Hmmm... if you are going to use only Bavarian paraphernalia to symbolize "German Rust", you might as well go all the way and use Bavarian instead of German for some extra laughs? Ok, TBF most programming keywords are rather scientific, and dialects are less used in academia, so that might be tricky.
Also, I would bet that most Germans would also use "fn" as a two-letter shorthand for "Funktion". But it just had to be different, so they chose "fk" for "FunKtion"...
In contrast, when I worked for Goldman Sachs business unit 'Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities' I made sure not use their abbreviation in polite German company.
Possibly “(ver)änderbar” (changeable) to have a distinct keyword. “Mutierbar” would also work fine in German, but it was probably changed with the same reasoning that fn was to fk.
As a German native speaker, it's surprisingly hard to read the code examples. Seems like all common concepts of programming languages like access modifiers, types etc. are hardwired to their English terms in my brain.
I've never been able to even use localized UIs on anything that goes on my computers and my phone. My native Romanian looks either foreign or silly when it's on the "File" menu.
It's probably what you got used to when you first learned it though.
Because I am also slow at reading math / the theoretical part of IT in English because I learned it ... in Romanian.
Edit: to the point that I didn't remember the "theoretical part of IT" is "Computer Science" when posting in a hurry :)
With me it goes so far that I switch everything that can be switched (e.g. Android on my phone) to English. It's not just the terms, it's also the frequent translation errors. One "oldie but goodie" example is a Windows utility (I think it was Registry Editor, but not sure anymore) that translated "key" with "Taste" - which means key on a keyboard, not key as in a thing that opens doors or allows you to uniquely identify a bit of data, that would have been "Schlüssel".
I do the same thing. When helping friends with their computer problems, having to translate words in a menu is such a hassle, especially when the translations aren't obvious.
When it turns out they were using a different version and didn't have that option, we still had to figure out what translates to what – if the option even is there at all.
As an English native speaker, that makes sense to me. When I read code, I don’t really think of keywords as being related to the English word that inspired them; they’re just their own distinct symbol to my brain.
Rost also did do extra work to have maximally diverging naming.
- struktur could have been strukt
- umstz could have been impl as in Implementierung was added to the German language
- nutz would be a more realistic replacements of use
- Mutieren is a German word so mut would stay mut
- unsafe is better translated as unsicher, not gefährlich which is dangerous
- hinein is a translation for into but .into() a short for "convert into", which in German is "konvertiere zu" so `.zu()`, similar "convert ... from .." would be roughly "aus ... erstelle ..." so `.aus()`.
- etc.
in general authors do choose language keywords, syntax and acronyms so that they flow/read reasonable nicely and that isn't true here in many ways. If we don't just try to translate by word but by what we mean with the word in given context then verhalten would be a better choice for trait and you can definieren (define) behavior so `impl Behavior for Thing` become `def Verhalten für Ding`. Similar static wouldn't become statisch but instead global.
When I first read the examples, besides my laughter, I felt a similar disconnect im the semantics of the chosen German words. Thank you for you suggestions, I agree with all of them, they are better indeed IMHO.
Both Finnish and Swedish are official languages in Finland. Linus' parents are from the region of Finland that primarily speaks Swedish, so Linus grew up speaking Swedish at home.
What makes it really funny is that the joke was lost on Microsoft in the mid 90s when you might program macros for MS Office in a version of BASIC that actually did get its keywords translated.
Still to this day, when I occasionally use Excel/Libre Office Calc I never know wether to write `sum(` or `summe(`. Function names depend on the localization settings of the system I'm working on.
Microsoft's choices can easily be understood under the following frame: They essentially think of everyone they (supposedly) serve as stupid. Thinking that the need to learn a bunch of keywords in a foreign language is a serious stumbling block to the adoption of their programming language is just one case in point. Having a good laugh at their expense about it feels like karmic justice, because it's bad enough that they keep getting away with it as much as they do.
counterpoint: Microsoft does serve a lot of computer-illiterate customers. They also have very literature customers but they have to design for the lowest common denominator
It usually doesn't have this charitable "no user left behind" character, though. Their shenanigans include "Let's inject advertising in between people's e-mails and turn everyone's OS into a billboard. Will it be hard for people to get any work done this way? Of course it will. But who is going to stop us? Surely not those suckers whose money we take." What is the appropriate reaction to that? Surely not "Thank you, thank you, Microsoft, for putting me into a digital world that is so perfectly matched to the stupidity, laziness, and digital helplessness of me and my brethren".
