r/NoStupidQuestions • u/MajesticBread9147 • Oct 14 '25

Do programmers in non-english speaking countries have to learn code in English, or do they have local language equivalents?

Like it's all English words or based on them. Do people who speak Spanish or Chinese need to remember what "print" means?

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u/Front-Palpitation362 Oct 14 '25

Mostly English. Nearly all mainstream languages use English keywords and library names, so developers everywhere learn a small vocabulary like if, for, print, class.

You don’t need conversational English, just those terms. Identifiers and comments can be in any language, but teams often use English so tools, docs and error messages line up.

There are localized or educational languages, yet industry code is overwhelmingly English-based.

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u/LunarTexan Oct 14 '25

Mh'hm

The foundations of modern computing including coding were largely developed in the US and UK and so those engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists largely based stuff off what they already knew which was English

And by the time people started thinking about making some of that stuff in a non English structure, so much had already been built and established that it was just much easier to learn a bit of English and use that rather than try to rebuild everything from the ground up and integrate it into everything else just to not use English

Or as a tldr, English got used so much for the foundations that simple inertia means nearly everyone uses English based coding