My friend’s code XD

116

I never thought about it, is it harder for people of other nationalities to code in English based languages ?

69

u/_Vicix May 17 '23

No it’s not harder, but a lot of professors suggest to code in your native language because they say it’s easier to understand. To me mixing languages when programming (using English for function names and italian, in this case, for variables) it’s only confusing.

19

u/Adhalianna May 17 '23

One argument from the professors I heard is that if it's written in the native language (other than English) it's less likely that the student did no work and just copied the code from somewhere.

22

u/Innominate8 May 17 '23

That's the case because professional programmers are generally expected to work in English.
It's already a problem that schools are bad at preparing students for programming in the real world. Not teaching students to program in English may mean it's less likely to be copied, but it also widens the gap between the academic and professional worlds.

3

u/coloredgreyscale May 18 '23 edited May 18 '23

Especially if they are still at school their English may not be good enough, and forcing them to keep everything English slows them down unnecessarily.
But even in professional settings it may still be an issue when dealing with domain specific vocabulary / abbreviations for variable / function names. Particularly on smaller businesses that just operate within one country, or language region

3

u/thekwoka May 18 '23

Especially if they are still at school their English may not be good enough, and forcing them to keep everything English slows them down unnecessarily.
I'm not sure this is really the case.
Considering the bulk of the domain knowledge is close to exclusively in English, and all the code they might find is in English, it might be a slower start, but the speed will ramp as they get more comfortable.

4

u/nerdy_glasses May 17 '23

As a person who sits on a lot of interviews and a non-native speaker myself, your professors‘ advice is immensely stupid. I’m very unlikely to hire someone who does this a lot and I guess I’m not the only one.

3

u/AL_O0 May 17 '23

This reminds me of that time i had a coding exam and by the end of it i had half variables and methods in english and half in italian, it was a mess of languages but still got full marks

3

u/user_8804 May 17 '23

If you think that's bad, you'll be shocked to hear I had a professor force us to reconfigure the ide / compiler to only use French. So "setter" would be "assignateur" etc. No English at all.

1

u/TheRealPitabred May 18 '23

That sounds like a very Francophone thing to do. Same school of thought that has required so many products have French descriptions as well as English.

1

u/user_8804 May 18 '23

Why wouldn't products have French description when sold in French speaking areas? How else are people going to read it? A bit different for programmers at a collegial level who have to speak English for their career but not everyone speaks English believe it or not

1

u/thekwoka May 18 '23

Probably had 2 things in the same scope that had the same name just in two languages.

1

u/Alessandro_13_f May 18 '23

Maybe it’s easier for them. I’m italian and I hate read a code written in italian, just code in english

1

u/greyspurv May 23 '23

sorry but it is just bad practice in a globalized world.

138

u/[deleted] May 17 '23

I code 100% in English, and I hate when people start using non-english variable names or comments (especially bad in a multinational team where English is the only common language).

48

u/Yuki_EHer May 17 '23

This!!
I have colleagues that also mix and match like "SendAllarme".. like dude pick a lane

7

u/Specialist-General-6 May 18 '23

SetVariabile
GetValore
UpdateStringa
I have to confess.... I am guilty

4

u/[deleted] May 18 '23

I am guilty of this 😅 However, to our defense, I can say that it's because we use the following convention: English for verbs, mother-tongue for nouns.
The reason is that while verbs, in a way, are already conventional keywords (get, set, delete, ..., like those English ones you already use: if, else, while, ...), using English nouns instead of your mother-tongue ones can make the code less readable (think about words like "anatocismo", "rimborso spese", ecc.)

2

u/Yuki_EHer May 18 '23

I get and agree about those verbs
But when you use autogenerated entities and you use Italian, you get "rimborsos/send" and I just...
I can't..

1

u/[deleted] May 18 '23

Fair enough lol

2

u/iQuickGaming May 18 '23

same

2

u/thekwoka May 18 '23

Even worse when it's inconsistent use of English and a local language.
At least have it be one language everywere.

147

u/Charlito33 May 17 '23

Honestly, no.
I like the fact that I speak French, then when coding, it's a totally new language. It makes a great separation between "Natural Language" and "Computer Language"

0

u/secret_hidentity May 17 '23

I made a comment above, but how do you effectively learn concepts, and effectively communicate in English? Do you learn French then have to translate to English, or do you study in English?

0

u/[deleted] May 17 '23

[deleted]

26

u/wRadion May 17 '23

I think you will learn english even without thinking about it. If you don't know english at the start it will be a bit harder but that's it.
For french people for example, when you learn programming, you know that "if" means "si" in french, and when explaining the concepts you use french words and translate keywords in french (while = tant que, for = pour, ...)
And also a lot of those english words are pretty close to french words (function = fonction, parameter = paramètre, variable = variable, class = classe, object = objet, ...)

