English variable names

15Feb/054

English variable names

The really interesting thing, and this interests me about all code written by non-English speaking people. Is how often the variable names are english words. I’ll see an occasional snippet of code written by a German speaker with German variable names, but for the most part they are in english.

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http://del.icio.us/jackwilliambell Jack William Bell

I’m not sure what the link to Scoble has to do with this post, but I know what you are talking about. Personally I think it is because so many of the foreign coders are starting from sample code developed here in the US, and it was just too much bother for them to change the var names. I would say that the Japanese are the worst in this way; I have seen code originating in Japan which seemed to use random (and therefore meaningless) English words for variable and method names.

However I have noticed that Brazilian and Italian coders are more likely to use their own languages throughout.
http://del.icio.us/jackwilliambell Jack William Bell

I’m not sure what the link to Scoble has to do with this post, but I know what you are talking about. Personally I think it is because so many of the foreign coders are starting from sample code developed here in the US, and it was just too much bother for them to change the var names. I would say that the Japanese are the worst in this way; I have seen code originating in Japan which seemed to use random (and therefore meaningless) English words for variable and method names.

However I have noticed that Brazilian and Italian coders are more likely to use their own languages throughout.
http://www.lazycoder.com Scott

Ah, weird. I thought I had clicked on the permalink to the post about the new Iranian blogs. Looks like I missed. Anyway the Scoble posted a link to a new Iranian blog site http://weblog.iranasp.net/ and I saw some source code on there with english words.
http://www.morganpersson.net Morgan

I think there is an easy explanation to this, at least from my own perspective
English is a 2nd language for me and when you write code the syntax is in english so therefore it make more sense to use english words for virable names. The readout of the code get so weird otherwise with mixed languages (Swedish in my case).
I also tend to write code comments in english, at least when im in ‘the zone’.