I hate to “pull-up” a Wiki answer but knock yourself out. Programing in non-English

Thanks. I wonder how hard it would be to make a language multilingual, with the user having the option of choosing which language to use. The number of commands is fairly limited, so I don’t think that compiling would be much of a problem if there are no errors. The biggest nuisance might be translating all of the possible error messages.

Translating the language is the easy part. Translating the millions of existing API calls, framework calls, and libraries out there would be an insane amount of work.

Look at it this way; most of the places that have a need for computer programmers are places where English is either predominant or a fairly ubiquitous second language.

However, there are languages like Brainfuck that are not based on English… or sanity.

Yes, for the same reason relevant scientific discoveries are published in English. You need to keep the whole software life cycle in mind. One never knows who will read a program five years later and potentially change it. In the 90ies many companies still made the mistake to allow programmers write comments in their native language, or worse create identifiers in their native language, like private static void Zinsberechnung(int[] Ueberziehungskreditkonditionen) which created all sorts of problems later on. Now what is this function supposed to be doing? You tell me.

Matt, Although a bit unwieldy, I am assuming those are proper German words. Is English so prevalent that it should be used as a common language?

@LostInParadise – Yes, they are. They’re about calculating interest rates. In the IT world, like in science, English is prevalent. Many students participate in open source programming projects and almost all of them consist of international teams. When they graduate and join companies, they find IT departments tied to international software vendors and offshore developers.

When biologists communicate on a global level they use Latin, not English, to uniquely identify species. It’s an agreement. But when you talk to your neighbor, you won’t say: my canis lupus just peed in my living room. Likewise when two German programmers talk about their programs they would still use terms like Zinsberechnung and Ueberziehungskreditkonditionen.