It's a very dangerous path to walk down, to think to yourself "I'm smart and powerful, but most of my customers are stupid and helpless, so it's not the needs of my peers that I need to cater to, but rather the needs of the [stupid] many". The contrapositive of that is: Most of my customers aren't truly my peers. Well that's the first step on a slippery slope towards: These people aren't really deserving of being treated in a moral/ethical way, the way I would treat my peers and the way I would expect my peers to treat me.
One problem is that a lot of translations in Microsoft's documentation are subtly wrong, but you don't immediately notice because the grammar is correct. And this problem already existed before machine translation was a thing (I guess MS just hired translators who were not familar with the documentation's product or even 'computer-lingo' in general).
Many times in corporate environments you don't have permissions to do that, and let me tell you it's a pain when you 5 layer down a RDP rabbit hole to figure out which locale you're using
I'm German. Lived abroad for close to a decade although back in Germany for the past 4 now.
Generally, I have no issue switching between German and English for anything, be it movies, books, conversation, etc.
Coding is just something though that my German brain will refuse to do. It feels foreign and just downright weird. That's the best I can describe it. I even started learning to code in German. German is also one the languages that generally has a ton of resources translated and translated well. I just cannot do it though. Syntax and technical terms in German just turn my brain to mush.
Same here, though with one exception: things that are not usually written out in English words (operators and punctuation) still have German names to me. In my head I still say “Stern”, “Klammer zu”, etc. when reading code like “x = *y;” and error messages like “')' expected”. I read “==” as “gleich gleich” and “!=” as “nicht gleich”.
As an American moving back there from Switzerland and scared to lose the German I know, maybe this is exactly what I need.
Though I will say that “benutze” is much longer than “use” haha.
Would be hilarious to make a Swiss German version.
Edit: the words are abbreviated which makes it that much harder for a non native German speaker. Seems like German is much longer on average. That’s one plus of English over German.
I do wish more languages had capitalized nouns though
Language vocabulary and syntax design has been influenced by how "fit" the terms are for use. Fitness includes the length.
Now it's true that English is particularly full of short terms.
But I wonder how a programming language would have evolved if one had chosen German (or another) language from the get go instead of having a translation
Oh, no, this is Weimar Republik style, peak Germanity. There were lots of avant-garde movements that were sure that capital letters in general were just about to be phased out in a few years time.
Nein Nein Nein. Nicht gut. Hans lass sein. German in Programming seems like the worst idea ever made.
DampfSchifffahrtGesellschaftsVertragsKlasse = nil
the irony must be lost on me here, but I began writing Rust in German and never I had as much fun programming as since I began using German as main language.
Forgetting about Kamel or Kebab case? Love it.
German is awesome for programming, imao.
PS. I speak Persian, know Arabic, Serbian too but none offer the ease of text to code as German.
Horrible idea, but I am not surprised someone decided to do this. In Germany employees have guarantee that they can speak German at work, does not matter the company is international, on the meetings, emails are people from USA, India, Ukraine, Poland. German has to be used if a single German employee wants that.
I have a friend who works in such place. DeepL is a most important piece of software he uses, the problem starts if DeepL messes up some details. Meetings are a nightmare, communication is a nightmare. Managers try to mitigate all that, by avoiding employees from Germany in the projects, what is pretty funny, as company is multinational, but of German origin, and most of the managers are Germans...
Why would it be wrong that an employee working in his country prefer to use his native language for communication?
If the team is mixed, that means someone would need to learn and use a foreign language. Why does it have to be always only English?
That being said, I still prefer a programming language in English, but it's not like there are no precedents here. Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German.
Why not code? Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly to and from a universal internal format?
> Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German.
And many Japanese are used to writing Excel formulas in Japanese.
Excel is such a crap program. Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language.
> Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly
> Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language.
Excel always shows the formula names in your system language. If happen to be on a computer set to Japanese and prefer English, just set it to that. Why does the whole world need to assimilate to English to save you the - rare - inconvenience of two clicks?
Because a lot of people already know English. You can find good candidates anywhere, bring them together, and they will be able to work together. That's the advantage of English today. There are no reasons to build artificial barriers that hurt cooperation in your company and your country's economy in general, other than nationalistic ones.
It is especially silly in countries like Germany, which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers and an aging population. I'm not saying that immigrants shouldn't learn the local language, but there should be other mechanisms and incentives outside of one's workplace.
Welcome to Europe where every country has a different language that's not English. You call this nationalistic, but how many people in the Anglo-sphere would be comfortable working in foreign languages?
