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.

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.

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.

They should all be written in Esperanto.

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I’ve always been writing comments and using variable names in English, at all jobs I’ve had. Probably also the non-professional code before I started writing code professionally.

Part of this is that I’ve been working in a lot of companies with non-Swedish speakers, and another part is that it’s just kind of been expected that the code and everything around it is in English.

Using English is the only way that all my colleagues are able to read it, but if it’s just meant for you, or only for Spanish speaking people, I’d say why not.

This actually depends on the kind of project. In larger and longterm projects I write my comments in English. In quick jobs like writing a source code generator or data swabbler that I need once or relatively short term, I use German. It does not make much of a difference for me, though, and I have a script that walks over a source tree to find some common German words just in case I had written something in German by accident.

…why is this nsfw exactly?

My language is rtl, so… shit no!

Writing detailed and technical comments in English is easier that saying a simple English sentence in real life for me, lol.

At my job we write everything in english. Code comments, variable names, review comments. Everything. It’s just to make everything readable to people who don’t know our language because some people in the office are from other countries.

I’m not a native English speaker, current country is non-English as well (ahora es español) . My comments have always been in English.
I review and deal with a lot of code from different countries, and it’s always annoying if I have to throw the comments through a translator, if I think I’m not understanding the comment well enough.