Are you working in a non-English codebase?

What do you mean by non-English codebase? Maybe that function and variable names are written in another living language e.g. Italian / Spanish / French / German?

Yes, it’s Elixir but everything is written in German.

I would give you the normal recommendations of just using Google Translate or pair with German-speaking colleague but I am positive you already thought of that.

So maybe ChatGPT?

All the companies my friends or I worked in, which had non-English codebase, were a complete garbage. So my tip is to refactor and translate all of it at once or leave the company

That’s a ridiculous take. Plenty of English codebases are garbage too, and if teams working on that codebase don’t understand English this tip can’t be applied anyway.

I’ve had to do something similar once. I had a gig where I had to migrate the data from one ERP system to another, but the source ERP system code (names, etc) were all in French and I didn’t have access to any technical resources familiar with the source ERP system to call on… and I don’t speak any French at all.

So I did as @dimitarvp has suggested and used online translators. I did three things to get through: 1) I’d take words from the code and translate them; 2) I’d take the English names (I speak English natively) of the concepts I knew should be in an ERP system and translate those into French; 3) I used multiple online translators since different translators might give me different answers (and thoroughness).

Items 1 and 2 above helped where the French words had been abbreviated in some way for brevity and so couldn’t be translated directly from what was in the code.

In the end I got through it and it wasn’t that bad. Mind you I did have that advantage of really knowing the kinds of things that should be there, being able to evaluate if the data matched my assumptions, and I also had an English UI that I could validate against as well.

No, it is not. Code is a text which is designed to be understood by machines and humans. If you write your code in your native language, you make it hard to understand for those, who do not speak this language.

I used to work in teams where 100% of devs, users and managers were Russian-speaking, and we still wrote our program in English, because writing transliteration or using Russian terms (even though Russian language has it’s own broad and deep software development vocabulary) in English programming language would result in a mess nobody would understand. Even if we wrote everything in a Cyrillic alphabet and wrapped every dependency into Russian language wrapper, we would still have an ugly fusion of two languages.

I didn’t say that every English codebase is good.

I am sorry, but how do they program in Elixir? Language constructs, documentation, tutorials, libraries, maintainers, conferences: all in English. How do they explain what does the Supervisor or GenServer mean?

I started programming when I was a kid and I didn’t know any English back then, so I learned terms and gave them my own special meaning (I can sometimes pronounce “header” as “heedr”). But when I learned English, it all finally connected together like a huge puzzle. I understood that I had know only like 50% of what actually was meant in the first place.

If you program in Elixir without knowing English, you’re just combining magic words with a hope that this time it works

Such overhead. Did you at least get paid more because of the extra work?

I read online

It’s considered best practice that code is written in English

and I agree with that. It makes sense since programming languages are a special form of language so the underlying base - just language - should be consistent. I can understand why some people would prefer writing in their mother tongue, just wouldn’t consider it “best practice”.

On yeah, the gig was time and materials and it wasn’t unexpected by the client either; they had warned me in advance that they knew a lot of the underlying stuff was all in French.

…and I keep saying “French”… it actually the Québécois variety of Canadian French; not a big difference for what I was doing, but something that needed to be considered when consulting the online translators.

In code, broken English is still better than poetry in other languages. A program is a piece of writing that is utilitarian to the extreme; your audience is the world and no one is going to translate for you.