Rost – Rust Programming in German | Hacker News Reader

Rost – Rust Programming in German

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As a German native speaker, it's surprisingly hard to read the code examples. Seems like all common concepts of programming languages like access modifiers, types etc. are hardwired to their English terms in my brain.

I've never been able to even use localized UIs on anything that goes on my computers and my phone. My native Romanian looks either foreign or silly when it's on the "File" menu.

It's probably what you got used to when you first learned it though.

Because I am also slow at reading math / the theoretical part of IT in English because I learned it ... in Romanian.

Edit: to the point that I didn't remember the "theoretical part of IT" is "Computer Science" when posting in a hurry :)

With me it goes so far that I switch everything that can be switched (e.g. Android on my phone) to English. It's not just the terms, it's also the frequent translation errors. One "oldie but goodie" example is a Windows utility (I think it was Registry Editor, but not sure anymore) that translated "key" with "Taste" - which means key on a keyboard, not key as in a thing that opens doors or allows you to uniquely identify a bit of data, that would have been "Schlüssel".

I do the same thing. When helping friends with their computer problems, having to translate words in a menu is such a hassle, especially when the translations aren't obvious.

When it turns out they were using a different version and didn't have that option, we still had to figure out what translates to what – if the option even is there at all.

I am a German native speaker as well. That is horrible idea!

As an English native speaker, that makes sense to me. When I read code, I don’t really think of keywords as being related to the English word that inspired them; they’re just their own distinct symbol to my brain.

Rost also did do extra work to have maximally diverging naming.

- struktur could have been strukt - umstz could have been impl as in Implementierung was added to the German language - nutz would be a more realistic replacements of use - Mutieren is a German word so mut would stay mut - unsafe is better translated as unsicher, not gefährlich which is dangerous - hinein is a translation for into but .into() a short for "convert into", which in German is "konvertiere zu" so `.zu()`, similar "convert ... from .." would be roughly "aus ... erstelle ..." so `.aus()`. - etc.

in general authors do choose language keywords, syntax and acronyms so that they flow/read reasonable nicely and that isn't true here in many ways. If we don't just try to translate by word but by what we mean with the word in given context then verhalten would be a better choice for trait and you can definieren (define) behavior so `impl Behavior for Thing` become `def Verhalten für Ding`. Similar static wouldn't become statisch but instead global.

When I first read the examples, besides my laughter, I felt a similar disconnect im the semantics of the chosen German words. Thank you for you suggestions, I agree with all of them, they are better indeed IMHO.

Agree. Felt the same. Just wanted to add that "wesenszug" for trait would be my choice.

I wonder if it makes more sense for people who use other scripts besides Latin. I know there are some Chinese-character based programming languages

Horrible idea, but I am not surprised someone decided to do this. In Germany employees have guarantee that they can speak German at work, does not matter the company is international, on the meetings, emails are people from USA, India, Ukraine, Poland. German has to be used if a single German employee wants that.

I have a friend who works in such place. DeepL is a most important piece of software he uses, the problem starts if DeepL messes up some details. Meetings are a nightmare, communication is a nightmare. Managers try to mitigate all that, by avoiding employees from Germany in the projects, what is pretty funny, as company is multinational, but of German origin, and most of the managers are Germans...

This attitude is just one of the many factors that led to https://www.amazon.pl/Kaput-German-Miracle-Wolfgang-Munchau/...

Why would it be wrong that an employee working in his country prefer to use his native language for communication?

If the team is mixed, that means someone would need to learn and use a foreign language. Why does it have to be always only English?

That being said, I still prefer a programming language in English, but it's not like there are no precedents here. Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German.

Why not code? Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly to and from a universal internal format?

> Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German.

And many Japanese are used to writing Excel formulas in Japanese. Excel is such a crap program. Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language.

> Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly

Because some words' meaning is context dependent.

"We don't need no education"

> Because some words' meaning is context dependent.

And English is the only language where that is true?

> "We don't need no education"

Then educate yourself and learn another language. Something tells me you are fluent only in English.

> Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language.

Excel always shows the formula names in your system language. If happen to be on a computer set to Japanese and prefer English, just set it to that. Why does the whole world need to assimilate to English to save you the - rare - inconvenience of two clicks?

> Why does it have to be always only English?

