No Stupid Questions

I wrote variable names and comments in Spanish when I started as my English level back then was very low.

Once my English improved and started to use English documentation and tutorials I just switched to write in English.

In my previous job I worked at software consultancy, I had coworkers who wrote code in Spanish but it wasn’t the norm.

Currently I work for an international company, the team is Spanish but we have to write everything in English as it can be shared with teams in other countries and audited by international organisations.

When AI tools were allowed, a lot of people use them in Spanish, it generates code with comments in Spanish. I had to reject a lot of PRs from the same guys over an over because everything must be in English.

Never even heard of a programming language in Danish. Even the ones invented by danes are in english.

much easier to look for guidance for coding in english instead of my native language, syntax makes more sense too. Though personally i would wish more stuff was properly translated into finnish instead of english slowly gnawing at it.

As somebody with a friend who speaks Chinese as their first language, I know she often uses non-English file names, variable names, etc.

It's still standard Python and C++ though (and excellent code at that!), nothing esoteric.

Russian here.

For the most part, it's all English. Not even romanized Russian in variable names, although that happens sometimes. Comments are mostly in Russian, though. Depending on the company and whether it has to deal with countries where Russian isn't as widespread (e: which is not a lot of companies these days), that English can be a little difficult to understand once you start applying English language logic to it as opposed to basically writing Russian poorly translated to English. It's fine if the variables, classes and method names are short and offer little room for stringing words together, but anything complex poses risk of producing something that will be difficult to read without heavy Russian background and developed English skills (at both comprehending and producing).

However, there is a number of Russian-based programming language. I am fortunate to have never worked with any one of them. One of them is 1C:Enterprise, which is also a sizeable business for automation software and such.

Here's what it looks like. I can spot a couple of English words there, though. And having learned programming through English and English only, I actually find it more difficult to read, because Russian-native developers still often refer to things in English, even if there's a word for that same thing in Russian - it's just that much part of your programming work.

I'm a native Spanish speaker, it depends on the language and the person.

Spanish has very few diacritics, so it's quite understandable in ASCII (áéíóúüñ). But I guess it would be a lot harder in other languages like Czech or Vietnamese.

When I program for myself or in public repos, I tend to code everything in English, but when I have to do projects with classmates at my university, I usually do it in Spanish because they are not great at English.

No chance, hungarian has non-ascii characters(ő and ű), digraphs(cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs) and a trigraph(dzs). Also generally how the language works is pretty disadvantegous to coding and tech. English has maaaany useful one syllable imperatives(get, click, etc), even with doors irl its often in english whether you pull or push cause hungarian doesnt really have these completely stateless verbs. One thing that did exist back in the day was people coding in german but i only know a single person who still does this.

We always code in English at work. Using our native language for programming is generally frowned upon.

Coding is all done in the language of the code... if, and, or, for, include, except, etc. It's not exactly a vast array of words you need to know to be able to code.

Also, I can only speak for Sweden, but I started learning english in third grade. These days they start in kindergarten. Basic stuff, days of the week, 1 through 10. But still.

Online: everything in English for me, except for some explanations sometimes but that's just at random as I'm a hobbyist/amateur.

Offline (a course I did): explanations in Portuguese (Brazil), we learned Portugol (programming language that uses Portuguese keywords) as an introduction then switched to C.

I have no clue but at the very least, a programmer names their own variables and, barring any special characters, they could be named in any language.

About every programming language is based on English. Names for functions, objects, variables are based on personal, project, or company preferences. In reality you'll find these only in two languages as far as I've seen in the last decades: either English or Chinese. I've seen German and, sadly, French, but they are outliers.

Hedy is a new programming language designed for pedagogy that can be localized to different languages.

https://hedy.org/

Only in the very beginning people use anything besides english

i think it depends, for me at least, mostly being self taught, english entirely because I just think in english, search in english, speak in english to myself so much

I learned to code before I learned proper English as a child.

However, many educators insist of forcing students to first learn Hungarian pseudocode (not Hungarian notation) stuff first, I specifically was forced to learn Hungarian pseudocode SQL, because our teacher thought the future of programming will be natural language programming (she was a mediocre mathematician). Problems with it include:

• Hungarian is very antithetical to be used as keywords in a programming language, mainly by substituting affixes with different words, or keeping the affixes in certain ways.
• Students who already know English or actual coding are confused by it.
• Natural language programming is quite bad. Nothing is gained by throwing out programming symbols in favor of natural language. In fact, things are being lost, and the main advocates of NLP are just out-of-touch techbros, who think creation is about having a cool idea.
• Time that could been spent learning other things are wasted on it.

Well we learn to code in the programming language that the teacher choses, not in any natural language at all, so neither English nor our native languages.

But all significant programming languages that I know do have reserved control words that are taken from English. Maybe that is the direction of your question?

Then no, mostly we don't use specifically crafted or preprocessed programming languages just to have control words recognizable as words in our native languages. We just learn the English-based control words as features of the programming language, if we don't already recognize them.

As for the variable names and natural language comments embedded in the code, that we create, that varies. I'd say as soon as interlingual collaboration or code sharing is a possibility, people will go for English in my experience. And I suspect that people who have gone for English before tend to stick to English even in their private use.

This is also related to learning materials, documentation of language features and libraries being available to the largest degree in English.

I perceive it as easier to stick to English, rather than to code switch between natural language while I program.

There have been some interesting attempts to translate languages, but generally at most you would get phoneatically local names using English characters for functions and variables, etc.