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Comment by tcbawo | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but do the programmers you know that can't read English struggle using programming languages and libraries where the keywords, class, variable, and function names are primarily in English? I'm curious how beginning or ESL programmers manage. Are there ecospheres where they can manage using only their first languages?

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There is a vast difference between people that don't fluidly read/speak English and people that can't be arsed to learn what the 20 English keywords mean a programming language might use.

20 keywords, but what about EscapeString, or SpringContextIntegrationTest? A program can use a lot of English words.

Easy, you would code it in your own language.

Here in Europe is quite common to be faced with programs where everything written in-house uses the local language, including comments, only the third party libraries use English.

I already had a couple of consulting gigs where what got me the deal was my knowledge of the specific (human) languages being used.

I've seen several coding conventions that prohibit the use of past perfect aspect in boolean query methods (e.g. `checked`) in favor of an explicit auxiliary verb (e.g. `didCheck`). Also sophisticated concepts frequently get transliterated. 20 might be a stretch but less than 1000 is not that impossible.

How does a cord for fleeing tell you anything about what it actually is?

Both of your examples bring very little meaning from their English definition. You just know a second definition in the context of programming, which is why you can deduce what it does.

The same applies to the people that don't fluidly speak the language.

I'm not a native English speaker, but most of what I read on a day-to-day basis is in English. And yet, whenever I see or hear the term "string", I associate it with "sequence of characters", not with "cord". Same goes for "thread", but even more strongly [1]

So I agree, you don't have to speak fluent English to be able to read and write programs. Knowledge of English grammar won't help (except for reading comments – if they exist...), and the vocabulary is small, specialized, and has little to do with colloquial language.

[1] Or should it be "...even stronger"? I don't think so, because it refers to the verb "goes", so it should be an adverb, right?

This is pretty common in Brazil, there is a lot of people that are able to master the syntax, but cannot fully understand an article in English. That's why I always recommend then to have at least invest a little in technical English, as the resources in Portuguese usually are scarce and outdated.

Variables and nouns are easy to translate. Sentence meaning is significantly harder.

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