Because a lot of people already know English. You can find good candidates anywhere, bring them together, and they will be able to work together. That's the advantage of English today. There are no reasons to build artificial barriers that hurt cooperation in your company and your country's economy in general, other than nationalistic ones.

It is especially silly in countries like Germany, which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers and an aging population. I'm not saying that immigrants shouldn't learn the local language, but there should be other mechanisms and incentives outside of one's workplace.

>other than nationalistic ones

Welcome to Europe where every country has a different language that's not English. You call this nationalistic, but how many people in the Anglo-sphere would be comfortable working in foreign languages?

A lot of workers, especially older ones, still aren't fully comfortable in English beyond ordering a pizza on vacation abroad, and the older ones also have a longer tenure and a bigger voice in the company. And European companies are a lot older than US companies due to a lot of factors.

Plus, most often, European companies build products for local markets rather than the international markets, which means local language knowledge is mandatory besides English, so then when a lot of the product management, sales, marketing, customer support is all done in the local language, how can you expect to have the SW dev team to be the only insular one without speaking the local language?

>which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers

There's no skill shortage in IT work. Every open position gets enough applications form local candidates in this economy. The skill shortage is in poorly paid hard labor jobs that nobody likes to do like elderly care or construction or that requires doing night shifts.

One of the unexpected tough parts during my CS studies was keeping track of the german translations of terms. I would sit in an exam and wonder what Halde (Heap) was again. 98% of interesting literature is in English, and even if the lecture was in German, the recommended literature would usually be in English. In my job, I'm thinking and writing in English, then sometimes translate back to German if need be. Switching to an English keyboard was a major improvement, as many really important strokes are less intuitive in the german layout ( {} for example).

I would be really peeved if a random guy on my team could force all of us to program in German. It creates a lot of unnecessary friction.

My favorite hate term from that category is my Operating Systems professor saying "I-Knoten" for inode. Not "Indexknoten" oder anything, just the letter I + "Knoten".

Erlangen?

only narrow-minded people see an idea which was intended as a joke as validation for their opinion and then go on and drone on about their stubborn ideas to lecture the world with their agenda

other people however are busy implementing something in rost to further anger the former

> German has to be used if a single German employee wants that.

I'm not sure about this statement. See [1]:

"The Regional Labor Court (Landesarbeitsgericht - LAG) of Nuremberg had to rule on a motion by a works council, in which the latter demanded that the discussions held with it be conducted only in German. At the same time, it demanded that all communication between the branch management and the employees be conducted in German. The Regional Court rejected both motions of the works council."

[1]: https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de...

Yes, but translation must be provided when requested.

"Contrary to the view of the works council, communication in English is also not an obstruction of the works council. The court explained that it is crucial how the works council receives the communication. In the disputed case, texts were previously translated into the German language. Face-to-face conversations were translated by those present into German or into English for the branch manager. This was not objectionable, since the risk of a wrong translation was at the expense of the employer."

That is certainly one way to look at a fun project...

It is absolutely mad that today, in 2025, with all the computing power available, the mass of extremely well educated programmers, the number of geniuses, and the advances in computer science...

... merely suggesting the possibility that the keywords of a programming language could be freely translated back and forth between two human languages (in a totally compatible way!) immediately generates comments such as "horrible", "a nightmare", "this is why that country is a failure"...

I mean, this is a 1-to-1 transcription of very specific, identifiable, unique, protected words in a text file.

And this is the top-rated comment when I write this. Who are you, people who wrote or upvoted this? Why are you so scared by any deviation from what you are used to?

You're imagining something which can't exist. Maybe because you don't know any other human languages, or maybe despite that (which is worse)

"freely translated back and forth between two human languages" isn't a thing. You might as well insist that Pi is rational.

So what you get instead is awkwardly translated back and forth in a way that increases confusion. Nobody actually wants that. You're arguing for much worse outcomes, as a result of an at best naive understanding of what language is.

It is a 1-to-1 mapping of keywords. It's not the only choice of German words one could have used for those concepts, but neither are the English ones. For some people the particular choices made in German here will make more sense, for others the English ones. What's so bad about being more inclusive?

>You're imagining something which can't exist.

Excuse me, what is hard in taking this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-01-keywords.html

And translating those back and forth?