A lot of workers, especially older ones, still aren't fully comfortable in English beyond ordering a pizza on vacation abroad, and the older ones also have a longer tenure and a bigger voice in the company. And European companies are a lot older than US companies due to a lot of factors.
Plus, most often, European companies build products for local markets rather than the international markets, which means local language knowledge is mandatory besides English, so then when a lot of the product management, sales, marketing, customer support is all done in the local language, how can you expect to have the SW dev team to be the only insular one without speaking the local language?
>which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers
There's no skill shortage in IT work. Every open position gets enough applications form local candidates in this economy. The skill shortage is in poorly paid hard labor jobs that nobody likes to do like elderly care or construction or that requires doing night shifts.
One of the unexpected tough parts during my CS studies was keeping track of the german translations of terms. I would sit in an exam and wonder what Halde (Heap) was again. 98% of interesting literature is in English, and even if the lecture was in German, the recommended literature would usually be in English. In my job, I'm thinking and writing in English, then sometimes translate back to German if need be. Switching to an English keyboard was a major improvement, as many really important strokes are less intuitive in the german layout ( {} for example).
I would be really peeved if a random guy on my team could force all of us to program in German. It creates a lot of unnecessary friction.
My favorite hate term from that category is my Operating Systems professor saying "I-Knoten" for inode. Not "Indexknoten" oder anything, just the letter I + "Knoten".
only narrow-minded people see an idea which was intended as a joke as validation for their opinion and then go on and drone on about their stubborn ideas to lecture the world with their agenda
other people however are busy implementing something in rost to further anger the former
> German has to be used if a single German employee wants that.
I'm not sure about this statement. See [1]:
"The Regional Labor Court (Landesarbeitsgericht - LAG) of Nuremberg had to rule on a motion by a works council, in which the latter demanded that the discussions held with it be conducted only in German. At the same time, it demanded that all communication between the branch management and the employees be conducted in German. The Regional Court rejected both motions of the works council."
Yes, but translation must be provided when requested.
"Contrary to the view of the works council, communication in English is also not an obstruction of the works council. The court explained that it is crucial how the works council receives the communication. In the disputed case, texts were previously translated into the German language. Face-to-face conversations were translated by those present into German or into English for the branch manager. This was not objectionable, since the risk of a wrong translation was at the expense of the employer."
It is absolutely mad that today, in 2025, with all the computing power available, the mass of extremely well educated programmers, the number of geniuses, and the advances in computer science...
... merely suggesting the possibility that the keywords of a programming language could be freely translated back and forth between two human languages (in a totally compatible way!) immediately generates comments such as "horrible", "a nightmare", "this is why that country is a failure"...
I mean, this is a 1-to-1 transcription of very specific, identifiable, unique, protected words in a text file.
And this is the top-rated comment when I write this. Who are you, people who wrote or upvoted this? Why are you so scared by any deviation from what you are used to?
You're imagining something which can't exist. Maybe because you don't know any other human languages, or maybe despite that (which is worse)
"freely translated back and forth between two human languages" isn't a thing. You might as well insist that Pi is rational.
So what you get instead is awkwardly translated back and forth in a way that increases confusion. Nobody actually wants that. You're arguing for much worse outcomes, as a result of an at best naive understanding of what language is.
It is a 1-to-1 mapping of keywords. It's not the only choice of German words one could have used for those concepts, but neither are the English ones. For some people the particular choices made in German here will make more sense, for others the English ones. What's so bad about being more inclusive?
I would assume that in rust, as in other languages, you can't use keywords as e.g. variable names because it would lead to mixups. So you can't translate programs back and forth without making sure you don't use keyword of _any_ possible language as variable names.
For keywords in particular you can write the identifier anyway, r#async is a perfectly reasonable (though ugly) way to use async as an identifier, despite the fact that async is a keyword in current Rust editions.
But the problem is that while we can mechanically perform the operation that doesn't have the effect claimed, it's as if people expected (and I know this does happen with idiots) that Chinese is just the same as English but with different symbols.
> This attitude is just one of the many factors that led to ...
Thanks! Sounds like an interesting read. German manufacturing is in a really tough spot indeed. But, just to have a bit more nuance in the discussion. It's not all hopeless. Munro loves the new electric motor from VW [1]. And I'm personally also very impressed by multiple high quality open source projects that are made in Germany such as Typst and Forgejo.
If I am not wrong German was supposed to be a dual language in the United Stated but the German migrants there who contributed to founding the country lost their cultural access; and as someonein love with works by Goethe and inspired by other European authors, I believe the loss of European languages is a humanitarian cultural heritage loss;
and a German comapny should endeavour to hire individuals who are interested in German language and culture.
