Hacker News Reader

Why is "public static void ..." written in Cyrillic here? I guess this might be a joke?

The first programming language I learned was Java. And for us non-native speakers who didn't know English very well at that point public static void did indeed sound like a magic spell. It was behind both an understanding and a language barriers

When I first saw Java, I had already seen multiple dialects of BASIC, plus Turing (a Pascal dialect), HyperTalk (the scripting language of HyperCard, and predecessor of AppleScript), J (an APL derivative), C and C++. I'm also a native speaker of English.

Your perception is still warranted. It was clear enough to me what all of that meant, but I was well aware that static is an awkward, highly overloaded term, and I already had the sense that all this boilerplate is a negative.

To try and relate to the native English speakers the impression of how the usual boilerplate feels like arbitrary magical incantations to novice programmers (and non-native English speakers, I guess).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com