How are the chinese coding?

Question

Do they code in Latin?
Do they have their own programming language?

I'm just curious.

Answer 1

Why would they use any other tools like we do? I'm german myself and don't program in german either. But a good question.

Answer 2

I've got two native Chinese speakers on my team - I'll ask them personally on Tuesday if you don't get a good answer by then, but here's my initial guess.

Code is written in the standard programming languages, although comments (and perhaps variable names) could be written in Chinese. No use re-inventing the wheel (where "the wheel" is C++, Perl, Python, etc.) when you can just learn a few keywords.

Answer 3

I maintain the Korean IME (Input Method Editor) for Microsoft Windows and Office. Thus I work with Korean devs on a daily basis, Japanese devs regularly, and Chinese devs occasionally. We all code in C/C++.

I am most familiar with the code for the Korean IME. There are a few places with comments in Korean script (Hangul) where it is absolutely necessary, but even most comments are in English.

This may be because we are an international company, so we all need to communicate in a common language. Even emails are usually sent in English. However, when I verbally speak with my Korean co-workers, it's almost always in Korean.

Although C/C++ reserved words are also "English" words, they have their own very specific meaning and end up becoming part of a language that isn't even really "English," per se.

edit: Incidentally, I was just listening to the stackoverflow podcast (#29, I think) where a similar question came up. Joel said the scripting language in Excel was localizable (reserved words changed to the local language.)

Answer 4

Most of the commonly used language are English-based, and most of them are so to appeal to an international audience. Some countries do actually have their own personalized/localized programming languages. Here is a list of some of them: Wikipedia: Non-English based programming languages

Looks like there is a version of BASIC called Chinese Basic. I'd be surprised if it's used on the same scale as other widely used languages at the moment :)

Answer 5

In mainland China at least virtually everyone of an age to be getting a job programming already knows Pinyin--a version of their language set into our alphabet. Also, you have to know it to type anything into the computer as that's how the input editor works.

Thus it seems to me a trivial step to use the standard keywords--why in the world would they make a different version of the language in order to get around this?? The inconvenience of their code not being interchangeable would far exceed the tiny advantage to not having to deal with reserved words not in their script.

Answer 6

To answer the exact questions asked: For the most part, they code in "English" (that is, they code in the exact same version of the programming languages used in the U.S., with English-based keywords and so on). However, there are some programming languages that cater to Chinese to varying degrees. As one commenter mentioned, ChinesePython is one.

However, I think there is more to the endeavor of programming than just producing source code. For the perspective of someone who has lived in Shanghai for years and worked with programmers there during that time, I think this blog article is an extremely good one.

For further references on Stack Overflow, not necessarily about Chinese in particular:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/288061/do-there-exist-any-compilers-with-localized-versions-of-programming-languages
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/667720/truly-multi-lingual-programming-languages
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/202723/coding-in-other-spoken-languages
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/250824/do-you-use-another-language-instead-of-english
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/440052/should-identifiers-and-comments-be-always-in-english-or-in-the-native-language-of