Regarding the English defeated ‘insert language here’ by one vote urban legend:
a href=http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/german.asphttp://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/german.asp/a
Note that similar urban legends exist for other languages too.
Jeff, didn’t you know that thanks to India, Inc. and the H-1B lobby, Hinglish is now the lingua franca of programming?
I completely agree with Eric Raymond and am in the same situation as Slawomir, except with Romanian instead of Polish. Also Herr_Alien a few comments up.
Something people are forgetting in all this discussion is /why/ English is the ‘lingua franca’ that it is right now - and that’s imperialism. No, not the derogatory meaning, which seems to carry overtones of ugly racism and narrow-minded provincialism, but the original meaning of having a mindset pertaining to empire. That is to say, a mindset that acknowledges the existence of a larger common framework while maintaining local culture and civilisation.
Why was Latin (and Greek) the lingua franca for such a long time? Because the Roman Empire’s influence spread far beyond its borders - and at its height, its borders were pretty large. France had a pretty huge geographical spread as well, stretching from America to Asia. As for the British Empire and all its territories… well, let’s not say any more. American (or rather, Hollywood) culture may complete the English cultural hegemony of the entire world.
Accatagon comes exceedingly close to describing the supremacy of English as the ruling language, in the describing of English as an amorphous blob of words. But did you know that this is a deliberate action? The English were pirates, after all, and equal opportunity pirates at that - they stole everything from everywhere, and are the mediaeval version of the Borg. Your language and cultural distinctiveness will be added to the Empire, arr. Resistance is fultile, yaargh. There’s a reason why you have maharajahs and gurus running amok across verandahs in their haciendas while discussing microbiology and masticating hor d’oeuvres. Name one language that has not had at least one word imported into English, and I can tell you that people group had never been discovered by the British Empire.
And that is why two centuries from now, ceteris paribus, some language called English will still remain dominant. Granted, we peons might not comprehend yonder language to any significant degree, but we will probably still be able to speak the lingo, Homo sapiens that we are.
Vive le English! Ada 2005 forever!
If I’d hire a programmer here I’d demand English as a second language (fluent).
Some of the programmers here still use horrible method names, simply because it’s incorrect spelling or incorrect use of terms in English.
But I guess that’s inevitable if english is not their (and my) first languuage.
Aftur all my englis vill not be parfect eether.
Consider the following: first in Swed#, second in c# … I have a hard time not laughing 
använd System;
namnrymd Konsollapplikation1
{
klass Program
{
statisk tom Huvud(sträng[] args)
{
Konsoll.Ut(Hejsan Världen!);
}
}
}
using System;
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.Out(Hello World!);
}
}
}
I am natively German. I started using a German Version of Delphi 3 as my first real programming IDE. I switched to an English Version of Delphi 4 when it was released, and since then, I NEVER looked back, and I NEVER had the desire to use a German version ever again. When MSDN.com comes up in German, I switch to English. Why? Because translation are just that: Translations. They are not the Real thing. It’s called Exception, not Ausnahme. If my code says Exception then the error message should say Exception as well. If my Code says Exception and the error message talks about Ausnahme, I have to make an extra thought-step in order to associate them - easy with Exception/Ausnahme, but really hard in some other areas.
Plus, because English is spoken by so many people, the community and resources are simply bigger. You can bash Americans/British if you like, but it’s a fact that English is by far the most spoken language in the world. Limiting myself to the German Community would be a stupid move in my opinion, because it’s like using only 20% of your PC’s RAM before starting swapping.
For people who do not really speak English, localized Communities are of course fine, I don’t want to bash them, but I think that if you really want to connect to all the community, English is the way to go.
Any if someone wants to change that - feel free to do so. Invent an absolute must-have programming language in your native tongue. Just keep in mind that Delphi is an English Product, Visual Studio is English, Mac OS X is English, Windows is English - with only very few exceptions, ALL the important programs are natively English and then translated, and translations are never 100%, especially not if you leave the Syntax unchanged in english. There is one example, which is WinDev. To my knowledge, they have a French translation that really translated EVERYTHING into French, including the language itself, and it seems to be quite big over here in France.
