I'm a native English speaker. I do actually remember programming languages feeling a little uncanny at first. Like you can tell that it's "computery" and that the language author tried to make it English-like and only sorta succeeded.

So I think at this point, for me, programming languages just aren't English. One odd thing I've noticed is that in Ruby the `unless` keyword confuses the hell out of me, and yet when speaking English I never get tripped up on the actual word "unless". So I guess it's handy that the keywords in programming happen to be English words, but my comprehension of programming languages seems to occupy another region of my brain.

(Brit here) My first encounter with a foreign PL was a French Prolog implementation in the mid 80s whose only compiler error message was IIRC something like 'Erreur syntactique'. This seemed superbly Gallic, if somewhat less than helpful.

The closest I've ever felt to this as a native English speaker is reading words in music scores in English. I'm a classically trained cellist, and grew up learning notation with Italian and French words for directions and expression. I've never learned either of those languages, save the words used in music notation. Seeing a score with those words in English just feels... wrong. Not in any big way, but as you said: uncanny. Definitely get the "bad psuedocode" vibe, because to me it English in music notation feels similar -- like the person who wrote it didn't know what they were doing, even though the notation makes perfect sense and the music is good. It removes some of the flair of the art of the notation itself for me.

For anything vaguely technical, I use the English term. I don't feel comfortable in any other language, no matter how well I speak it. It just doesn't sit right with me to use eg a Danish term for density, or power, or eigenvalue, or anything programming.

Part of it is that even though I might know the term, it won't be long before I need to bring in something where I don't know the term. At that point I'll be inventing a local term, when I know what the English term is.

In this particular case, it might also feel uncanny because the keywords were merely translated; but the grammar (most notably word order) doesn't (always) match.

`asynchrone fonction` feels wrong because it's the wrong word order for French; it should be `fonction asynchrone`...

I'm a native Portuguese speaker. Here, when people are first starting to learn programming, it's very common for them to write code in Portuguese. For example, they would write this simple age verification algorithm:

  int verifica_idade(int idade) {
    if (idade < 18) { return -1; }
    return 1;
  }

  int main() {
    int idade;
    scanf("%d", &idade);

    int verificacao = verifica_idade(idade);
  
    if (verificacao < 0) { printf("Acesso negado\n"); }
    else { printf("Acesso liberado\n"); }

    return 0;
  }

It did not feel odd to me.

Possibly a remnant of being bilingual as a child (I am not anymore, and was not by the time I learned programming later in my childhood)?

I do not think I ever really thought of programming languages as being English, but English like/derived from English.

As a native french speaker, I have the same feeling when reading code written with french keywords, except that since I learned boolean and arithmetic in french, it makes more sense to me to read them in french. As others have pointed out, it seems to only be a matter of how you learn to read and write code.

For comparison, in mathematics I learned to read all the symbols in french, and only learned their english equivalent much later, so it feels uneasy for me when i read their english version. So it is clearly a matter of habit that took its root when you learned reading.

It is uncanny but in that case I had a fun feeling reading usual abstraction (maybe types, self traits) in French, it tapped into a different part of the brain, that helps thinking about what the code means less mechanically

Yes it's so strange, like bad and unreadable pseudocode.

I could see myself coding in Latin though: https://github.com/pianoman911/ferrugo. Something about the prepositions tickles my brain the right way.

As an American...no uncanniness to English. I guess because it was always the default and what was taught.

The first time I encountered a non English PL, I did feel the same uncanniness you spoke of. It felt... wrong? I wish I remembered which one it was. It was probably the first time I realized how prevelant English was, and that PLs could even be written in any language .

The words may be English but it doesn’t feel like English at all because it’s but structured like natural language.

How's Microsoft Excel for you?

Salutations,

I always felt the same and one theory I have is because the imperative nature of source code feels rude if you try and put it in French. It feels like yelling orders to a dog.

Then I don't know if it's just because in French, despite everyone calling us rude, we are usually quite polite. Or if it's the same for every ESL.

It looks more elegant than English.

i thought the verbs in English-programming were meant to be infinitive and not imperative?

I've notice there is "merde" method which is available in the example like in https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille/blob/7e9523fe24026bff1a3a7...

Merde is an alias for "calisse" and "oups" , see https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille/blob/7e9523fe24026bff1a3a7...

Haha the translation is so funny. But I confess, as a native french speaker, I could not code in that language. It is so weird because I am used to english for coding now. Sometimes I write my variable names in french and I think I even used accented letters one time. What is worse, is that I tend to mix english and fench variable names in my code, but anyway english is way more common in the code base.

I find it slightly disappointing that they haven't stuck with the Rust practice of picking short or abbreviated words when they're clearly unambiguous - such as "fn" instead of "func" or "function". E.g. why Résultat<...> when you can write just Résu? Why PeutÊtre and not Ptêt, very common in quick language, e.g. for texting or chatting?

As a non-Bavarian German, I'm offended by the German = Bavarian stereotype! (jk, it's just mildly annoying sometimes and this is meant to be silly)

Almost perfect. I'm missing the Schwabacher typeface rendering.

I don't like the non-Germanic ref here in als_ref is not Germanic enough. als_ver (from Verweis) would be nicer.

Indent with two spaces for code formatting.

Years ago the research team behind OCaml released Chamelle, a version of the language localized in French, as an April fool's joke:

https://gallium.inria.fr/blog/ocaml-5/

This is actually in a very aproachable and lenient french. The compiler will offer you a smoke to cool down and think about your syntax from some distance.

> Arf("fetchez le dico".vers())

Missing!! They should've translated `let` to `le` and `la`.

lol, it'll just say 'Noh!' and then ignore any further input. Especially if you forget the --bonjour flag.

I don't know russian, so I can't judge the quality, but Tsoding's lang might suit you better:

https://github.com/tsoding/good_training_language

I thought the Russian version was pretty funny. Thanks for calling it out.

I wish the Greek one had a vibe at all, past putting the Rust logo on a gyro. Not even a curse word. You could have some fun with compiler errors and allusions to Oxi Day (which was two days ago).

Just wait until the Quebecois government here in Canada hears about this. They are militant about avoiding english at all costs. They changed all the STOP signs in Quebec to ARRET because STOP was too english.

"Nothing to wank license", too literally translated

French has so many perfectly normal looking words for sexual stuff. Not particularly long or short, not a compound of other words or a circumscription... nope, just a word for a thing, like table or house or tree.

But is it more vulgar than the English version? Deep question.

I can tell you that github.com/jeroenhd/roest was all done manually.

If I'd used AI, I probably would've included grammatical gender for nouns.

The Russian version seems to be handcrafted with humor

It definitely was.

https://github.com/dscottboggs/rustteksto