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One semester I was TA'ing a certain course all electrical and computer engineering students are required to take.

One student named all his variables in phonetic chinese (using the utf8 character set of course).

Another student named all his variables after superheros.

For the Chinese guy, I wonder if the code would have been way easy to maintain for the average Chinese developer. That would be an interesting analysis.

I once worked in a Chinese software company on the mainland and often maintained code written by Chinese developers.

I'm Irish and didn't appreciate their comments in Chinese, they didn't appreciate my comments in Irish.

Once that was understood we swapped quickly over to English for all comments / variables / declarations.

On that note, Python's style guide, PEP 8, contains this:

"Python coders from non-English speaking countries: please write your comments in English, unless you are 120% sure that the code will never be read by people who don't speak your language."

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

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