Suppose I develop an application for a given company of my own country. Is is better to code in English or with the language of my country ? I mean, if it is better to comment in French and name the variables and functions, classes in French …
I ask this question in terms of code maintenance in the future.
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I’d recommend English.
Our own, Dutch speaking company bought out a French company. Having to deal with code that’s written in French isn’t much fun for non native speakers. And that’s for people who understand some French. Our Irish/Indian colleagues wouldn’t understand a word of it.
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The answer, in my experience is, short and consistently: English!
When you develop for yourself, there’s really nothing holding you back to comment or name things in your native language (although you shouldn’t!), but code that you write for a company:
- Doesn’t belong to you
- Might be maintained by anyone in the future
To allow yourself and others the best possibility to quickly get up to speed with a growing code base, you’d do well to make it a habit to write variable, class and method names as well as comments in English.
It is, after all, the convention and common ground that we all share (including this site!) so we can more easily understand and learn from one another. There is, in my opinion, no room for (well-meant) chauvinism or laziness in this.
I don’t use these words lightly and certainly by no means imply, that you in your case would choose to use your native language to write comments because of such, but I have seen blatant displays of both in production environments, with loss of productivity as a result, having myself knowledge of very costly projects that have gone south because of the inability to translate the comments and method names.
For the record, I’m not a native English speaker either.
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