A key reason English became the preeminent language of scientific and technical communication, and thus the source of keywords in programming languages, is because German (the other candidate) fell out of favour due to the two world wars. So, were it not for Prussian militarism, our programming languages may have instead been based on German (along with most scientific literature being in German).
Also because, as a person who has studied multiple languages, German is hard and English is Easy with capital E.
No genders for nouns (German has three), no declinations, no conjugations other than “add an s for third person singular”, somewhat permissive grammar…
It has its quirks, and pronunciation is the biggest one, but nowhere near German (or Russian!) declinations, Japanese kanjis, etc.
Out of the wannabe-esperanto languages, English is in my opinion the easiest one, so I’m thankful it’s become the technical Lingua Franca.
Had the world settled on German, someone might be making a similar argument that the world dodged a bullet by choosing a language with phonetic orthography and words composed of logical building blocks rather than a mess like English
Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you’re only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don’t give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).
OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.
So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.Making fun of people has more “stank” in English (not a hard fact, just my opinion).
* Yiddish has entered the conversation
silently goes to German GitHub to learn German words
Make enough C macro definitions and you can certainly do that, I did my final project in my high school programming class in the 90’s like that, made macros to simulate QBasic syntax and then just wrote it in basic, the end result is the macros converted everything into valid C++ and it compiled fine. Fortunately my teacher for that class was cool, and he was amused by it and since it compiled with no warnings and did what it was supposed to do, I got full marks for it.
Yeah, Excel does that, it always fascinated me. It was so weird writing =KDYŽ instead of =IF in Excel. Different times, I guess.
Does that get translated if someone else with a different language opens that file?
No idea, but I would hope so.
Yes, but it would be funny if you could just switch languages in the middle of your sheet, чтобы можно было начать на русском, continue in English,وانتهى باللغة العربية.
Tap for spoiler
I hope that the built in translation in iOS can translate to Arabic well
Don’t worry, the arabic translation is correct
It’s formal Arabic, as is expected of any translator
The best part is that if your version of Excel is German, you can’t write
=IF(). You have to use=FALLS().It’s always fun to google a function and then the translation.
I’m pretty sure it’s not
FALLS()butWENN(), at least the last time I used Excel.
Internally Excel saves it in English (or some internal code) and translates it when opened.
My company switched from Excel-Interops, where you had to send the German function name to Excel. Now we write .xlsx files directly and have to send the English function name. But when opened it displays all functions in German (or whatever localization Excel is set to).
Functional programming languages kind of are that way. Just chain together enough map calls
Mine gott
https://github.com/michidk/rost
Aren’t you müde from writing Rust programs in English? Do you like saying “scheiße” a lot? Would you like to try something different, in an exotic and funny-sounding language? Would you want to bring some German touch to your programs?
rost (German for Rust) is here to save your day, as it allows you to write Rust programs in German, using German keywords, German function names, German idioms.
I like the branch names auch
PETA isn’t going to like all those
fürloopsFür is short for fuer. The umlauts are tiny “e” on top of the letters
That’s how umlauts historically evolved, but nowadays I wouldn‘t say ü short for ue, but its own letter (even though you still can write it as ue if you don’t have it available on your keyboard or whatever)
Well, my point is that it’s not considered a u, and Austrian and Swiss don’t use it.
Also, fun fact, some romance languages like French and Brazilian Portuguese have an identical diacritic to umlaut but it’s different. It’s meant to mean the vowel is separate (like in the word naïve)
in Brazillian portuguese it had a completely different meaning, and it was used for disambiguation of the pronounciation of some words, in short “gue” in portuguese can make a ghe (gh as in ghost) or a gue (gu as in guatemala), a similiar thing happens with “que”, this umlaug looklike was meant to make clear that the “u” was to be pronounced, so we had spellings like “freqüencia”
That’s exactly the other meaning I described. In Portuguese it was/is used to separate the vowels so they are not pronounced together.
Well, my point is that it’s not considered a u, and Austrian and Swiss don’t use it.
It’s true that u and ü are very different things in German orthography, but it must be some bizarre misunderstanding that ü wouldn’t be used in Austria or Switzerland, the largest city in Switzerland is even named Zürich in German (Züri in Swiss German).
We call it tréma. Aka diaeresis. It explicitly tells you to pronounce two vowels near each other separately.
