No Stupid Questions

I have no clue but at the very least, a programmer names their own variables and, barring any special characters, they could be named in any language.

much easier to look for guidance for coding in english instead of my native language, syntax makes more sense too. Though personally i would wish more stuff was properly translated into finnish instead of english slowly gnawing at it.

I wrote variable names and comments in Spanish when I started as my English level back then was very low.

Once my English improved and started to use English documentation and tutorials I just switched to write in English.

In my previous job I worked at software consultancy, I had coworkers who wrote code in Spanish but it wasn’t the norm.

Currently I work for an international company, the team is Spanish but we have to write everything in English as it can be shared with teams in other countries and audited by international organisations.

When AI tools were allowed, a lot of people use them in Spanish, it generates code with comments in Spanish. I had to reject a lot of PRs from the same guys over an over because everything must be in English.

Russian here.

For the most part, it's all English. Not even romanized Russian in variable names, although that happens sometimes. Comments are mostly in Russian, though. Depending on the company and whether it has to deal with countries where Russian isn't as widespread, which is not a lot these days, that English can be a little difficult to understand once you start applying English language logic to it as opposed to basically writing Russian poorly translated to English. It's fine if the variables, classes and method names are short and offer little room for stringing words together, but anything complex poses risk of producing something that will be difficult to read without heavy Russian background and developed English skills (at both comprehending and producing).

However, there is a number of Russian-based programming language. I am fortunate to have never worked with any one of them. One of them is 1C:Enterprise, which is also a sizeable business for automation software and such.

Here's what it looks like. I can spot a couple of English words there, though. And having learned programming through English and English only, I actually find it more difficult to read, because Russian-native developers still often refer to things in English, even if there's a word for that same thing in Russian - it's just that much part of your programming work.

Never even heard of a programming language in Danish. Even the ones invented by danes are in english.

Preferably in English. Nothing is worse than reading code with a mixture of languages. Although false friends can also be quite annoying.

It depends honestly.

Key words like If, Match, Else, From, This ,etc will be in English, but variable names can be in any Unicode language as the var name gets converted to machine code after compilation.

Coding is all done in the language of the code... if, and, or, for, include, except, etc. It's not exactly a vast array of words you need to know to be able to code.

Also, I can only speak for Sweden, but I started learning english in third grade. These days they start in kindergarten. Basic stuff, days of the week, 1 through 10. But still.

As somebody with a friend who speaks Chinese as their first language, I know she often uses non-English file names, variable names, etc.

It's still standard Python and C++ though (and excellent code at that!), nothing esoteric.

The real deal isn't the language barrier but the keyboard layout. Most special characters usually used for coding are just perfectly at hand when using the US layout.

At one point i started buying US keyboards and use US-int layout, which i find easier to use than ES and latam.

Also air traffic control and commercial aviation radio communication are in English, worldwide.

I'm a native Spanish speaker, it depends on the language and the person.

Spanish has very few diacritics, so it's quite understandable in ASCII (áéíóúüñ). But I guess it would be a lot harder in other languages like Czech or Vietnamese.

When I program for myself or in public repos, I tend to code everything in English, but when I have to do projects with classmates at my university, I usually do it in Spanish because they are not great at English.

No chance, hungarian has non-ascii characters(ő and ű), digraphs(cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs) and a trigraph(dzs). Also generally how the language works is pretty disadvantegous to coding and tech. English has maaaany useful one syllable imperatives(get, click, etc), even with doors irl its often in english whether you pull or push cause hungarian doesnt really have these completely stateless verbs. One thing that did exist back in the day was people coding in german but i only know a single person who still does this.

i've seen both. there is german program code with german variable names and german comments. yeah, it sounds about as strange as it is.

// diese variable beschreibt den luftzug an den messrohren
var trötflöte = lese_zahl_aus(datenbank);

but it's rare. most people who work in IT in germany will write english variable names and english comments.

Well we learn to code in the programming language that the teacher choses, not in any natural language at all, so neither English nor our native languages.

But all significant programming languages that I know do have reserved control words that are taken from English. Maybe that is the direction of your question?

Then no, mostly we don't use specifically crafted or preprocessed programming languages just to have control words recognizable as words in our native languages

As for the variable names and natural language comments embedded in the code, that we create, that varies. I'd say as soon as interlingual collaboration or code sharing is a possibility, people will go for English in my experience. And I suspect that people who have gone for English before tend to stick to English even in their private use.

This is also related to learning materials, documentation of language features and libraries being available to the largest degree in English.

I perceive it as easier to stick to English, rather than to code switch between natural language while I program.

Most popular programming languages have English-language keywords and that can't be changed, so we certainly have to learn those.

How we learn to name symbols (variable/function names), that obviously depends on the programming course. But most real-world code has most symbols written in English with the possible exception of business-specific terminology that the business doesn't use in English. The same is true of comments.

Everyone should code in Armenian. Why? Because it would be funny.

There have been some interesting attempts to translate languages, but generally at most you would get phoneatically local names using English characters for functions and variables, etc.

We always code in English at work. Using our native language for programming is generally frowned upon.

About every programming language is based on English. Names for functions, objects, variables are based on personal, project, or company preferences. In reality you'll find these only in two languages as far as I've seen in the last decades: either English or Chinese. I've seen German and, sadly, French, but they are outliers.

Online: everything in English for me, except for some explanations sometimes but that's just at random as I'm a hobbyist/amateur.

Offline (a course I did): explanations in Portuguese (Brazil), we learned Portugol (programming language that uses Portuguese keywords) as an introduction then switched to C.

Hedy is a new programming language designed for pedagogy that can be localized to different languages.

https://hedy.org/