Lykkjulok

This morning I snapped (again), having stubbed my toe on yet another impenetrable bit of code knocked up at the end of a typical 14-hour day by a fresh-from-college “subject matter expert” (honestly, that’s what they call them) in our Indian office.

The comments in the code defy description. Sure, the words were English(ish) on the surface, but any meaning was buried (and remains to this day) deep within the misfiring synapses of the stressed-out, burnt-out graddie who wrote them.

The code was written six months ago, so naturally the perpetrator has long since been head hunted and is now burning out even more brightly in another Bangalore sweatshop. Good luck to him/her.

In the meantime, I’m left trying to figure out what the hell s/he was thinking. So naturally after about 10 minutes I got bored and started wondering about how difficult it must be for somebody who doesn’t speak English as their first language to use the if-else/do-while constructs of a programming language.

Wouldn’t it be easier for them to marshal their addled thoughts if they could use their own grammar? Their own set of meaningful function names?

Enter Wikipedia.

Turns out that at least one bright spark in Iceland had the same idea back in the 80s, and “Fjoelnir” was born.

What does this do, I wonder?

    bottles ->
        stef(;n)
        stofn
            val n úr
            kostur 0 þá
                skrifastreng(;"no more bottles"),
            kostur 1 þá
                skrifastreng(;"1 bottle of beer"),
            annars
                skrifa(;n),
                skrifastreng(;" bottles of beer"),
            vallok
        stofnlok

See what I mean? I can see that it’s a switch statement, but it hurts my head. No wonder most of the code coming out of India is crap – not only do they have to deal with English in the programming language itself but they’re increasingly faced with design patterns* that most native English speakers find hard to internalise.

Wouldn’t surprise me if the programming languages of the future are based in Esperanto. Or Latin. Luckily I won’t be around to see it.

* or “knitting patterns”, as I like to call them when trying to make a point to an imagination-challenged colleague