There are more interpretations of "OO" than there are people, but the overall direction is that OO isn't a panacea for code maintainability, and some frameworks ahem Spring create a mental model at times so distant from OOP, that I might as well have written everything in Python. I gain nothing from having classes when one half are records and the other half are singletons.
This is mostly the case because most solutions provide more than the bare minimum of DOM rendering and event binding that a web view originally entails. Once you "accidentally" ship an entire browser inside your app, you've opened up more vectors for vulnerabilities—such is the price of humanity's hubris in attempting omnipotence.
Then second aspect is the "well-hidden" JS runtime or the general dislike of Javascript, but this point has been explained by other commenters well enough.
> Once you "accidentally" ship an entire browser inside your app
That’s not needed. Generally there’s a webview available on the system of choice. All major platforms have it, including mobile and many Linux distros.
> vulnerabilities
Such as? I mean yes if you load remote content with local access to FS etc (although that’s not within the webview). But you don’t need to (nor should you).
I resonate with skepticism for perhaps a different reason -- I just don't see how the censorship discussion is ever about helping China, when the whole discussion is "thinly-veiled" ritualistic anticommunism and an attention-stealing boogeyman that relativizes more pressing political issues, like a higher risk of another world war or the climate crisis. With so much tension in the air, I can't help but notice the sabre-rattling and retreat towards a reductionist description of geopolitics.
It might seem less credible to encounter English in a place where it’s less expected, but think of it this way: would a Yandex-developed ClickHouse database be adopted by Chinese devs if everything in it were written in Russian?
There is some merit in asking your question, for there’s an unspoken rule (and a source of endless frustration) that business-/domain-related terms should remain in the language of their origin. Otherwise, (real-life story) "Leitungsauskunft" could end up being translated as "line information" or even "channel interface" ("pipeline inquiry" should be correct, it's a type of document you can procure from the [German] government).
Ironically, I’m currently working in an environment where we decided to translate such terms, and it hasn’t helped with understanding of the business logic at all. Furthermore, it adds an element of surprise and a topic for debate whenever somebody comes up with a "more accurate translation".
So if anything, English is a sign of a battle-hardened developer, until they try to convert proper names.
In my experience, Germany is the most common exception to the "programming is done in English" rule.
In general, these things happen, and are not restricted to pre-Internet times - in fact, I most often see it in random webshit SaaS developed in Europe - things like, say, food delivery - Pyszne.pl and pizzaportal.pl (defunct) come to my mind. Those sites tend to be well-localized, so they seem like local businesses targeting the national market. But then you accidentally look at an URL deep in ordering form, or the ordering form breaks and you pull up dev tools to fix it, and suddenly you realize the SaaS operator is actually German or Swedish or Dutch, and they're just deploying the same platform across the EU, with a really good localization polish.
'T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM' is the PHP parser's name for the '::' double-colon/scope-resolution-operator token; it means 'T_DOUBLE_COLON' in Hebrew, hence related parser error messages mean "Unexpected double-colon/scope-resolution-operator found". There was some controversy in the PHP community in 2013 about keeping the non-English naming as it was widely considered confusing to users.
It's 2025, I've used PHP professionally maybe for a few months out of the last 20 years, the languages I use mostly don't have `::` as a token, and still, I find it really hard to refer to it as anything other than Paamayim Nekudotayim :-)
It isn't uncommon to find german variable names in codebases that predate web 1.0 or linux.
Now that I think about it, german is especially good at creating words by concatination. So "arrival time" should just be the single word "Ankunftszeit" - "ankunftZeit" feels a bit off.
Yup. If languages were characters in a computer RPG, they'd have "special skills" listed on their character cards. Off the top of my head:
- English: verbing and nouning. All languages have ways of introducing new words, but only in English I've seen it accepted as something anyone can casually do in a throwaway manner. Have a noun but want to talk about the (contextually) default action related to the noun? No big deal, just stick an "-ing" or "-ed" to its end and carry on. I adore this feature.
