What are some possibly unique development standards in your country?

Question

What are some possibly unique development standards in your country? In general Information on the internet is focused around practices, standards and current programming tendencies in western countries, specifically the U.S.A.

However that tends to be "biased" as one might say. So it'd be fun if developers overseas could compile some standards that might cause American Programmers "culture shock" if they were to come to develop for a normal local company in your country.

Note: The purpose of the question isn't meant for only BAD practices and such. Many times these local practices are well suited to the local mind-set and not doing them could even be considered strange. Even better might would be some local practices that if done, say in the U.S.A, could benefit programmers.

Answer 1

I'm not even sure if this differs much from what you do in the US but here goes:

At least here in Sweden companies tend to have a mix of English and Swedish versions of their OS so localization will come and bite you if you don't keep your eyes open about it. Like if floats are written with a comma or a period. And as Swedish is a bit of a minority language we tend to build language support into our applications very early on. Customized error messages to protect from cryptic ones in English or the other way around if our entire application is in English.

Code comments and documentation is usually in English everywhere I've worked. Variable names are also usually English so no difference there.

Answer 2

In Ireland, good web developers will keep an eye on web accessibility standards. As far as I know, legislation in many countries puts a responsibility on businesses to make their premises and websites accessible. While this is not usually enforced, any person with a disability could take a business to court for failing to be accessible, and the simplest way to prove that a website is inaccessible is to show that it fails HTML validation by the W3C Markup Validation service. Therefore, it may be negligent for a web development company to produce invalid markup.

Answer 3

In Japan, contrary to many other countries, less than half of the developers speak english. So all comments (the few you may find) are in Japanese, this happens even at fairly international companies, Which means that source code (good one of course) tends to be very literate, and comments are fairly rare except for what's necessary for documentation tools.

Thus by the same token foreign developers can't rely on comments to explain their code, because no one will read them, so in an unspoken way code literacy is enforced at most shops.

Answer 4

My experience:

In Asia: Bias toward results. Standards only considered after-the-fact. Not very proactive, e.g. let the customer find the problem.

In Europe: More respect for standards. More of a bias toward OO, especially in Scandinavia. This put them ahead of the curve 20 years ago, but behind the curve today. Tend to be more proactive with finding errors versus just shipping.

The USA: Somewhere between Asia and Europe in terms of importance of formal standards. More like Asia than Europe in setting ship dates, i.e. aggressive. Definitely more friendly to out-of-the-box thinking than either. Most post-OO, post-Waterfall thinking is being done here, e.g. Extreme Programming, for example.