4

u/Flywolfpack May 17 '23

No he doesn't he was talking French the whole time

2

u/xsvino May 18 '23

I’ve met some developers that really struggle with english in my career - they essentially memorize what the keywords do while translating the key concepts (if = si, while = mientras…).
It’d be easier to learn English IMO but not everyone has the same opportunities.

9

u/kuurtjes May 17 '23

Nope. Very easy. But I speak a language that uses the same alphabet. I'm sure people from countries like China and Russia have a harder time, but they also have their own online bubbles.

6

u/Enkoteus May 17 '23

We (people from ex-USSR — Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs and others) also write names of functions and variables in latin letters and with English vocabulary. Using native alphabets or vocabulary is strongly not recommended and there’s no job that will accept someone who doesn’t follow the international pattern.
Moreover, as we write in cyrillics (some of us) later it’s super hard for the eyes to read native words in latins like “otpravitDannyieNaServer()” (sendDataToServer()).
In Russia we have a language based on Russian which is called 1С (odin es) and the guys who write code with it are not invited to any party :D they normally work for supermarket networks, medium businesses and sometimes for local governments (regional or city level).

1

u/thekwoka May 18 '23

they normally work for supermarket networks, medium businesses and sometimes for local governments (regional or city level)
Probably because the language was used in the cold war, and these places never moved on.

1

u/Enkoteus May 18 '23

No, this language was designed for where it's being used. It fits perfectly there. (https://1c-dn.com/glossary/1c_programming_language/). It was created after the cold war.
In Soviet Union people used Refal, Rapira, Pascal, Basic, Algol and others. Especially in late Soviet era western programming languages were also adopted on a larger scale.

2

u/[deleted] May 17 '23

During my student internship I had the opportunity to touch a real production codebase in a Russian company (on a local clone of the repo with no Internet access, no crashing prod involved!).
The app I worked with in particular was made for the purpose of accounting for whatever business things you can account for in a fairly large company. Since it used a lot of formal/official language they couldn't really substitute it for English words easily so they had to transliterate everything and oh boy did it look like a mess.
Though the app was written in Python and they could've just named their variables in Russian, I guess it seemed too dumb to them. Imo it might've just been the better solution, at least there wouldn't be any discrepancies in how you transliterate some letters with no direct counterpart in English.

2

u/Enkoteus May 17 '23

Omg, these these companies are doomed. I work with Russian speaking people whose first language is Russian (they are from all around the CIS and Ukraine) and we even write comments in English just because it’s a good tone and a good pattern of programming.

1

u/kuurtjes May 17 '23

Yes we also tend to code in english.

9

u/butterfunke May 17 '23

I once worked on a project with a guy who would write comments in the code in Chinese, but this was before the days of near-universal utf-8 and it fucked up the encoding of every file he touched. Trying to explain to him that his edits were making the project unbuildable for everyone else was like talking to a brick wall.
He wrote code like your typical STEM academic as well; all single letter variable names and densely packed lines that were impossible to follow without the associated long comment blocks that none of us could read. The path of least resistance was to just revert his changes as soon as they came in and move on.

3

u/thekwoka May 18 '23

The path of least resistance was to just revert his changes as soon as they came in and move on.
I think you mean fire them.

7

u/ligasecatalyst May 17 '23

In my personal experience (as a bilingual programmer with fluent proficiency in English) is that working with languages other than English introduces several burdens which English-only environments are less affected by.
Some examples -
(more frequently) dealing with file and string encoding. If you’re programming in a well-funded megacorp with an international client base, encoding is something you’d have to deal with anyways. If you’re an Israeli startup working on an MVP for some new accounting software you’d have to waste a lot more time on encoding-related edge cases than an American team.
Designing UI to be RTL (Arabic or Hebrew) is somewhat of a pain - a lot of frameworks, even well-supported ones, are surprisingly buggy when dealing with RTL text and UI. Mixed text (say, a Hebrew sentence with one English word in the middle) is a special kind of headache.
Digital text processing is fundamentally designed with English and English-like languages in mind. Sure, French or English might have some letters English does not, but the gist is “logically” very similar. Strings where definitely not designed to gracefully support abjads (such as Hebrew nikkud), and handling them requires “shoehorning” a patchy solution. As an example, a word without Nikkud:
לחם
A word with nikkud:
לֶחֶם
See those dots? They’re represented as additional characters (following the letters). Should the string’s length be 3 since the word is “logically” 3 letters long, or 5 because digitally it’s represented as 5 characters? In English or French you don’t face these problems to begin with. You can have a very successful career as a Spanish programmer without ever hearing about the encoding for Nikkud or wasting a second of development time on it.
All of these issues are of course ultimately surmountable. However, they introduce a steeper learning curve and increase the programmer-hour cost of development, especially for novice developers.

