It’s super common if it’s any sort of open source project because the collaborators can be anywhere and English is a good baseline.
IIRC one of the big tasks when Star Office became Open Office (later Libre Office) was translating a bunch of the German comments to make the code more accessible.
I’m sure I’ve seen some majority french code bases as well. There are certainly academic hypervisors out of China which have comments in Chinese kanji.
Thanks. Are they related? I don’t understand any Asian languages myself but I do recognise difference in for example the Korean symbols and Japanese ones. But Japanese and Chinese ideograms look very similar to my ignorant eyes.
The script-less Japanese adopted them, but they didn’t fit their language well on their own. So, they created hiragana (a syllabary) to be able to properly write their own language. A Japanese sentence typically comprises Chinese ideograms and hiragana.
Later, both the People’s Republic of China and Japan simplified their ideograms, but not in the same way, and the Chinese went much further.
So, now, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao use the traditional hanzi.
Japan uses their kanji, somewhat simplified.
And the PRC, Malaysia and Singapore use the simplified hanzi.
South Korea uses hanja which is virtually the same as traditional hanzi. And North Korea completely abandonned the Chinese ideograms.
i’ve seen both. there is german program code with german variable names and german comments. yeah, it sounds about as strange as it is.
// diese variable beschreibt den luftzug an den messrohren var trötflöte = lese_zahl_aus(datenbank);but it’s rare. most people who work in IT in germany will write english variable names and english comments.
In my experience it’s more common in industrial (plc) and embedded software. Where people don’t have to work in large teams.
what does “plc” mean here?
Programmable Logic Controller
Removed by mod
It’s super common if it’s any sort of open source project because the collaborators can be anywhere and English is a good baseline.
IIRC one of the big tasks when Star Office became Open Office (later Libre Office) was translating a bunch of the German comments to make the code more accessible.
I’m sure I’ve seen some majority french code bases as well. There are certainly academic hypervisors out of China which have comments in Chinese kanji.
In Chinese, they’re “hanzi”.
Or you can just say “Chinese ideograms”
Thanks. Are they related? I don’t understand any Asian languages myself but I do recognise difference in for example the Korean symbols and Japanese ones. But Japanese and Chinese ideograms look very similar to my ignorant eyes.
The Chinese invented the Chinese ideograms.
The script-less Japanese adopted them, but they didn’t fit their language well on their own. So, they created hiragana (a syllabary) to be able to properly write their own language. A Japanese sentence typically comprises Chinese ideograms and hiragana.
Later, both the People’s Republic of China and Japan simplified their ideograms, but not in the same way, and the Chinese went much further.
So, now, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao use the traditional hanzi.
Japan uses their kanji, somewhat simplified.
And the PRC, Malaysia and Singapore use the simplified hanzi.
South Korea uses hanja which is virtually the same as traditional hanzi. And North Korea completely abandonned the Chinese ideograms.
As a native Dutch speaker, Trötflöte sounds hilarious.