How do you program in other languages if you don't know English? Like in C++, do you know what a "class" is? Do you get to learn some English? Are there programming languages not in English?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you have to know some English to use them [Unless there is a language in the native language]. But, just knowing a few words isn't that hard, you wouldn't have to learn the whole English system, just words like 'if' 'else', ect. So, basicaly if you can type english letters you should be able to do so.

Think about it like playing the piano--everything is in Latin. You don't notice it though, it is merely notation.

Good example.

Many places like Japan, even though they use Japanese, still use English on computers, and in VGs, so like it or no, English is the language of the computer.

And i've discovered that alot of people write comments in english, even though it might be easier to write them in their native language. (My personal reason why I write english comments is, because switching back and forth between different languages can get quite confusing....)

I had a problem when I first started maintaining Bobot++--the documentation and comments are all in French. Some of the class members were in french too. Good thing the implementations made it obvious what everything did!

Needless to say, that would be a very effective method of learning english.

My native language is french but I can't stand using french variable names and comments where the language I code in uses french words. This is especially annoying with very verbose languages like Basic.

English is the language of business, it is the language of the virtual world, it will soon be the language of the planet.

If you wanna be an airplane pilot/air traffic controller you must be fully fluent in English.

How about Chinese that pretty popular. Chinas big and dangerous ,I wonder why we dont hear of those "chinese crackers" only russian and bulgrian ones. *sad* Well some languages are documented in other languages e.g. PHP so really learning the word if and for and strip is pretty easy.

There are alot of tutorials/doc's/books in different languages... I've got a Java book in swedish (from school), and I just can't stand it :D
I read the german translation of Meyers More Effective C++ (or whatever it's title is) and it wasn't the same thing somehow (fortunatly, unlike the swedish Java book the translator didn't go as far as translating the actuall code; the java stuff resulted in a mess of blended english keywords and swedish identifiers/comments)

thank you for your responses.

Where I live, British Columbia (Canada), Manderin (chinese) and Cantoneese (close enough to chinese) are the second and third most spoken languages. French is 5th, but it's still the "main" (with english) language here. i.e. you need to learn it until high school, and all the food products have to be half in french (thats right! It _wasn't_ raisin jello!)

I always use English variable/function/class/whatever -names in programs. That way it's much more fluent to read.


"it will soon be the language of the planet." Right. Noone is going to give up his languages without a fight (or at least, a lot of complaining), I think it won't be English that's going to be the language of the planet, rather a mixture of several hundred languages. The process of this mixing can be seen al around you. Every language has words borrowed from others, and because of modern communication stuff, like internet and TV, people borrow more and more words from other languages and many of these words end up in the official dictionaries. Eventually we'll have one official languages and several milions of dialects of it.

So everyone would speak a combonation of ebonics and leet?

*shudder*

those that are extremely unfamiliar with english could probably just express english words such as 'if' and 'class' and 'private' as symbols in mathematical terms... there ought to be plenty of foreign language programming books which explain these odd words.... as our english books do :-)

RedX: True, but the "language of the planet" will probably be based mainly on English/American. It also probably won't exist for at least 100 years probably much longer.

Qubit: often one can just translate these keywords :)

I very much doubt that there will ever be a "language of the planet"... can I remind everyone of Esperanto? Whilst it's a really cool language, it doesn't seems to have caught on as it was supposed to.

Chinese will dominate. What idiot (sorry) suggested China would ever attack Russia in that old post hehhehe ? China is just



HUGE.

And we'll always have French kicking around in some form or another. Very defendant of their language, the French.

Hell, if you open a shop in Quebec and your signs don't have the french twice as big as any other language, the Language Police come around and ticket you or throw you in jail or something. Horrible!