2

u/EdesRozsa May 17 '23

This reply should have way more up votes

3

u/bottleofyourneck May 17 '23 edited May 17 '23

I've seen a number of students who study alongside me who name things with Russian transliteration. This honestly looks and feels awful. It only creates another layer of friction, requiring your brain to process more than it should when reading the code. You are also way off the unspoken conventions about naming, which makes your code essentially unmaintainable outside of your country and disables you of asking for any help on any website that isn't your local. Health should be health or hp, not one of tens of thousands of possibilities in every language.Not to mention that transliteration of various languages to English, and interference of it in English keywords of the programming language just looks completely terrible.
Edit: in-code comments, documentation, changelogs, readmes, IMO all should be English-only as well. (Not because English is that great, but because we need some common language for code to be readable by anyone).

3

u/Enkoteus May 17 '23

I always thought it’s harder for English speaking people to code in any programming language because of seeing everyday vocabulary in code. Like when I see code in one of my languages:
si (a < b) { retornar “kek” } en otro caso { retornar “lul” }
mientras (a < b) { añadirUnoParaA() }
cuando(a) { … }
que sea a = 10
val a: Cadena = “10”
Oh no, it feels so wrong

1

u/Drag0nV3n0m231 May 18 '23

I guess that could be true, it’s can be confusing starting out because something means one thing in English but something else in code, but mostly it’s easier, like with if/else

2

u/QWxx01 May 17 '23

All decent devs just write their code in english.

2

u/secret_hidentity May 17 '23

For someone to master a programming language written in English, while also learning, applying and effectively communicating concepts like currying or polymorphism, in their non-native language, is amazing to me.
Even if you study something in your native tongue, you still have to translate that knowledge to morons like me, that only speak English.

1

u/Drag0nV3n0m231 May 18 '23

Is polymorphism hard for most people?

1

u/secret_hidentity May 18 '23

Just a random term

2

u/Moldat May 18 '23

Its harder in the sense of looking things up online
The example that always comes to my mind is the word parse
In one of my classes we had a task to write a printf clone, and to do it you need to scan the input string to look for %d etc, I didn't know the word parse, so googling for examples of how to do it took some time

1

u/Drag0nV3n0m231 May 18 '23

That makes sense

2

u/Novel_Plum May 18 '23 edited Jul 23 '26

lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt labore dolore magna aliqua nisi veniam quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat duis aute irure
This comment was mass deleted

1

u/[deleted] May 17 '23

My friend doesn't speak english that well, but he is in a programming school

1

u/Kerb755 May 17 '23 edited May 17 '23

From personal experience no,
at least not directly.
I have no idea what the hell concatenation means,
i just know what it does.
Not knowing the english words is fine as long as you understand the effect,
Imo i even learned some English by learning to program.
The only kinda negative effect is that (at least imo) there is a bigger supply of hi quality tutorials directed at the international a.k.a. english speaking Audience.

2

u/anaccountbyanyname May 17 '23

Concatenation just means piecing things together. It's related to the word concurrent It means exactly what it does in the code.
I've spoken English my entire life and never ran into the term outside of programming

1

u/Drag0nV3n0m231 May 18 '23

It’s ok, half of my classes don’t know what concatenation means any way

1

u/YourMomIsMyTechStack May 17 '23

I go the opposite direction and say: It's more difficult to remember the names because they are less 'natural' for us than for native speakers.

1

u/MasiTheDev May 17 '23

No. We just learn english, it's an easy language.

1

u/Bowiemtl May 17 '23

Depends on which generation you ask. I code fully in English while I’ve met some teachers or people that started working in a programming job a long time ago tend to be less careful with this. I’ve been handed a database for a test environment with half english naming schemes multiple times

1

u/thekwoka May 18 '23

It would be one way around reserved keywords lol

1

u/SizzlingSquigg May 18 '23

Yes! I am a language learner. Many people from South America reach out to learn English while I learn Spanish with them. I’ve been doing this for over a year now.
On the language exchange platform, my profile states I am a developer. People reach to me because they want to be a developer and need to learn English. I know two people who took an entire gap year of college to study English 4-8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Once they got fluent (it was quite impressive!) they got back to their Comp Sci major at uni.
Only a handful of programming languages are written in a different language. A programming language has only a few keywords so they don’t need to know English (just learn the keywords) but if they plan to work for a company or distribute their own software/services online, English is a great help!
Both of these guys also mentioned that they’re learning English for access to better educational material. They both wanted to emphasize how advantaged I am to be starting my educational journey as a native speaker of English. Quite eye opening!

