peeps say tac, drives me nuts.