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Comment by aredox | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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