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Non-English speaking programmers, do you write your comments in your native language? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I ask because sometimes I feel very silly when writing clumsily in English and even sillier when I have to look up how to spell a particular word.

I want to know if I'm the only idiot that it happens to or if on the contrary it's something generalized.

(Mi idioma es el Español, por cierto)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That depends, actually.

In general, I try to keep everything English, since we do have some international colleagues.

However, I work with a bunch of projects that have some legal/administrative background and certain words have very precisely defined meanings, that can't be easily translated (at least not in one word, so that the next guy can back-translate the word). So in these cases, I sometimes write comments that explain the domain problem in German, because it's much much easier and whoever touches that code better understand the German terms or screw everything up. Unfortunately class and method names are often a weird language mix.

It's not a perfect solution, but given the legal complexities behind seemingly simple words, it's the best of the worst.

[–] gentooer 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's an interesting perspective. Do you think it would be better to have separate legal documentation in German, which you then can refer to in your comments?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

That would be a way to get rid of German comments, sure. But it's also another layer of hassle. Usually, the comments are just a few lines to explain weird behavior.

The naming problem is nearly unsolvable, though. Unless you want to map every concept to a random string, but that's not feasible either.