But unless 99.99% of my working environment is natively English, I refuse to use a translated version of any development tools, because that would mean I seriously limit my resources.
While your point is certainly true for the next 30 years or so, the promise of machine translation is that it will eliminate language barriers. e.g. on the fly (perfect) translation.
But yes, I’m guessing that’s at least 30 years away. I think we’ll be getting diminishing marginal returns wrt accuracy - unless we hit some big breakthroughs.
I have a disk with russian Visual Studio inside… But I’m never input it in my CD-rom… and never will. And no one in company is do this. 
So yes, English is the only language we speak in the code.
Whatever country you live in, whatever language you speak, you have the same access to the accumulated knowledge of the world as every other citizen of the planet Earth.
…you really haven’t traveled much have you, or tried to use the internet in Dubai, Thailand, China, Australia etc…
You wrote:
Anon on March 30, 2009 09:15 AM
Why would they do it? Tailoring to a user base that may not be proficient in English?
As russian speaking programmer that have to write some piece of code for 1C systems I need to say that russian coding for 1C is a trully CODDING HORROR for programmer. And it’s confusing a LOT. I’d preffer a russian comments in the code, not the code.
do we really code in english? i’ve been coding for a while now (8+ yrs), i speak and understand english fluently, speak some french and very little german as well as being fleunt in my mother tongue and several other languages in my country (important for swearing).
my point is, which ever language i am speaking, i find myself thinking in it as well. isn’t that the same with code? do we write significant paragraphs in comments so that one can look and say that is english or geekspeak? really.
what i would really like to know is, what language do you think in as you code? are your english words in your code actual communication of ideas or just symbols that just so happen to have english meaning?
could linus trovald have reached all of us just as well with UML?
i work with filipinos, indians, a malagasy and a whole rainbow of africans. when i say connect as sys, dump database, su root, reboot server, load dump to test, start uat, brb, thnx was that english?
I’m from Mexico. And I find that, in fact, English is the languaje people should program in. I’m into games, and it is really hard to find good information in Spanish, so I don’t even bother any more.
Also, good programming books in spanish aren’t hard to find, THEY DON’T EVEN EXIST. I have never, ever, seen a translation to Code Complete or The Pragmatic Programmer.
It’s a shame, because most programmers I know in Mexico aren’t proficient enough in English to read these books or the internet. And the good stuff never gets a translation
It’s a similar situation with music. Most music uses Italian annotations (forte, piano, crescendo, andante, presto, con sordini, etc.) though some contemporary stuff uses English. Italian is just the de facto standard. The thing with music is that one only needs to know a few words and doesn’t need to read pages of documentation or books.
The article is fine, there are very few grammatical errors, spelling is superb,… But in essence, to sum it all up, the whole point came down to this: The sky is blue.
It is. English, english and english. All the other languages are all, but useless to developers.
You’re wrong. The Polish example is just a sample of one people in one specific country. Hardly statistically relevant.
It so happens that many programmers in eastern European countries would find it a little insulting to insinuate that they don’t understand English. Most of the rest of the world feels differently though.
One thing you’re not talking about (that in itself is absolutely amazing) is that you are excluding most of the population of the world from ever learning programming, which would be immensely damageable to the industry as a whole.
I learned programming way before I learned English and that is how it should and will be for most people.
Most of the world doesn’t speak English. The approach you’re advocating is just laziness and arrogance.
I’m from france, my english is certainly not perfect, but every books or documentation I read are in English. When people in France asks me if a french version of a book exists I say always you’re a programmer your life will be awful if you think to read a technical book in french.
To me it became easier to read technical documentation in english than in french.
When I talk to other french programmer I always use English technical terms (not their translation in french).
I don’t say : une propriété but une property, I don’t say un champs but un field.
East End is a great, tiny brewery. The brewer Scott is an awesome dude and quite the opposite of an ugly american. If you like barleywine and can visit his shop, I’d suggest a bottle of this: a href=http://www.eastendbrewing.com/?q=node/24http://www.eastendbrewing.com/?q=node/24/a
I don’t care which language a coder speaks as long his/her product is Unicode clean. There are still too many, especially American, coders who seem to think that ascii is the only encoding their crapplication needs to be able to handle.