Sacrificing a temporary short-term ease of in finding employees at the cost of cultural loss is not wise, imao.
119 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadAlso, I would bet that most Germans would also use "fn" as a two-letter shorthand for "Funktion". But it just had to be different, so they chose "fk" for "FunKtion"...
In contrast, when I worked for Goldman Sachs business unit 'Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities' I made sure not use their abbreviation in polite German company.
It's probably what you got used to when you first learned it though.
Because I am also slow at reading math / the theoretical part of IT in English because I learned it ... in Romanian.
Edit: to the point that I didn't remember the "theoretical part of IT" is "Computer Science" when posting in a hurry :)
When it turns out they were using a different version and didn't have that option, we still had to figure out what translates to what – if the option even is there at all.
- struktur could have been strukt - umstz could have been impl as in Implementierung was added to the German language - nutz would be a more realistic replacements of use - Mutieren is a German word so mut would stay mut - unsafe is better translated as unsicher, not gefährlich which is dangerous - hinein is a translation for into but .into() a short for "convert into", which in German is "konvertiere zu" so `.zu()`, similar "convert ... from .." would be roughly "aus ... erstelle ..." so `.aus()`. - etc.
in general authors do choose language keywords, syntax and acronyms so that they flow/read reasonable nicely and that isn't true here in many ways. If we don't just try to translate by word but by what we mean with the word in given context then verhalten would be a better choice for trait and you can definieren (define) behavior so `impl Behavior for Thing` become `def Verhalten für Ding`. Similar static wouldn't become statisch but instead global.
(Swedish is Linus Torvalds' native language.)
Supporting multiple languages is a problem all right: googling, communication, etc...
It depends.
> So switching by locale should not be a problem?
Until you get an Excel file written in another locale. The coolest one i had was one with Japanese formulas.
I mean sure, hurdur Microsoft dumb, it's a classic joke. But if that was the first attempt at translating keywords, then how is it "really funny"?
It just gets my goat when people make fun of innovators with the benefit of hindsight.
It's a very dangerous path to walk down, to think to yourself "I'm smart and powerful, but most of my customers are stupid and helpless, so it's not the needs of my peers that I need to cater to, but rather the needs of the [stupid] many". The contrapositive of that is: Most of my customers aren't truly my peers. Well that's the first step on a slippery slope towards: These people aren't really deserving of being treated in a moral/ethical way, the way I would treat my peers and the way I would expect my peers to treat me.
Being forced to use their software while outside an English speaking county is terrible.
Many times in corporate environments you don't have permissions to do that, and let me tell you it's a pain when you 5 layer down a RDP rabbit hole to figure out which locale you're using
Because they didn't really bother to ask native speakers if the translation makes sense in the target language.
I also propose Eierlegende Wollmilchsau as a type, that would be fun!
https://github.com/charyan/unirust
https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...
Btw, 'sonstwenn' seems really silly. 'ansonsten' or just 'sonst' might be more idiomatic.
Hmm, the actual code uses 'anderenfalls', which also works, but is a bit longer than 'sonst'.
Generally, I have no issue switching between German and English for anything, be it movies, books, conversation, etc.
Coding is just something though that my German brain will refuse to do. It feels foreign and just downright weird. That's the best I can describe it. I even started learning to code in German. German is also one the languages that generally has a ton of resources translated and translated well. I just cannot do it though. Syntax and technical terms in German just turn my brain to mush.
Though I will say that “benutze” is much longer than “use” haha.
Would be hilarious to make a Swiss German version.
Edit: the words are abbreviated which makes it that much harder for a non native German speaker. Seems like German is much longer on average. That’s one plus of English over German.
I do wish more languages had capitalized nouns though
Now it's true that English is particularly full of short terms.
But I wonder how a programming language would have evolved if one had chosen German (or another) language from the get go instead of having a translation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl
I would have probably just gone with 'nutze' instead.
Also https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille
https://www.netlingo.com/word/das-blinkenlights.php
FWIW I teach in a German-speaking area, and all of my material is in English.
PS. I speak Persian, know Arabic, Serbian too but none offer the ease of text to code as German.
I have a friend who works in such place. DeepL is a most important piece of software he uses, the problem starts if DeepL messes up some details. Meetings are a nightmare, communication is a nightmare. Managers try to mitigate all that, by avoiding employees from Germany in the projects, what is pretty funny, as company is multinational, but of German origin, and most of the managers are Germans...
This attitude is just one of the many factors that led to https://www.amazon.pl/Kaput-German-Miracle-Wolfgang-Munchau/...