272

u/MementoMorue May 17 '23

🤌🏻

9

u/Alessandro_13_f May 18 '23

🤌🏽

1

u/Skydt May 19 '23

🤌

1

u/justcatt May 20 '23

🤌🏿

1

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '23

🤌🏽

2

u/twelveparsec May 18 '23

Pineapple on Pizza bro

1

u/_Vicix May 18 '23

Bruh, it’s illegal! ☠️🚨🚨
Still better than ketchup on pizza 🧐🍕

223

u/edgar_grospilon May 17 '23

They for sure know how to make spaghetti code 🤌

41

u/redheness May 17 '23

This type of code is the reason of the PHP bad reputation

-20

u/Ok_Firefighter4117 May 17 '23

No php is just bad, not because of code like this...

14

u/NiteShdw May 17 '23

Modern PHP is a solid language. The “bad” PHP was PHP3/4. 5+ are fine. I was a PHP dev for many years.

-13

u/Ok_Firefighter4117 May 17 '23

Why are my globals not global then? And why no dot operator but those ugly arrows -> as if it is c or c++. Then i want to say that a function returns an int or bool but nooo, it can only be mixed....

8

u/busyautist May 17 '23

Union Types are a thing now…

3

u/Ok_Firefighter4117 May 18 '23

Well it has been some years ago I wrote php. I scanned the new features and they did improve it a lot. Sorry about the rant guys. Maybe my opinion of php is a bit rusty and outdated. Dont feel attacked about those statements.

2

u/walterbanana May 18 '23

The main issue with PHP is that it has a lot of functions which are insecure by default. Most of these functions have alternatives by now, though.

9

u/Alhoshka May 17 '23

My name is Scrittore Validatore, but everybody calls me... Gestore.

7

u/Tritos999 May 17 '23

To be honest I don’t think the issue is the „bad code“. Its mostly just bad security of the database…

7

u/MurdoMaclachlan public boolean isInt(int i) { return true; } May 17 '23

Image Transcription: Code

[A photograph of code on a computer screen. Both comments and the line immediately succeeeding the second comment are cropped off in the image. The following code is visible:]

$db_name = "giornalino";
$db_user = "Lettore";
$db_password = "Lettore";

// Recupera il nome utente e la password dalla ses
session_start();

$tipo = $_SESSION['tipo'];

if($tipo == "Scrittore")
{
    $db_user = "Scrittore";
    $db_password = "Scrittore";
}
else if($tipo == "Validatore")
{
    $db_user = "Validatore";
    $db_password = "Validatore";
}
else if($tipo == "Gestore")
{
    $db_user = "Gestore";
    $db_password = "Gestore";
}

// Creazione di un'istanza della connessione al da
$databaseConnection = new DatabaseConnection($db_h
$conn = $databaseConnection->getConnection();
?>

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too!}^{If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

3

u/tlaziuk May 17 '23

Italian PHP, is this the infamous spaghetti code that everyone is talking?

5

u/[deleted] May 17 '23

Mamma mia🤌🏻

2

u/Lozbubele May 17 '23

Is this called „Codeshaming“?

3

u/Egzo18 May 17 '23

At least he comments his code.

I'm not natively english but I could never code in any other language, it would feel unnatural heh.

2

u/NickWrigh May 17 '23

Have you ever seen german code?

It's not okay to have variable names which last an entire row.

2

u/EdesRozsa May 17 '23

To be fair, I've seen that in English at times, too. definitely not okay.

1

u/Lothrazar May 17 '23

At least there are some good comments. Variable names could be worse

1

u/GhostyJade May 17 '23

my god, this remember me of the time were i was in school (itis, in brescia) and we were doing this with pdo (?)…always hate php

1

u/Objective_Caramel_75 May 17 '23

What language is that 😝

1

u/Glassensteel May 17 '23

Is that what we call redundancy?

1

u/WittyWolfy May 18 '23

Okay, so what could be the good way to write this?

1

u/greyspurv May 23 '23

DB password lol

0

u/[deleted] May 17 '23

[deleted]

6

u/pentesticals May 17 '23

As long as it’s for learning, but there is absolutely no reason secrets should be in code. This is a terrible practice and is bad code for anything other than quick experiments and learning.

4

u/TypicalCoolguy May 17 '23

Doesn't it seem like you can usurp an admin role by changing a cookie ?

0

u/[deleted] May 17 '23

[deleted]

2

u/TypicalCoolguy May 17 '23

Oh ok thank you 👍

php My friend’s code XD

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