That's what they do with formulas in Excel. There it sucks HARD. Try googling for documentation on StackOverflow for example. Anything you want to copy paste doesn't work because Excel is expecting the commands in a different language.

That sounds like there's a demand for a code-help service that is syntactically aware enough to perform translations into the viewer's native language. I'm sure it would be harder to implement than a basic text-only + syntax highlighting site, but imagine how nice it would be to have your user's language preference (or, if not logged in, with a dropdown "pick $human_language for this $programming_language snippet"). You could also optionally integrate Google Translate or similar for the non-programming-language parts (obviously with less accuracy, but still better than nothing).

Searchability would be tricky, since google etc. might detect the very-similar-but-for-code-snippets links as duplicate/spam and bury them, but there are hopefully ways around that--up to and including asking google to somehow improve their algorithm; it seems like they might be sympathetic (because they're programmers and because there's money to be made) to a request to accommodate such search patterns.

Not only would that solve the problem you posed (googling for stuff on SO is tricky for you as a (presumably) English speaker if it's in another language), but it would also address a far wider-reaching problem with big implications: the relative inaccessibility of programming, especially at the early-beginning stages, to people who are not fluent English speakers.

Sure, you can solve almost any problem without a budget...

If you google in your native language you'll get results in that language. I agree that it takes a bit to relearn all formulas (and I find it too confusing to use different versions at the same time) but when I was still using a non-English version I had no problems finding solutions.

I think it was exactly the right thing to do. Excel formulas are often used by people with little knowledge of programming who aren't aware that "if" is a common keyword. Using the local variant makes formulas much easier to understand (and to get people closer to actual programming).

I agree it's a good move from Microsoft to make Excel more accessible. It's just not something I was expecting the first time I stumbled upon the problem.

I have a programming background so I'm used to searching everything in English, even though that's not my native language.

I inserted sqrt() in my non-English Excel and it didn't work. I thought I had a completely broken version of the program. Took a while to figure out it was a language problem!

And now you need to maintain hundreds of variants of each SO answer.

It only sucks for us, that are used to English as "programming language".

Many Office users only speak their native tongue, are quite happy with the translations and don't even know that StackOverflow exists.

They rather buy books, https://www.fca.pt/en/catalogue/computer-science/office/page...

I don't know, for me as a non-native speaker the words in a programming language are just memorised tokens, they could just as well be symbols or emojis. The bigger deal is libraries and documentation. For instance Microsoft is attempting to localise all their SDK documentation, and at least for German it's a nightmare, either the translations are done by non-technical people, or algorithms, sometimes the information is twisted in a way that reads like correct German, but doesn't contain any useful information, or is even plain wrong.

> they could just as well be symbols or emojis

I'm sure they will...

You can already use emoji in JavaScript.

There's also http://www.emojicode.org

You just described Excel, and I can assure it is anything but "pretty dope". It is in fact a monstrous pain in the ass.

What would be the point though? I feel like that would only increase misunderstandings . Like searching for documentation or help online on that function.

I can't find anything about this on the web, but didn't AppleScript originally do this?