In fact, if it "can't exist", how can Rost be "fully compatible with English-Rust, so you can mix both at your convenience"?

And Rouille? https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille

And Unirust? https://github.com/charyan/unirust

I would assume that in rust, as in other languages, you can't use keywords as e.g. variable names because it would lead to mixups. So you can't translate programs back and forth without making sure you don't use keyword of _any_ possible language as variable names.

For keywords in particular you can write the identifier anyway, r#async is a perfectly reasonable (though ugly) way to use async as an identifier, despite the fact that async is a keyword in current Rust editions.

But the problem is that while we can mechanically perform the operation that doesn't have the effect claimed, it's as if people expected (and I know this does happen with idiots) that Chinese is just the same as English but with different symbols.

I've never worked at a German tech company where people actually talked German..

Are you based in Germany?

SAP is also a “German tech company”, and I bet most of their non-Germany based employees don’t speak German either.

Working at SAP and working language is English, also in Germany.

I work at Qt in Germany and literally everything is English, official language is English

You have been successfully trolled.

> This attitude is just one of the many factors that led to ...

Thanks! Sounds like an interesting read. German manufacturing is in a really tough spot indeed. But, just to have a bit more nuance in the discussion. It's not all hopeless. Munro loves the new electric motor from VW [1]. And I'm personally also very impressed by multiple high quality open source projects that are made in Germany such as Typst and Forgejo.

[1]: https://youtu.be/qTilowhsX_w

If I am not wrong German was supposed to be a dual language in the United Stated but the German migrants there who contributed to founding the country lost their cultural access; and as someonein love with works by Goethe and inspired by other European authors, I believe the loss of European languages is a humanitarian cultural heritage loss; and a German comapny should endeavour to hire individuals who are interested in German language and culture. Sacrificing a temporary short-term ease of in finding employees at the cost of cultural loss is not wise, imao.

> German has to be used if a single German employee wants that

Many large german companies use english as their primary language, so I doubt this claim.

Why is this up upvoted?

This is flat out wrong and you link to a very poorly researched book with a lot of blatantly false populism in relation to energy politics.

Hmmm... if you are going to use only Bavarian paraphernalia to symbolize "German Rust", you might as well go all the way and use Bavarian instead of German for some extra laughs? Ok, TBF most programming keywords are rather scientific, and dialects are less used in academia, so that might be tricky.

Also, I would bet that most Germans would also use "fn" as a two-letter shorthand for "Funktion". But it just had to be different, so they chose "fk" for "FunKtion"...

I saw "fkt" as a more common abbreviation for "Funktion", that'd be only one extra character

If we allow for one more character, we can get the even clearer "fukt".

Which would be perfectly acceptable in German.

In contrast, when I worked for Goldman Sachs business unit 'Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities' I made sure not use their abbreviation in polite German company.

What makes it really funny is that the joke was lost on Microsoft in the mid 90s when you might program macros for MS Office in a version of BASIC that actually did get its keywords translated.

Still to this day, when I occasionally use Excel/Libre Office Calc I never know wether to write `sum(` or `summe(`. Function names depend on the localization settings of the system I'm working on.

This. I am always wondering if this was a serious decision. In my view it doesn't make any sense to switch function names by locale. It just confuses

Presumably one uses the same locale everywhere? So switching by locale should not be a problem?

Supporting multiple languages is a problem all right: googling, communication, etc...

> Presumably one uses the same locale everywhere?

It depends.

> So switching by locale should not be a problem?

Until you get an Excel file written in another locale. The coolest one i had was one with Japanese formulas.

It seems obvious in hindsight that everyone, non-native speakers included, prefer to read syntax in English. But was it as obvious 30 years ago?

I mean sure, hurdur Microsoft dumb, it's a classic joke. But if that was the first attempt at translating keywords, then how is it "really funny"?

It just gets my goat when people make fun of innovators with the benefit of hindsight.

