this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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This looks like the final layer of hell. Your coworker writes their scripts in another language and now you have to decipher what the hell they mean. Who has a problem woth English for development tools, etc.? It's really not a monumental task to learn it, and I'm not even a native speaker.
May I introduce you to the concept of Microsoft Excel?
One time, someone from HR asked me, if I could help them with an Excel formula. So, I quickly looked up how to do something like that in Excel, adapted it as needed on my laptop, then sent it to them. And well, it didn't work on their system, because I coded it in English, whereas their OS was in German.
Yep, this sort of behaviour translates to Windows paths also. Why would they name a directory "C:\Users\Example\Desktop", when they can replace "Desktop" with a locale-specific name, which is not just a link to "Desktop", but a completely different directory which breaks any scripts expecting "Desktop".
We know MS well, their choice is clear :)
It's just........... Why?
Was there a thought process applied here at all? Worse still is that many of these localised paths are actually lies. They still use the original developer version in order to not break compatibility with programs, but refuse to admit it in the explorer. It's maddening.
Yep, and when you try to troubleshoot shit, it all falls apart and you can't really tell what's going on under the hood...
FUCK whoever thought translating Excel formulas was a good idea. It is the most infuriating shit. Everything I learnt in English is now useless, without googling every fucking function every single time. Fucking idiots.
Even if everyone is using English, there will be cultural differences. I used to work at a company which had a lot of indian externals working on their code base. Whenever I had to work on a mainly Indian developed project i had to get used to how they wrote things. Usually things where named a bit different. Not by much, but enough tho throw me off a couple of times before i got used to it.
IMPORTANT: I am not shitting on how they used English, merely pointing out that they used it differently from how i would have expected.
In this case they were still using English, with minor differences. Imagine one of the Indian externals writing an internal script that utilizes the Indian localisation. You'd have to whip out a translator or dive into the docs for a tool which you may have already used countless times and know how it works when instead, they could have simply learned the English arguments for the tool.
Nothing against people not being native speakers of English, I'm not one either. I just think that this creates more problems than it solves.
I agree with you, that even the devil would run away from localised scripts.
Just pointing out that even if everyone is using English, there will be differences. These differences can make it hard enough - no need for more stuff on top.
To be fair, sometimes I look at my own code and think it was done in another language, and I only know English.
The 3 AM programming syndrome. I know it very well :D
Just happens at any time of day for me
I’ve never met this man in my life.
Wouldn't it be easy to convert the code to any language if this was the case though? Any human-language programming is already an abstraction, so why can't a programming language be abstracted to more than one human language? Literally just swap the command words out for words in the other language, seems like something modern IDEs can trivially do if a language like that existed.
Also, non-English speaking countries exist. Some have actually developed programming languages in their own language so the idea of non-English programming isn't exactly unheard of. There is no reason that code that won't be edited by English speakers should always be written in English, it's not like it's the one perfect human language for interfacing with computers or anything. So I suspect that should this become a reality, you wouldn't even notice anything's changed unless you live in a non-English speaking country. Either way your company can still always just require code to be in English, the same way companies have requirements for formatting and software design philosophies.
All code should be written in Esperanto, the international auxillary language!
I prefer Klingon. I's a more threatening language which keeps the computer in line.
Black speech all the way. I believe the hellfire of Mt. Doom will cleanse all bugs, and I will die on this volcano so fight me on it.
Not particularly, because compilers rely on very explicit syntax to parse. And languages are all structured very differently grammatically speaking.
You don't even have to learn English, you just memorize a few flags/keywords, no complex grammar or anything.