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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

> It doesn't make sense to me that people in china, russia, europe, india, etc are writing code in english. Why not translate computer languages to their native language?

It doesn't make sense to them to cut themselves off from the English-based open-source ecosystem just so they can use their native language when they already know enough English to get by.

Many programming languages already support Unicode identifiers and nativist movements exist (e.g. [0]), some people produce interesting mixed-language programs (e.g. stdlib in English, other identifiers in Chinese with Latin prefixes to indicate type: [1]) but it's overall a very small niche, because most people can see the value of being able to share code globally, which means using English.

[0] https://github.com/program-in-chinese/overview/

[1] https://github.com/cflw/cflw_py/blob/master/%E7%A8%8B%E5%BA%...

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> It doesn't make sense to them to cut themselves off from the English-based open-source ecosystem just so they can use their native language when they already know enough English to get by.

Just because they develope their own chinese-based open-source ecosystem doesn't mean they have to cut themselves off from the english-based one. But by using the english-based one, they are cutting themselves off of their potential native chinese-based one.

My point is that it would be easier for chinese people to develope in their own language. I'd consider it silly if I had to learn chinese or greek just to program "hello world".

> because most people can see the value of being able to share code globally, which means using English.

You could share code globally even if the chinese code in mandarin. You can translate code from chinese to english and vice versa. It would be even simpler in assembly.

Also, there would be more code overall if programming didn't have an added hurdle of having to learn english in the first place. If people around the world could code in their native language, we'd have more programmers and more code.

Using your argument, the chinese should write their novels in english too. But everyone would consider that absurd. That's the same for programming. It's an absurd system that exists, but hopefully things will change in the future.

The problem with Chinese, in particular, is that despite unicode and additional software for input, the language is terribly unergonomic to use.

It's no wonder why the latin alphabet got chosen, the same reason why it became popular in the first place, thousands of years ago. It's just efficient to use 26-ish letters, like numeral systems are easier to manipulate with 8~12 base digits.

> Just because they develope their own chinese-based open-source ecosystem doesn't mean they have to cut themselves off from the english-based one. But by using the english-based one, they are cutting themselves off of their potential native chinese-based one.

So does using one language cut one off from the ecosystem of another or does it not? In practice, this depends on the prevalence of bilingualism: few English-speaking developers know Chinese, but most Chinese-speaking developers know English. So using English doesn't cut them off (because they understand it) while using Chinese cuts everyone else off.

> You can translate code from chinese to english and vice versa.

And who do you think is going to do that translation? Someone who understands the program in question and knows both human languages well enough to translate between them. In most cases, that will be the developers. They're saving themselves a lot of hassle by just writing it in English to begin with.

> Also, there would be more code overall if programming didn't have an added hurdle of having to learn english in the first place. If people around the world could code in their native language, we'd have more programmers and more code.

People around the world can code in their native language. I linked to projects that are all about programming in Chinese. That there isn't more Chinese code should tell you something about the priorities that Chinese programmers actually have.

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