Language of variable names? (native foreign language speakers)

Question

We are a spanish speaking development team, we code in django and we all are pretty fluent in english, as all documentation, sample code, APIs, etc come in english.

On our last project we chose to name all the variables, class names, modules, files and such in english, even though the whole application was in spanish, we kept a strings file where all our spanish was stored.

We did this because it seemed more natural to read the whole code in one language, since keywords, constructs and dependencies have names in english.

On new projects we are starting, we are having second thoughts about other teams mantaining our code or just having 3rd parties having to deal with templates or context in spanish.

Do you know of any best practice on this matter?

Answer 1

As your code is going to be used by others and maintained by another team you have to take their familiarity with English into consideration. If you think that they'll benefit from the variable names etc. being in Spanish then code them in Spanish.

It might be worth talking to the other teams to see what their views are.

Answer 2

Hi, I am a software developer and my native language is Spanish as well. As of today I have not used Spanish to name variables, etc... it is all in English since as you mentioned it, the rest of the code is in English anyways. I found this to be the best solution, none of the non-English speaking developers has ever complained or made a negative comment about it, in fact, the Spanish speaking developers say they welcome the all English code since it helps them to keep learning the language.

Answer 3

If there is the smallest possibility of the code being seen by non-Spanish speakers (and there is), you should use English names for everything.

See SO on Should all code be written in English