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Comment by Yuval_Halevi | Hacker News Reader

It's actually never come to my mind that there are only English programming languages

So programmers in China and Russia also using only English programming language?

I will tell you even more -- in Russia it is dominant practice that code comments are written in English as well, though could be written in Russian. You never know who will work with your code tomorrow.

Yep. That's probably why you'll never met a developer without a rudimentary understanding of written english.

As some empirical evidence, look at how few StackOverflow sites there are in other languages: https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#technology-traffic. Just three (Russian, Spanish, Portuguese), all were introduced 5+ years after the main site started.

Similarly, Github doesn't have localised versions.

There are certainly clones in other languages (e.g. https://teratail.com/ clones SO in Japanese), but it shows how little demand there is when these well-funded platforms for developers de-prioritise local versions. I couldn't imagine a comparable platform for lawyers or accountants doing same thing.

In China there are several Chinese PLs, the most wildly used is called EPL(易)[0]. However, those are not generally used in production other than lightweight scripting scenarios.

Comment-wise, many companies use Chinese comments in code while many use English as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Programming_Language

There are multiple such languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

And yes, most of the time, Chinese and Russian programmers use the same languages as the rest of the world...

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