- German: word concatenation you mention, it's a killer feature. And then there's the peculiar grammar that puts the most important verb at the very end of a sentence, giving you stuff like "Gegen die hohen Preise für Gas, Strom und Treibstoff will die Regierung etwas machen", meaning "The government wants to do something about the high prices for gas, electricity and fuel", but structured as "<tone> <stuff> <blah> <blah> <subject> <stuff> do something". So not only you need to listen to the end of a sentence to know what it's about, but you can actually zone out a bit early on, catch the last few words, and still recover the meaning. I'm sure one could write an interesting signal processing take on this.
(If anyone knows examples of such unique/special "skills" for other languages, I'd love to hear about them!)
> And then there's the peculiar grammar that puts the most important verb at the very end of a sentence
An American woman visiting Berlin - intent on hearing Bismarck speak - obtained two tickets for the Reichstag visitors' gallery and enlisted an interpreter to accompany her.
Soon after their arrival, Bismarck rose and began to speak. The interpreter, however, simply sat listening with intense concentration. The woman, anxious for him to begin translating, nudged and budged him, to no avail.
Finally, unable to control herself any longer, the woman burst out: "What is he saying!?" "Patience, madam," the interpreter replied. "I am waiting for the verb."
'Aan die hoge brandstofprijzen zal de regering iets gaan DOEN'.
If I say it in my local dialect, it will sound a lot like German.
Speaking of unique skills, I find French very unique as well. "His life" translates to "sa vie" because vie happens to be female. "what is it" translates to "qu'est-ce que c'est", a _seemingly_ random concatenation of shortened words, in spoken form it is only 3 syllables!
blaming Neanderthals for most things is a gross over-simplification and misdirects reader's attention towards genetics. While there is some humour to it, I would be cautious of giving into unwarranted fixation towards genetics, as we no longer live in the world where it needs to be defended against Lamarckism and like.
I posit that the "runtime environment" i.e. epigentics, among other things, has a far traceable cause than the smidge of related species. The nature and consequences of autism land me to believe that it's more likely a consequence of a compiler error, although shoddy source code could be a secondary/compounding cause for it. Take Down's Syndrome as an prime example of genetic disorder, and it becomes clear why such categorization does not work for autism: autism is too broad, it describes the effect rather than cause, and I'd argue that autism is far less debilitating (pronounced) and definitely not inherited.
Autism being "too broad" is why it doesn't have a genetic cause?
Autism's nomenclature not being descriptive enough is why it doesn't have a genetic cause?
Autism not being as debilitating as DS is why it doesn't have a genetic cause? (developmental logic aside, are you familiar with Type 2 and Type 3 autistic individuals?).
Extra dings for not for over-use of CS analogy, "unwarranted fixation", and "we no longer live in the world".
I think the real problem here is this can potentially be a politically heated take. I don't believe it is in this case, or they were making an effort to not make it so. Of course, that is just my reading of it.
In identical twins, autism and homosexuality both have about the same rate of non-occurrence between the twins: 50%. This means, of course, that autists and gays are "born, not made" by the environment. Move along. Nothing to see here.
As a worthless junior dev, thank you for the post. I am seeing a general sentiment of reluctancy towards an introduction of yet another dubious metric in an environment where "software quality" is hijacked to mean something else.
This lead me questioning how good is it to judge a project by its age + last commit (+ project size/complexity + funding/community), as this is what I do in practice. I agree that SemVer isn't really designed to be human-readable and is a rather meaningless / deceiving metric due to divergent practices of different developers.
Written language is like the outer skin layer, a product of a living organism consisting of dead cells.
Being a good translator is to have a good sense of what those organisms are.
Before ChatGPT, human language translation had a similar problem but people weren't as vocal about it.
What I find frustrating that it's increasingly challenging to have DeepL translate thou -> du, as this was my go-to "hack" to overcome the incompatibility of the English language due to its missing features.
To somewhat remedy the "yes man" problem, one needs to become a pedantic mathematician about posing your questions and I don't believe that LLM technology alone is capable of overcoming it entirely. As silly as it sounds, I must concede to the existence of "prompt engineering" as I can forsee the development of abstractions aimed to decompose questions for you.
