Preferably in English. Nothing is worse than reading code with a mixture of languages. Although false friends can also be quite annoying.
They are annoying even if you write in English. One such example is “library”.
In Spanish, there are two words: “biblioteca” and “librería”.
Library = biblioteca
Book shop = librería
When speaking about programming libraries, everyone says “librería” because it’s just easier to translate that way. But it just feels wrong every time.
A funny one is Pizza Hut. “Hut” means “hat” in German. And since the Pizza Hut logo kind of looks like a hat many Germans believe that they gave it a German name in Germany. So they pronounce it in a German way and if they were to talk to an English speaker they might say Pizza Hat in an effort to translate.
Considering that their roofs tend to look like this, that’s a very reasonable understanding. Pizza Huts look like they’re wearing a hat!
What should you do if you inherit a project where they are already mixing languages because they just copy pasted from tutorials?
Exacerbate the problem by using your own style that’s not been used before.
The only solution to having too many standards is always to add another new standard. /xkcd
TBF, USB C is an example of that approach actually working.
int main(){ cout << "It's more compact this way and yeah I'll die on this hill"; Return 0;} //see you even get to end lines in devious winky smilies who doesn't love thatIt’s tradition!
Although false friends can also be quite annoying.
What does “false friends” mean?
In a nutshell, words that look the same / similar but with different meanings in their respective languages, making it pretty confusing.
Like homonyms or something different?
False friends usually aren’t homonyms since the word comes from different languages.
To give an example: an English speaker might look at “rare auto” (Dutch) and might translate it to “rare car”. But “rare” means “weird” in Dutch. So rare is a false friend in this case
Edit: an example of a false friend that is a homonym is “horloge” in French and Dutch. They are pronounced and written the same, but it means “clock” in French but “(wrist)watch” in Dutch
Edit 2: just a writing mistake :)
The Dutch word for “who” - wie - is the same as as the German word for “how”.
Nastiest false friend I know because it’s a very common use word in both.
The more you know! German as a Dutch speaker has always been a bit of a special language (I’m assuming the other way around as well).Like some words are similar (like gevonden/gefunden). Which makes sense, but then some German composite words sound funny. Because we do understand what a bahn (baan) and hof (also hof) mean. But we call a bahnhof a station.
I first learned Dutch as a non-native speaker (I’m Portuguese and lived in The Netherlands for almost a decade) and only after that did I start learning German, and knowing Dutch is both helpful for it (due to things live verb order in the sentence and many, many words being very similar) but also problematic because of the false friends and also because whilst speaking one language words from the other often pop-up instead.
I’ve picked up Spanish because of speaking Portuguese as my native language, but unlike with that language pair were I always know for sure if a word is on one language or the other (probably because Portuguese is my native language), with the Dutch - German language pair that’s not at all the case and they seem to interfere with each other a lot in my mind.
Even though I learned Dutch first and to a much higher level, I don’t really get a feeling of strangeness with German probably because they’re both strange to me.
That said, I do get that strangeness with Spanish, were there are also some weird unexpected things vs Portuguese (like going along a sentence which is pretty much the same thing with a different accent but there’s a single word that’s totally different), though not in composite words since neither language has that.
That’s cool about “rare” in Dutch. It’s the same in Spanish. “Qué raro” means “How weird.” So that’s a false friend for English, but an accurate one between Spanish and Dutch!
Damn that’s cool!
There are many false friends between French and English. Off the top of my head:
- EN: eventually (FR: un jour)
- FR: éventuellement (EN: possibly)
- EN: actually (FR: en fait)
- FR: actuellement (EN: currently)
“Enregistrer” in French both means to record or register something and to save a file, but you can’t use the English word “register” for both.
“Défense” in French both means defense and prohibited, but you can’t use the English “defense” for both.
As others stated, it is when two words in different languages are similar phonetically/graphically.
They are called false friends because they seem familiar and you expect to mean the same as with other words that are pronounced similarly in two languages and mean the same. False friends not just mean different things but they sometimes can change the phrase in a bad way.
Note: The following examples are with Spanish from Spain, they might be different in other Spanish speaking countries.
Alice and Bob discussed about having children
Alicia y Bob discutieron sobre tener niñosIn English Alice and Bob had a conversation, in Spanish they had an argument.
Bob is a sensible guy
Bob es un tipo sensibleBob is a person who acts with prudence and thinks carefully in English, in Spanish he is a guy who is easily affected by feelings.
I had an English teacher who told the same anecdote about false friends and her sister. She was in UK and the batteries for the remote died, so she went to a convenience store and asked if they had them.
The thing is that in Spanish we only use battery (batería) for the ones that are not meant to be replaced regularly, like the car battery, the laptop battery, etc. The replaceable ones (even the rechargeable that take the same shape), are called pilas. So in the anecdote, the sister told the woman at the store very confidently “Do you have piles?” (haemorrhoids, for the ones who doesn’t know).
