On Tue, 20 Jul 1999 14:47:44 -0400, Patrick Andries wrote:
>This is very interesting: could you explain why switching from German to
>English [in the use of identifiers] improved the quality of your source code
>? This sounds counter-intuitive since one would expect that native German
>speakers immediately recognize German words, remember them easily, type them
>with more ease than foreign words, finally these words would also describe
>their function in a more comprehensible and accurate fashion (the developper
>having a wider vocabulary in his mother tongue).
We have to occassionaly use a dictionary :) but the advantages
outweigh the disadvantages. It's not sufficient to switch from German
to English, you also need a style guide for coding, choosing
identifiers, and so on.
English words are often shorter than German words, so I can use more
words to make clearer names. Examples: "string" / "zeichenkette",
"key" / "schluessel", "encrypt" / "verschluesseln".
Also a lot of those words (like "string") are in common use in German
as technical terms. It would confuse when somebody uses
"zeichenkette". It's simply not practical to translate words like
"hash" or "heap" into German, because nobody would understand. Ask a
German programmer, if he/she knows, what a "Halde" (heap) or a "Faden"
(thread) is! Note: I saw those translations.
So it's almost impossible to use only German in source code. But if I
use *both* English and German, quality of source code decreases. What
happens is that we get a very ugly, incoherent and hard to read
mixture like "LeseString" or "ReadZeichenkette" (and these are the
nice examples).
-- Torsten Mohrin Sharmahd Computing GmbH, Hannover, Germany Phone: +49-511-13780, Fax: +49-511-13450 http://www.sharmahd.com, mohrin@sharmahd.com
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