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Are all programming languages based on English? (lemmy.one)

submitted 10 months ago by StorageB@lemmy.one to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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If you're from a non English speaking country, do you first have to learn English if you want to get into programming?

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[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 106 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Not sure about today but VBA (in the MS Office products) actually had translated keywords because Microsoft is batshit insane.

[–] Gumus@lemmy.world 58 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I hate using Excel for this reason. ALMOST all functions are translated, so you're never sure what to look for. If you find a solution for a problem online? Doesn't work, you'd have to rewrite it in your language. And you can't even switch the language in settings, because it's tied to the OS language (maybe you can in recent versions, haven't bothered to check for a while).

[–] mcmoor@bookwormstory.social 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This is why I never touch language setting in any OS. It's guaranteed I'll have some problem down the line because I can't search the problem or understand the solution if error crops up someday, because the menus are different.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Error messages are a pain to search for when they are translated too.

[–] dan@upvote.au 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This is why it's good to have unique error codes in addition to messages. It also helps with error monitoring as you can aggregate errors by their error code rather than message (which can have variables in it, different languages, etc).

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago

Error codes can be useful but I find that a lot of vendors using them rely on the code too much to classify errors as identical. Usually the variables do matter, e.g. which file couldn't be opened or which action was attempted by whom that got a permission denied error.

[–] eRac@lemmings.world 9 points 10 months ago

Not sure about VBA, but Excel formulas are actually saved in English and translated on file load. It doesn't translate strings though, so EVALUATE only works for users with the same language as the author.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Real world scenario happening to me:

Reinstall my win os to use French because a) back in the day you couldn't just change language, b) scrips were VB written french (so si instead of if etc).

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Hehe French programming. It's probably like

essaye:
    faire_qqch()
sauf OhMonDieuQuEstCeQuiSePasse:
    imprime("putain")

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Cucumber/Gherkin also has translated keywords (even Emoji.. smh) but there it actually makes sense because you actually write it in natural language.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 16 points 10 months ago

I am sceptical of natural language programming in general but I am also fairly certain that you would have to do a lot more than just translate the keywords to get something that looks natural in another language. Word order is different in many languages for one.