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Comment by seanewest | Hacker News Reader

Why are there no programming languages that use native vocabulary from other spoken languages (e.g. Mandarin)? Couldn't somebody make a coffeescript-like transpiler that converts if/for/which/import etc and library methods like printf/webserver/listen to another language? I would think writing code in a language you might not understand well would be a handicap.

Example: https://github.com/chanxuehong/wechat

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I believe there are tons of languages in local vocabulary, they just, well, local, so we don't heard about them often in global internets. For example, almost every business in xUSSR uses 1C:Enterprise system, where code is written in Russian: https://www.google.com/webhp#q=1%D1%81+%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B4&tb... (although code is not the cornerstone in that huge business framework).

And as your link shows, writing the documentation in any other language than English is a 100% efficient way to totally handicap an open-source project...

That would definitely be true if there weren't a lot of native speakers of your language in the open source community. The link I gave was (I believe) in Mandarin, and there are a lot of Mandarin speaking individuals in the open source world.

I'm not a native English speaker but I would never consider writing non-English technical documentation. The case of a potential OSS contributor having meaningful contributions but not understanding English sufficiently to understand the documentation is too rare to worry about.

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