English is the de-facto standard language of software development.This is simply not true in my experience here in Germany. I've worked with teams of German programmers who prefer talking and working in German. My German is pretty lousy, yet most of my German colleagues clearly preferred perservering with me in German on programming issues.
Typical German programmers can speak English. They can read Javadocs in English. But they are more comfortable doing so in their native tongue. They have families, customers, bosses who all speak to them solely in German. They watch television and read books in German. Therefore to program in German is more natural.
English-speaking-only people around the web say things like "all the German programmers I meet speak English." But naturally! This boils down to saying "all Germans I've been able to speak to in English speak English!". Or in logical form:
A and B implies Bwhere A is "is German" and B is "speaks English".
This leads to some strange code, because of Java conventions such as setters and getters. These rely on being in English to work. So method names are sometimes a mixture of languages. For example, setAnschrift(...) or getGrenzwert(). The "set" or "get" part ensures things work, but the "Anschrift" or "Grenzwert" part ensures all on the team understand what it does.
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This is just anecdotal, but I've noticed that Germans are the exception that proves the rule. Surf around sf.net for a bit. Most projects by non-native-English speakers have English documentation unless the native language is German. Any insight as to why that is?
> Any insight as to why that is?
Pure economics, I think. There's about 100 million native German speakers, almost all living in rich countries. Therefore it's viable and profitable to supply TV shows, movies, guide books, computer games, software products, IT conferences, and microwave oven user manuals in German.
Other European languages either have too few speakers to justify the costs of fully serving the market (eg. Dutch), or is not a rich enough market (eg. Russian).
Therefore a typical German programmer is used to being able to work and think in German. A typical Dutch programmer is accustomed to often having to work and think in English.
I'm a German developer. I routinely document my code in English, when I talk to non-German developers I do it in English (even if they do talk a bit of German) and I always had a feeling of it being natural. In IT, I always thought of English being the Lingua Franca and I'm always baffled when I meet German developers that can't speak English (or very badly). To me that's like a doctor who doesn't know the Latin names of bones and muscles. He can't talk to other doctors around the world.
But I explain this with some other observation: the difference between people who have come to IT because they heard you earn good money here and people who have come to IT because it is their nature. For example, I call myself a "programmer" with pride (I am not an "Informatiker") and it is an essential part of my life to write programs while a lot of developers I have met would never write a single line of code outside their jobs. I guess that later type of people has no incentive to master English as all they care about is doing their job from 9 to 5 and that's all. I guess the hackers out there consider English to be as essential like their keyboard and editor.
Unluckily the "9 to 5" workers are now the majority. When I started studying "Informatik" I was the only one out of 60 people who had coded before. And I guess that's why you observe more and more German developers who can't speak English (or only enough to read docs).
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