This is interesting, I’ve thought of this before.

I write comments and commit messages in English, mainly because programming is collaborative. I am a member of a local association of young programmers, and in the community (discord, meetups) we speak Finnish, however all interactions on github are in English, so are function and variable names, as well as comments. If someone makes a PR and it’s reviewed, it happens in English, even if both parties are native Finns.

This is expected Canadian source code:

// cache the colour in case we need it later for the neighbour
color = fetchColor();
neighbor.color = color;

When language keywords are all written in American English it’s foolish to try to author your code in a different language. But comments are fair game.

German here.

I am not writing anything in my code in German. All of my code, my variables, my default texts, my comments, my documentation, my UI strings, etc. are always and explicitly in English.

The only German I use, is when I provide translations for UI or documentation.

I don’t write a lot of codes, but when I do, it is usually a mixture of broken English and my native language.

I write in the official communication language of the company, because that’s guaranteed that everyone that will be hired will have to speak that language. I came from Brazil and it is a massive country and most of the population doesn’t have access to good English courses, so I like to go with the easiest solution for all future joiners

Always English. I live in a country where developers are hard to find. Chances are that I will get colleagues who do not speak my native language (yet).

I’m French speaking, but I write all code and comments in English, all the time. The code is basically English keywords and symbols, the mix and match just looks weird, makes it harder to share snippets for help or debugging with non-speakers. Especially in code that will be read by other people after the fact, it also tends to make it less likely that this person will be able to understand it - maybe they’ll hire an offshore team or some guy who just immigrated…

Bold of you to assume I write comments.

(Yes, they’re usually in my native tongue. I think it’s better for you to express your comment clearly then stumble through a different language to make it accessible… chances are you’ll be reading that comment next and non-spanish speakers can use Google translate or whatever and ask you if something is unclear).

No, I once had the displeasure of working with a mixed german english codebase (where also classes and functions were in both languages). It was quite the experience.

If I’m working for someone else (company or otherwise), I’ll write comments and docs in whatever language I can speak that they want me to (which pretty much means I write comments in English, because I rarely work for Hungarian companies nowadays, and even the ones I did work for preferred English, and these are the only two human languages I can write :().

When working on my own projects, it is always English, because Hungarian doesn’t have good translations for many of the technical terms, so half my comments would be English borrowed words anyway. Might aswell write the rest in English too. Also makes it easier for others to chime in, because there are a whole lot more people speaking English than Hungarian.

It was harder in the beginning, when my command of the English language was far worse, but even then, half-Hungarian/Half-English comments just looked weird, and more jarring than full English, even if that English was kinda bad.

I’m Brazilian. For personal projects and snippets, especially if I’m going to share their code publicly (e.g. GitHub or GitHub Gists), I often use English. However, when it’s a project from a company I’m working for, I use Portuguese, as every company I’ve worked for so far are Brazilian (and my coworkers were Brazilian as well).

Depends. Generally English, unless they are “directed” to one specific person like the professor who’s gonna grade it. But even then I might go with English anyway.

Oh I also use my language when I’m leaving an important warning to myself in a config file, like “this is needed because X! don’t touch it! If you touch it do Y!”

No, It will look so wierd.

They should all be written in Esperanto.

That depends, actually.

In general, I try to keep everything English, since we do have some international colleagues.

However, I work with a bunch of projects that have some legal/administrative background and certain words have very precisely defined meanings, that can’t be easily translated (at least not in one word, so that the next guy can back-translate the word). So in these cases, I sometimes write comments that explain the domain problem in German, because it’s much much easier and whoever touches that code better understand the German terms or screw everything up. Unfortunately class and method names are often a weird language mix.

It’s not a perfect solution, but given the legal complexities behind seemingly simple words, it’s the best of the worst.