I don’t know how real the anecdote was, but it fulfilled its purpose to make us aware of these situations.
Words in two different languages that sound the same but don’t have the same meaning. Real example from my last work: The German word for “topic” is “Thema”. So our programmers called the database field and variables “theme”.
It depends honestly.
Key words like If, Match, Else, From, This ,etc will be in English, but variable names can be in any Unicode language as the var name gets converted to machine code after compilation.
That one is mostly language agnostic.
Oh my god
Also air traffic control and commercial aviation radio communication are in English, worldwide.
Maritime radio has a lot of French in it
For handling international traffic under ICAO rules, ATC is indeed supposed to be done in English.
But if we take a look at some of the terminology in aviation, the French words cannot be ignored. Mayday and pan-pan are from the French venez m’aider and panne.
When radio silence is required, a station might command “SEE-LONCE” but this comes from the French word for silence. Though I think this is a rarity in aviation.
And then outside of aviation radio, the French left their mark on aircraft parts names: fuselage, empennage, aileron.
The real deal isn’t the language barrier but the keyboard layout. Most special characters usually used for coding are just perfectly at hand when using the US layout.
At one point i started buying US keyboards set with the US-int layout, which i find easier to use than ES and latam.
This, I switched my keyboards to US layout, and since I learned a bit touch typing , having the laptop with ISO es_ES is not of a big deal having the symbols not matching the input layout.
For Mac it is a bit shittier, I don’t get used to the way to introduce the Ñ with its US int.
On Linux, I didn’t managed to set the US int, only US so I don’t have either Ñ nor the possibility to add accents. It might be easy but I didn’t look for it either.
Not sure if thus is just bazzite with KDE/wayland, but i found today if i hold n i get the option for ñ/ń. Hold i and you get ì/í/etc. Similar to mobile keyboards on phones.
I wrote variable names and comments in Spanish when I started as my English level back then was very low.
Once my English improved and started to use English documentation and tutorials I just switched to write in English.
In my previous job I worked at software consultancy, I had coworkers who wrote code in Spanish but it wasn’t the norm.
Currently I work for an international company, the team is Spanish but we have to write everything in English as it can be shared with teams in other countries and audited by international organisations.
When AI tools were allowed, a lot of people use them in Spanish, it generates code with comments in Spanish. I had to reject a lot of PRs from the same guys over an over because everything must be in English.
I use British English in variables for the word “colour”. It’s actually kind of useful because I can tell when it’s my own variable and when I’m interacting with something else.
Most popular programming languages have English-language keywords and that can’t be changed, so we certainly have to learn those.
How we learn to name symbols (variable/function names), that obviously depends on the programming course. But most real-world code has most symbols written in English with the possible exception of business-specific terminology that the business doesn’t use in English. The same is true of comments.
As somebody with a friend who speaks Chinese as their first language, I know she often uses non-English file names, variable names, etc.
It’s still standard Python and C++ though (and excellent code at that!), nothing esoteric.
Never even heard of a programming language in Danish. Even the ones invented by danes are in english.
It’s for educational use, but myresnak is a programming language entirely in danish ;)
Everyone should code in Armenian. Why? Because it would be funny.
Western Armenian or Eastern Armenian?
Idk. I was just talking out of my ass. I don’t know how they are different.
So you’re saying everyone should code out of their ass.
better than vibe coding
much easier to look for guidance for coding in english instead of my native language, syntax makes more sense too. Though personally i would wish more stuff was properly translated into finnish instead of english slowly gnawing at it.
this, for anythijg technical in pretty much any field, searchig in english is always better
That’s probably fair, but I would also worry that anything coded in Finnish would be trying to find a way to kill me for not respecting its personal space.
Online: everything in English for me, except for some explanations sometimes but that’s just at random as I’m a hobbyist/amateur.
Offline (a course I did): explanations in Portuguese (Brazil), we learned Portugol (programming language that uses Portuguese keywords) as an introduction then switched to C.
We always code in English at work. Using our native language for programming is generally frowned upon.
I’m a native Spanish speaker, it depends on the language and the person.
Spanish has very few diacritics, so it’s quite understandable in ASCII (áéíóúüñ). But I guess it would be a lot harder in other languages like Czech or Vietnamese.
When I program for myself or in public repos, I tend to code everything in English, but when I have to do projects with classmates at my university, I usually do it in Spanish because they are not great at English.
Many programming languages support Unicode nowadays
About every programming language is based on English. Names for functions, objects, variables are based on personal, project, or company preferences. In reality you’ll find these only in two languages as far as I’ve seen in the last decades: either English or Chinese. I’ve seen German and, sadly, French, but they are outliers.
I quit my degree in computer science in 2018 after studying for two years, but I remember that it was a big focus on using norwegian for variable names.