If the team is mixed, that means someone would need to learn and use a foreign language. Why does it have to be always only English?
That being said, I still prefer a programming language in English, but it's not like there are no precedents here. Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German.
Why not code? Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly to and from a universal internal format?
And many Japanese are used to writing Excel formulas in Japanese. Excel is such a crap program. Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language.
> Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly
Because some words' meaning is context dependent.
"We don't need no education"
And English is the only language where that is true?
> "We don't need no education"
Then educate yourself and learn another language. Something tells me you are fluent only in English.
Excel always shows the formula names in your system language. If happen to be on a computer set to Japanese and prefer English, just set it to that. Why does the whole world need to assimilate to English to save you the - rare - inconvenience of two clicks?
Because a lot of people already know English. You can find good candidates anywhere, bring them together, and they will be able to work together. That's the advantage of English today. There are no reasons to build artificial barriers that hurt cooperation in your company and your country's economy in general, other than nationalistic ones.
It is especially silly in countries like Germany, which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers and an aging population. I'm not saying that immigrants shouldn't learn the local language, but there should be other mechanisms and incentives outside of one's workplace.
Welcome to Europe where every country has a different language that's not English. You call this nationalistic, but how many people in the Anglo-sphere would be comfortable working in foreign languages?
A lot of workers, especially older ones, still aren't fully comfortable in English beyond ordering a pizza on vacation abroad, and the older ones also have a longer tenure and a bigger voice in the company. And European companies are a lot older than US companies due to a lot of factors.
Plus, most often, European companies build products for local markets rather than the international markets, which means local language knowledge is mandatory besides English, so then when a lot of the product management, sales, marketing, customer support is all done in the local language, how can you expect to have the SW dev team to be the only insular one without speaking the local language?
>which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers
There's no skill shortage in IT work. Every open position gets enough applications form local candidates in this economy. The skill shortage is in poorly paid hard labor jobs that nobody likes to do like elderly care or construction or that requires doing night shifts.
I would be really peeved if a random guy on my team could force all of us to program in German. It creates a lot of unnecessary friction.
other people however are busy implementing something in rost to further anger the former
I'm not sure about this statement. See [1]:
"The Regional Labor Court (Landesarbeitsgericht - LAG) of Nuremberg had to rule on a motion by a works council, in which the latter demanded that the discussions held with it be conducted only in German. At the same time, it demanded that all communication between the branch management and the employees be conducted in German. The Regional Court rejected both motions of the works council."
[1]: https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de...
"Contrary to the view of the works council, communication in English is also not an obstruction of the works council. The court explained that it is crucial how the works council receives the communication. In the disputed case, texts were previously translated into the German language. Face-to-face conversations were translated by those present into German or into English for the branch manager. This was not objectionable, since the risk of a wrong translation was at the expense of the employer."
... merely suggesting the possibility that the keywords of a programming language could be freely translated back and forth between two human languages (in a totally compatible way!) immediately generates comments such as "horrible", "a nightmare", "this is why that country is a failure"...
I mean, this is a 1-to-1 transcription of very specific, identifiable, unique, protected words in a text file.
And this is the top-rated comment when I write this. Who are you, people who wrote or upvoted this? Why are you so scared by any deviation from what you are used to?
"freely translated back and forth between two human languages" isn't a thing. You might as well insist that Pi is rational.
So what you get instead is awkwardly translated back and forth in a way that increases confusion. Nobody actually wants that. You're arguing for much worse outcomes, as a result of an at best naive understanding of what language is.
Excuse me, what is hard in taking this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-01-keywords.html
And translating those back and forth?
In fact, if it "can't exist", how can Rost be "fully compatible with English-Rust, so you can mix both at your convenience"?
And Rouille? https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille
And Unirust? https://github.com/charyan/unirust
But the problem is that while we can mechanically perform the operation that doesn't have the effect claimed, it's as if people expected (and I know this does happen with idiots) that Chinese is just the same as English but with different symbols.
SAP is also a “German tech company”, and I bet most of their non-Germany based employees don’t speak German either.
Thanks! Sounds like an interesting read. German manufacturing is in a really tough spot indeed. But, just to have a bit more nuance in the discussion. It's not all hopeless. Munro loves the new electric motor from VW [1]. And I'm personally also very impressed by multiple high quality open source projects that are made in Germany such as Typst and Forgejo.
[1]: https://youtu.be/qTilowhsX_w
Many large german companies use english as their primary language, so I doubt this claim.
This is flat out wrong and you link to a very poorly researched book with a lot of blatantly false populism in relation to energy politics.