The Shape of Code

When creating a variable name, to what extent are developers influenced by their native human language?

There is lots of evidence that variable names are either English words, abbreviations of English words, or some combination of these two. Source code containing a large percentage of identifiers using words from other languages does exist, but it requires effort to find; there is a widely expressed view that source should be English based (based on my experience of talking to non-native English speakers, and even the odd paper discussing the issue, e.g., Language matters).

Given that variable names can prove information that reduces the effort needed to understand code, and that most code is only ever read by the person who wrote it, developers should make the most of their expertise in using their native language.

To what extent do non-native English-speaking developers make use of their non-English native language?

I have found it very difficult to even have a discussion around this question. When I broach the subject with non-native English speakers, the response is often along the lines of “our develo0pers speak good English.” I am careful to set the scene by telling them of my interest in naming, and that I think there are benefits for developers to make use of their native language. The use of non-English languages in software development is not yet a subject that is open for discussion.

I knew that sooner or later somebody would run an experiment…

How Developers Choose Names is another interesting experiment involving Dror Feitelson (the paper rather confusingly refers to it as a survey, a post on an earlier experiment).

What makes this experiment interesting is that bilingual subjects (English and Hebrew) were used, and the questions were in English or Hebrew. The 230 subjects (some professional, some student) were given a short description and asked to provide an appropriate variable/function/data-structure name; English was used for 26 of the question, and Hebrew for the other 21 questions, and subjects answered a random subset.

What patterns of Hebrew usage are present in the variable names?

Out of 2017 answers, 14 contained Hebrew characters, i.e., not enough for statistical analysis. This does not mean that all the other variable names were only derived from English words, in some cases Hebrew words appeared via transcription using the 26 English letters. For instance, using “pinuk” for the Hebrew word that means “benefit” in English. Some variables were created from a mixture of Hebrew and English words, e.g., deservedPinuks and pinuksUsed.

Analysing this data requires someone who is fluent in Hebrew and English. I am not a fluent, or even non-fluent, Hebrew speaker. My role in this debate is encouraging others, and at last I have some interesting data to show people.

The paper spends time showing how for personal preferences result in a wide selection of names being chosen by different people for the same quantity. I cannot think of any software engineering papers that have addressed this issue for variable names, but there is lots of evidence from other fields; also see figure 7.33.

Those interested in searching source code for the impact of native-language might like to look at the names of variables appearing as operands of the bitwise and logical operators. Some English words occur much more frequently in the names of these variable, compared to variables that are operands of arithmetic operators, e.g., flag, status, and signal. I predict that non-native English-speaking developers will make use of corresponding non-English words.