European languages won’t die just because English is around, there are millions of people in Europe that don’t interact on a national or international scale, and are quite happy to continue with their language as it stands, that won’t change for a long time.

I think your project is a really great idea! Code often doesn’t translate well when variable and object names are poorly suggested due to translation issues, and there must be billions of lines of code that are limited to specific languages, which are locked out to non-speakers. Can I suggest you focus more on the language benefits on the home page? Did you think about applying this technique as a transpiler to an existing programming language instead of a new language?

And corporate will be like "hey they are shit but they're the cheapest! and because our code is language and coder independent we can always move to the next emerging country once the current folks demands a pay raise! evil laugh"

This is a completely transactional phenomenon. You want to communicate with more people, and be understood in almost any part of the world, and possibly make more money doing just about any job? Speak English.

Also, I notice the web page to your project is written in English, I imagine it was done for mass appeal right? That's kind of the point.

> If Citrine respects all languages, why is this website in English?

> As a developer, entrepeneur or scientist, you need to be able to read English texts. Citrine does not try to change that. However writing complex programs in a foreign language is a different story. The Citrine project aims to reduce the number of mistakes in software by allowing everyone the language they know best. The manuals will still be mainly in English although translations in other languages may appear in the future or maybe summaries. The Citrine project also encourages ambassadors to host language specific implementations of Citrine along with translated manuals.

People don't know a lot of Dutch equivalents for English words either, they use 'body text' instead of 'broodtekst' and 'database' instead of 'databank'.

Code bases are a complete nightmare because managers 'want English as the main language' but we lack the English words for lots of (financial) Dutch concepts.

A lot Dutch people think they are really good in English, but we really aren't (sometimes native English speakers beg us to not try and speak English but use Dutch instead so they at least understand what is being said given their limited knowledge of the Dutch language).

Our limited knowledge of English leads to a lot of confusing code as well (i.e. they use the word 'childs' instead of 'children' in code that deals with tree structures). Also a lot of database names and tables are full of 'poor English' (user_project instead of 'participant') -- maybe due to a limited vocabulary (trying to describe a word with multiple words etc). There are many more examples. These are just my experiences.

edit: Due to the fact that English is not my native language my statements may sometimes a bit more rude than I intent. Sorry for that.

edit: Tried to clarify text, add some nuance.

As a native English speaker living in NL I'm really curious about this, could you describe a situation? The few Dutch people I work with have outstanding levels of English, although being at a company where ~90% of people in my department are non-Dutch, so English is widely spoken, my observation is clearly very biased. Plus I live in Amsterdam which I hear is very different from the rest of the country in this respect.

I have found levels of English there to also be excellent, one possible reason could be that English language television and radio broadcasts (BBC etc) have been available to the Dutch for decades, and in a lot of cases actively consumed. That was certainly the case when I was there as a child.

Same goes for the code bases, they had the usual mess that codebases have but variable names weren't an issue.

I find your example of childs vs children to be bike shedding, the hard part about coding isn't the variable names. If you read haskell you would probably find "c" for child and "cs" for children, simply to keep the code terse.

While I strongly condone the form of backlash you received, I am still happy that there is pushback.(sorry)

We as software devs battle complexity on a daily basis, and we achieve many of the things we achieve only because of collaboration. Introducing an additional translation step into the process of coding sounds like a complexity nightmare, a debugging nightmare and a communications nightmare.

When working in an international team you still have to talk about the stuff, and as long as something like this doesn't ship with a perfect star trek like universal natlang translator people still have to settle on one language, except that the code they are looking at is now code they've never seen before.

Kudos for the effort, go do it as a hobby but don't be suprised that people get mad just by the very thought of being forced by management to work with something that puts even more complexity onto their shoulders.

And I'm happy that people want collaboration so bad that they are willing to speak and work in a language that they don't understand well in order to connect with peers from all over the world.

And don't take it personal that others don't digg the idea of having to work with something like this. It's a cool idea, it didn't work. Move on and try the next cool idea, one day one of them will stick. You're not the only one to have worked on something and then figured out a year into the project that there is no demand/ its technically unfeasible / there is some obscure paper from the 70s that had the same idea but discovered a fundamental flaw and dropped it.

To quote allan key:

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.