Microsoft's choices can easily be understood under the following frame: They essentially think of everyone they (supposedly) serve as stupid. Thinking that the need to learn a bunch of keywords in a foreign language is a serious stumbling block to the adoption of their programming language is just one case in point. Having a good laugh at their expense about it feels like karmic justice, because it's bad enough that they keep getting away with it as much as they do.

counterpoint: Microsoft does serve a lot of computer-illiterate customers. They also have very literature customers but they have to design for the lowest common denominator

It usually doesn't have this charitable "no user left behind" character, though. Their shenanigans include "Let's inject advertising in between people's e-mails and turn everyone's OS into a billboard. Will it be hard for people to get any work done this way? Of course it will. But who is going to stop us? Surely not those suckers whose money we take." What is the appropriate reaction to that? Surely not "Thank you, thank you, Microsoft, for putting me into a digital world that is so perfectly matched to the stupidity, laziness, and digital helplessness of me and my brethren".

It's a very dangerous path to walk down, to think to yourself "I'm smart and powerful, but most of my customers are stupid and helpless, so it's not the needs of my peers that I need to cater to, but rather the needs of the [stupid] many". The contrapositive of that is: Most of my customers aren't truly my peers. Well that's the first step on a slippery slope towards: These people aren't really deserving of being treated in a moral/ethical way, the way I would treat my peers and the way I would expect my peers to treat me.

Microsoft are still doing their forced and absurd localization in all their garbage.

Being forced to use their software while outside an English speaking county is terrible.

Do you realize you can just switch language and locale with few clicks. What's the problem there?

One problem is that a lot of translations in Microsoft's documentation are subtly wrong, but you don't immediately notice because the grammar is correct. And this problem already existed before machine translation was a thing (I guess MS just hired translators who were not familar with the documentation's product or even 'computer-lingo' in general).

That's not actually true.

Many times in corporate environments you don't have permissions to do that, and let me tell you it's a pain when you 5 layer down a RDP rabbit hole to figure out which locale you're using

Haha, hardly. That's far from the case.

I was there Nindalf, 30 years ago. And let me assure you, it was already a stupid idea back then ;)

> But if that was the first attempt at translating keywords, then how is it "really funny"?

Because they didn't really bother to ask native speakers if the translation makes sense in the target language.

Well, I'm only saying locale dependent file formats!

The promptly emerging Excel-Schmerz reminds me that the author avoided the use of floating point numbers in the provided example for a reason.

In german Excel it's might be ok due to its original focus on numbers, but replacing decimal "." with the german "," also forces you to use a semicolon everywhere where you would use a comma (function, vector/array notations). To me the most annoying issue with localized programming languages. And consecutive ";;;" just looks awful. And what would happen to command/line endings...

BTW, Apple once tried to translate content-specific parts of their AppleScript language (like Dialogs etc) but in the process also hit some enumerations which often sit at the border between programming language and content. Big desaster in certain edge cases.

Anyway. Of course I like that the effort was made. There are famous Asterix comic books translated into all kinds of languages and dialects. I'd really like to see great localized coding languages, but I guess they will have to avoid line ending semicolons and only use integers :)

> In german Excel it's might be ok due to its original focus on numbers, but replacing decimal "." with the german "," also forces you to use a semicolon everywhere where you would use a comma

The best part is that sometimes you get new numbers.

Excel is showing to a user what AI can do to a document: destroy it.

It somehow feels that one has to come up with a tailored strategy for each CVS import that contains decimal numbers, dates and/or other data with dots in them. Most of the time I end up regexing my way out of the failing (and different) attempts the different build-in options in Excel deliver. LibreOffice is better, Apple's Numbers partially worse in that regard. Funny to see these things in that state in 2025.

Discussing number data with current LLMs also does not seem right at the moment. Not sure if simple column-specific conversion tasks might work.

I'm offended that nouns aren't capitalized. This is nowhere near proper German.

Oh, no, this is Weimar Republik style, peak Germanity. There were lots of avant-garde movements that were sure that capital letters in general were just about to be phased out in a few years time.

wow missed opportunity

Der Kommentarenbereich ist nun Eigentum der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Or FRoG for short, in English.

Why limit yourself to one language, when you can have 23 of them in the same Datei?

https://github.com/charyan/unirust

They chose the right license!

You really shouldn't be limited by only one language: https://github.com/charyan/unirust

This is so hard to read for an English native person, well done.

I also propose Eierlegende Wollmilchsau as a type, that would be fun!

its also hard to read for a german. coding in english is the only viable thing after learning everything in english

the french version has quite a complete list of other translation

https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille?tab=readme-ov-file#other-l...

