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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

"What can you do to avoid this problem? Use UTF-8. Always."

I disagree. I think that the solution to the problem is using English comments. This has many reasons, it blends better into the programming code that usually has English keywords, variable names are usually in English and ASCII only (no, JavaScript, you're special, as always) and the most important reason, it allows the most people on this planet to understand it (okay, there's also Chinese but it's pretty much limited to a country). I worked on a Korean piece of code. All the variable names were in English but the comments were in Korean. Why, just why? Talk about unnecessary complexity, at the end of the day you need to understand two languages in addition to the programming language. That just means I literally don't understand any comments. (And I'm not saying that because I'm lazy and don't want to learn languages; English isn't my native language)

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> the most important reason, it allows the most people on this planet to understand it

But I'm usually not writing code for most people on the planet. I'm usually writing it for work, or myself.

> I worked on a Korean piece of code. All the variable names were in English but the comments were in Korean. Why, just why?

Because the writers were probably not fluent in English! The purpose of a comment is to explain something; if you cannot explain it fluently, then the comment is useless.

I speak a tiny bit of Spanish, but if history had turned out differently only in that Spanish was the language 99% of programming was based on, I would still not leave comments in Spanish, because they would be nearly incomprehensible to everyone, including myself.

> at the end of the day you need to understand two languages in addition to the programming language.

At the end of the day, someone needs to learn two languages; you're saying that it should never be you, but someone writing some code you happened to run across.

> The purpose of a comment is to explain something; if you cannot explain it fluently, then the comment is useless.

Exactly. If a piece of code needs a comment in the first place, it means that there's something subtle about the task that cannot be fullly conveyed using code alone. But that's exactly the kind of thing that people have trouble expressing clearly in a non-native language.

I would much prefer a clearly written comment in another language that I can ask a colleague to translate for me, than a misleading comment in English.

> But I'm usually not writing code for most people on the planet. I'm usually writing it for work, or myself.

Even in such cases I tend to write code and comments in English, which is not my native language. English naming convention just fits better with English keywords and yeah, who knows if I'll really be the only one reading that code..

> Because the writers were probably not fluent in English! The purpose of a comment is to explain something; if you cannot explain it fluently, then the comment is useless.

Well, sorry, but in such case I am tempted to consider writers of such code as amateurs. In this age, if we speak about anything more than the smallest local projects, then English is a de-facto standard language to be used for coding (naming conventions and comments).

If a comment doesn't explain something fluently, then it may still be useful - it may provide hints as to what is going on. But if a comment is in an unknown language, then it is completely useless clutter, a distraction which just makes the code itself harder to read. So yes, I'd rather prefer a writer to use his not-so-fluent English (which actually is quite common in many projects; and this also gives the writer an opportunity to improve his English) rather than write in another language, which most likely won't be understood at all.

> At the end of the day, someone needs to learn two languages; you're saying that it should never be you, but someone writing some code you happened to run across.

He mentioned English is not his native language, so he already learned two languages.

> I worked on a Korean piece of code. All the variable names were in English but the comments were in Korean. Why, just why?

Variable names were probably in English because it enhanced readability of the code as the keywords, etc., of the language were probably also English-derived.

The comments were probably in Korean because they aren't part the code, they are side text that is intended to communicate clearly from the programmers to other people -- and the team writing them and the expected audience was Korean, and writing in English would have required translation both on read and write, greatly increasing the likelihood of miscommunication. Having an English speaker that didn't read Korean come into work on it later was probably not anticipated at the time it was written.

My dad does not speak english...

His code frequently has english variable names because it is common words used elsewhere, frequently he does not even know the meaningof those words.

So all his code has portuguese comments.

Some people DID get pissed off with him writing portuguese comments, he always reply: "Will you teach me english for free? If you do, I will rewrite comments in english."

Noone ever replied that they would...

... Proving that you can shut people up by being antagonistic and defensive.

Not really...

His open-source projects has lots of users, but no contributors.

He gets angry e-mails frequently, but never once got an e-mail offering help or praising the project.

But that is Brazil for you, asshole jerk behaviour is the default.

Writing comments in language other than English is probably something like пизда коровы.

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