A typical use is to indicate a normally silent vowel must be read out. For example “maïs” (MA-EE-S’) is completely different from “mais” (MAY).
Too bad that’s based on macros. A full preprocessor could require that all keywords and names in each scope form a prefix code, and then allow us to freely concatenate them.
Bruh why does it feel more natural in German.
Finally, a language where CamelCase feels natural
That was excellent
The ruby on rails generators do this sort of magic. It’s fun while you’re using it, but a nightmare to remember how to use on a 10 year old project.
*KamelKiste
In German you would write “Kamelkiste”, nicht “KamelKiste”. This holds true for most Java class names. I begin to see huge potential for evil …
Why is main capitalized but not printf???
If they are trying to follow German rules where nouns are capitalized, I guess this explains why their version of int would be capitalized, but that’s super annoying. Maybe C# is based on this.
And then why is Ganz in caps. I call cap on German C.
Could be because Ganz is short for Ganzzahl and a noun.
So Nat Fibonacci(Nat n) { …} ? Because Ganz would be signed int so Nat should be unsigned int?
I’d suggest “vorzeichnenbehaftete Ganzzahl” (maybe vbGanz) and “vorzeichenlose Ganzzahl” (vlGanz) 🤣 please don’t make that a thing
I’ll just leave this here, “An Introduction to German for ABAP/4 Programmer” (SAP):
POV: ESL programmers
i will never forgive them for making the pointer type be
T*instead of&T. most confusing thing ever.don’t even get me started on C++ making
T&the reference type and then makingT&&be something other than the double reference type.I always thought
T&&made sense as a movable reference. In order to move something, you need to change where the reference points, so conceptually you need a reference to the original reference to update it. (Effectively a double reference)
French fucking Excel formulas is an abomination and needs to die.
I’m am immigrant in Brazil and have to deal with Portuguese excel almost everyday. At least I know my Python and only use excel to do simple things.
Edit: all my scripts end with pd.to_excel() tho
Microsoft should be charged with war crimes for deciding to localize both Formulas AND keyboard shortcuts across the Office Suite.
THIS SO MUCH THIS, LOCALIZED SHORTCUTS ARE PAINFUL, I CAN NOT FIND WAYS TO FULLY EXPRESS MY HATRED FOR THEM AS SOMEONE WHO HAD TO USE OFFICIE 365 IN PORTUGUESE also btw mnemonic shortcuts were a mistake
Norwegian as well. It’s basically impossible to find the documentation. Translation has somehow changed the order of words, som direct translation of formulaes is not helpful for searches either.
The French are doing what??
I mean how?
Specifically, I need to understand it for scientific reasons.It’s Microsoft. For some insane reason, excel formulas are localized. E.g. German Excel uses “SUMME()” instead of “SUM()”.
It’s insanely annoying because it sport of makes it more difficult to ask for help (I.e. only Germans might know what SVERWEIS does). And if you manage to find a solution in English, you need to translate it.
Thank you for the explanation, I was aware of that.
My joke was merely on the level of:
French fucking Excel formulas
I hear the French usually program in French as well. I do not want to ever work in France.
Nah, just that WinDev thing.
On the plus side we have actual holidays and good luck bothering me outside of hours, haha!On the plus side we have actual holidays and good luck bothering me outside of hours, haha!
I mean we have that here in Estonia too :P
Haha, fair enough! I’m glad you do!
If you believed the stereotypes, you’d think we’re the only ones, sometimes :)I think that’s mostly an American stereotype, I believe Estonia and France and several other European countries get roughly the same amount of paid holidays as well as paid time off. Though apparently you guys also have a 35 hour work week, which I’m jealous of!
Not true, but don’t let me change your mind!
Oh? You want composit(ion)? Over inheritance maybe?
Seriously, fuck Excel for this. I always hate to look up function names in German.
Yes, I also hate it!
The Italian version of Excel had the brilliant idea of translating the
MID()function intoSTRINGA.ESTRAI(), which means “extract string”.Seriously, what the fuck.
The localisation of office software functions is atrocious in all languages. They should have defaulted to Volapuk, so that at least we could all suffer together.
It should have been Latin so at least you could feel like a magician or something
I thought of Latin, but then some people actually speak it, so they’d have an unfair advantage.
I would happily pull out my old dictionary and grammar books, for sure!
