I know that the "native" language of programming is English, but I was wondering on how many programmers dare to write the development comments/documentation in a language other than English or on the contrary take extra burden of using English everywhere to make their code international.
UPDATE: The general wisdom is (based on the answers so far): Always use English.
I used to write developer docs in English, but my colleagues, some of whose language skills are really not that good, had problems with it, so I write docs in my mother tongue now.
Just recently turned out one of your projects is to be translated into a different language and the new customer obviously requires English-written docs. So, you never know where your code might end up. This really makes me reconsider whether it's better to write the docs in my mother tongue or not.
Yap, Thats the way it works. It is stranger though to declare variables in another language since the language syntax is in English. You end up, in my case, with a span-glish statement declaration.
When I was young and doing Visual Basic and VBA programs, I wrote the comments and identifiers in French.
Now, when I read this code, I am slightly shocked, it seems... unnatural! :-)
I think lot of beginners tend to write code using their mother tongue: somehow, it is difficult enough to understand and memorize the new programming language, without expressing thoughts in a foreign tongue. I see that in the Processing forum, for example.
Now, in an Internet era, where you search information or look for help, you often have to show code, and be understood by others. You might find a programming forum in your language, but you will maximize your chances by using English.
At work, there is no question, English is mandatory to write code (comments, identifiers, even if sometime I see some strange constructs/words...), but also for commit comments, bug reports, specifications and user manual. This is even more stressed out by the fact my company is international, with people (testers, help desk, etc.) in UK, USA, Taiwan, etc. and international clients.
i have a friend (English) thats works in Spain for EA games. He says its a nightmare, although keyworks are still in English, the varaible names are all over the place. Some in spanish and some in english, and even combinations of both!
We do our documentation in our native tongue (Norwegian), except for code that goes into libraries that could be used by others.
I am from Thailand. Most of the employers in my country require English documentations. However, the English language skill of our programmers is not very strong in average, IMO. So, if English documentations are not required, we write them in our native language to avoid misinterpretation.
By the way, I have seen very few source code's comment in native language. I think most of us would like to keep our code in plain English as much as possible :)
Back a long time ago, I suggested to my friends in Germany that we convert the RATFOR compiler to use German keywords. The reaction was generally shock and laughter.
In Spain, both happened.
Company 1 (most companies are like this): Most variable names that were not general concepts like "stack" and "screen" and all documentation was written in the local language. This was also true in Italy.
This was nice because it was easy to tell which code was ours.
Company 2 (the international companies or wannabees): We did everything in English including code and documentation. We also wrote courses in English. Which of course led to some very funny, non-native English.
I write everything in english, even small tests i do at home..i guess its just the power of habit:)
You might find the discussion in this similar recent popular question of value.
Not really answering your question, but... Being American, I'm sensitive that it's easy for English-speakers to get a bit complacent or anglo-centric, that everybody else should have to learn to work in my language, and not only that, be expected to understand its idioms. For better or worse, now with the whole world talking together, one language tends to get picked as the "lingua programmatica".
It depends in a couple of things. First off who is paying for the project. In my currently ongoing project the client has specifically requested spanish comments (which are also source of documentation through doxygen).
On the other end, if you are planning on working in an open source project or if your potential customers do not share your mother tongue you should clearly go for english.
For the rest of situations, you can decide what you feel most comfortable with, which in my case has always been english.
Code is not just an artifact that is generated by programmers to create software. It is a means of communication about what the software does, how it does and is essential to be 'friendly' for it to be extended/modifed/updated/improved/revamped/refactored/maintained. Think of code the same way you think about other means of communicating about your software. Once you have that mindset, you'll be able to answer that question more approriately.
I work at an Israeli branch of an international corporation. The only things that aren't in English are verbal discussions, such as meetings or coffee corner conversation. Code, E-mail and even IM are in English. In fact, in the very common case that there are people from abroad even meetings are in English.
I work in Austria and except for very, very few exceptions I (and the company I work in) write everything in English.
For one it's a question of vocabulary: There are many terms that would need to be translated from English, since the source is English. And translating them makes it unnecessarily inaccessible, since even native German speakers know the English term better than their German translations.
The second reason is consistency: It's a pain in the butt to have one part of the documentation in one language and another one in another language. And since very few projects are really self-contained and reference nothing else it's a lot easier to just go with the linuga franca.
The only time I write German code is when the customer explicitly requests it. For code it is best to avoid this, in my opinion. Development documentation is almost never written in German, but end-user documentation sometimes needs to be.
My code is always in English, because English words are, in average, shorter than Spanish ones. And I hate code that is in mixed English-(insert local language here), so choosing the language that yields the shortest token for every variable or function name is not an option.
However, when I write documentation, most of the time I have to write it in Spanish.
"dare to write"? I would think at my workplace it would be daring indeed not to write the documentation in Dutch as it's only intended to be used here.
I'm a Croatian Developer. My experience so far (surmised from my work and the work of others I've seen or talked with them too) is :
In my opinion it is unecessary, and in some cases donwright damaging to the quality of the project to write code and documentation in English when is reasonably to expect that the only persons working on the code and reading the documentation are local speakers. The reason for this conclusions that is most likely that the majority or some team members will be poor english speakers and poor writers, who will only genereate unreadable code and documentation.
Plust there is always the extra overhead of writing and thinking in a language different then your own.
The problem with English and non-english documentation or code occurs when English speaking (native or non , in this case the point is that the persons don not speak the native code of the team) come in working contact with the code and documentation. In that case there are two solutions (and problems):
For me (living in Estonia), the ability to write code in English is an elementary skill of a programmer. I can't consider anyone a serious programmer if he can't read and write English at some average level.
I think most of the software-companies around here understand that and almost everyone requires some competency in English.
But documentation is a harder nut to crack. While for international companies the choice is pretty simple, for the local ones, who develop only to the local clients, the situation is not so straight-forward.
Even though I'm French, I started programming at 14 back in '81 and at that time, everything programming-related was in English more or less. So I started writing & programming in English and haven't stopped since. My computer are all running with English menus... At $WORK, in an multi-curtural environment (I work for a european agency), it makes sense to use English and that includes programming becuase you never know who will read your code and documentation and specially what is their language.
Here in the Philippines, we always use English for business documentation (programming or otherwise), as well as in email, which has been the case since the American colonial period. Verbal and IM communication are be done in our local language.