Rouille was previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490935

Bordel!

Also https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille

Any plans to add support for it in the Linux kernel?

Obviously, the Linux kernel would need a Swedish version.

(Swedish is Linus Torvalds' native language.)

He's Finnish, not Swedish.

Both Finnish and Swedish are official languages in Finland. Linus' parents are from the region of Finland that primarily speaks Swedish, so Linus grew up speaking Swedish at home.

I was expecting something along the lines of https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/

I'm German. Lived abroad for close to a decade although back in Germany for the past 4 now.

Generally, I have no issue switching between German and English for anything, be it movies, books, conversation, etc.

Coding is just something though that my German brain will refuse to do. It feels foreign and just downright weird. That's the best I can describe it. I even started learning to code in German. German is also one the languages that generally has a ton of resources translated and translated well. I just cannot do it though. Syntax and technical terms in German just turn my brain to mush.

Same here, though with one exception: things that are not usually written out in English words (operators and punctuation) still have German names to me. In my head I still say “Stern”, “Klammer zu”, etc. when reading code like “x = *y;” and error messages like “')' expected”. I read “==” as “gleich gleich” and “!=” as “nicht gleich”.

As an American moving back there from Switzerland and scared to lose the German I know, maybe this is exactly what I need.

Though I will say that “benutze” is much longer than “use” haha.

Would be hilarious to make a Swiss German version.

Edit: the words are abbreviated which makes it that much harder for a non native German speaker. Seems like German is much longer on average. That’s one plus of English over German.

I do wish more languages had capitalized nouns though

Language vocabulary and syntax design has been influenced by how "fit" the terms are for use. Fitness includes the length.

Now it's true that English is particularly full of short terms.

But I wonder how a programming language would have evolved if one had chosen German (or another) language from the get go instead of having a translation

You could have a look at Plankalkül for a very early example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

unfortunately Plankalkül seems to only have single letter keywords

> Though I will say that “benutze” is much longer than “use” haha.

I would have probably just gone with 'nutze' instead.

the irony must be lost on me here, but I began writing Rust in German and never I had as much fun programming as since I began using German as main language. Forgetting about Kamel or Kebab case? Love it. German is awesome for programming, imao.

PS. I speak Persian, know Arabic, Serbian too but none offer the ease of text to code as German.

Oh nice. Today I actually wanted to start learning Rust. As a native german this will make things a lot easier. Thank you!

To bring it full circle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust,_Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg

Some of the German Rust folks have joked about wanting to hold a conference here. We could go to the amusement park!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl,_Saarland

Reminds me when Scala was translated to German some time ago, at about the same time of the year:

https://scala-lang.org/blog/2017/04/01/announcing-skala.html

So far I've been resisting the Rust hype train but I guess I'll ditch Duolingo and do this instead.

Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache.

You have a typo in the snippet on README.md: SchlüsselWert should be Schlüsselwert.

Fun fact: stack datatype is called "Keller" in German, meaning cellar. You put stuff in it, but to fetch the thing you put there first you need to take out everything else you put there after it.

Behold the almighty SONSTWENN!

The interesting thing is that the weird 'else' keyword actually was invented by German speakers:

https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...

Very interesting write-up at your link! The early English alternatives were even longer than the common German suggestions we have here.

Btw, 'sonstwenn' seems really silly. 'ansonsten' or just 'sonst' might be more idiomatic.

Hmm, the actual code uses 'anderenfalls', which also works, but is a bit longer than 'sonst'.

I wonder whether LLM programming will make such projects more (easier to get assistance) or less (assistance might not be as good as in the original version) common.

What does „änd“ mean in the example?

I guess "änderbar".

Possibly “(ver)änderbar” (changeable) to have a distinct keyword. “Mutierbar” would also work fine in German, but it was probably changed with the same reasoning that fn was to fk.

Because they desperately needed some Umläute :)

Verdammt. Jetzt hat mein serielles Zeigegerät mir eine Unterbrechungsanforderung geschüttelt.

Richtig toll

10 min vibe-translating (Cursor + Claude 3.7, OpenAI for logo) and here we have Rdza - a Polish version:

https://github.com/stared/rdza

Polish can into Rust!