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Comment by gspetr | Hacker News Reader

At first I wanted to give a serious reply, but then I saw your (very aptly chosen, given the context) username and found myself wondering if HN rules allow parody accounts...

However, I'll give one for those who've missed the irony: It's considered gauche to have ubiquitous non-english comments.

Pretty much the only kosher use case is when you have to warn people not to modify otherwise bizarre looking code because of either regulatory, legal, or domain-specific reasons, and listing them in their native language makes more sense, since developers are not legal experts and translating them into English is not in the job description if the app is solely for domestic market.

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In many places I worked at in Brazil people will just write everything, even variable names, in Portuguese. That came down to the developers not speaking English at all.

Who considers it gauche to have software written in non-English? The Russians you mean? I certainly find it perfectly acceptable and even desirable depending on the contributor's English fluency.

Portuguese is still latin, isn't it. I suppose much of it is similar to English. Imagine if everything was, say, ελληνικά.

Yeah. I can see how that could be more difficult. Usually programmers will stick to ASCII in Portuguese, even though technically there are some non ASCII characters in the language. I can only imagine it's much more troublesome in Cyrillic. Anyway, my point was just that not writing comments in English is common practice in some corners of the world

>Who considers it gauche to have software written in non-English?

2x BigCo's I've worked at, with 1-5K IT staff. Yandex is xbig though, with 5K+.

>That came down to the developers not speaking English at all.

That sounds implausible and not very sane, unless of course you're working for something very static like the government, and the tech stack you're using is set in stone.

Imagine that you're using a popular library and decide to update your dependencies, who's going to read the change logs & the documentation? Sr. Architect?

If you have a security issue and the only writeups are in English, who's going to be trusted to implement a fix correctly if the people can't understand what the problem is in the first place?

Other people in the industry know multiple languages and translate. Also, reading is much easier than writing. So, I'd say that, with maybe help of Google translate, a majority of people would be able to read those. Given I read and write English relatively well, I'd also help out with efforts whenever it was needed.

Anyway, you'd be surprised at how much documentation and resources are available in Portuguese. You can get by alright with it. I did it when I was younger and eager to learn how to code.

I've worked in big companies in Brazil where docs and comments were mostly in Portuguese. And some teams would even use Portuguese variable names.

Just because they do it differently in Russia, it doesn't mean every country is like that. Remember what you said about bubbles and all.

By the way, interestingly, I've briefly worked for the government there once and it was one of the places where English was most prevalent. People there were very open source oriented, which the Brazilian government incentivizes (at least used to back then). So, nearly all code had English comments and docs. Differently from closed source intiatives in the industry where other people reading it was considered a liability and not a goal.

In Russia the chairmen are interested in kickbacks which they won't get with OSS.

Also, it seems that the situation with education in general is still better that in Brazil at least in some regards. In 2014 I worked in São Paulo and had a difficult time communicating with a taxi driver. I was trying to ask him to at least write the amount of money we have to pay for the ride on a slip of paper. Later a colleague explained that illiterate drivers are quite common.

In general Brazil felt mostly like home to me. Maybe Brazil is a version of Russia where homeless people don't freeze to death in the winter :)

It surprises me that you met an illiterate driver, maybe in the 80s/90s. But literacy rates in Brazil are around 99% nowadays and taxi drivers, specially in São Paulo would know how to read and write. However, speaking English is not that common in Brazil. It's a big country and far away from the US and Europe. The neighbouring countries all speak spanish, which is mutually ineligible with Portuguese. So, there's little pressure for people to actually learn English, unless they want to study/work abroad.

I think it depends on what you're working on. I often find myself having to use legal terms for which there are no direct translations (because they do not exist in English-speaking countries), or there are analogous terms, but they do not mean exactly the same thing, or are very awkward to use (for example, a common abbreviation which everyone recognizes at once becomes something incomprehensible after translating it to English). So we can either use Russian for comments and git commits, or spend a bunch of time digging though specialized dictionaries and force everyone getting acquainted with the code base to do the same.

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