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Re:Fun with Unicode in Swift by vbezhenar on Saturday December 15, 2018 @10:53AM (#18688809)
In Russia it's considered very bad and novice style to use Russian words as identifiers (they usually spell it with latin letters anyway, constantly switching between latin and cyrillic layouts is very cumbersome). There's one exception: 1C platform, but that software is used internally for accounting and basically a DSL with heavy use of application domain terminology.

Sometimes I'm tempted to use Russian identifiers for application domain terminology, because very often there's no adequate translation or I just don't know English enough to translate some terms. I like the following example: every man here has name combined from last name (Фамилия) which is used for all family members, first name (Имя), that's pretty standard. But there's also third name: Отчество, which is basically father's name with some suffix, e.g. father Иван will have child with third name Иванович. Now I've seen all kinds of translations for those terms, including plain wrong. Last name, family name for Фамилия, first name, name for имя, father name, second name, patronymic, patronymic name for отчество. I've seen bugs because one developer interpreted those terms differently from another.

And that's just for name. There are plenty of other terms. Add to that that many developers are bad at English and at best will use first result from Google Translate. So may be national identifiers have its place.

Re:Fun with Unicode in Swift by kbenson on Saturday December 15, 2018 @11:28AM (#18689012)
> every man here has name combined from last name (Фамилия) which is used for all family members, first name (Имя), that's pretty standard.

Sounds like you get to skirt a few of the problems outlines in Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[1]. That's nice for programmers in Russia that deal with Russia only, if true. :)

1: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Re:Fun with Unicode in Swift by drewmate on Saturday December 15, 2018 @11:58AM (#18689143)
I think Russians do get to skirt a few of the problems... if they believe their systems are only used by native Russians with standard Russian names.

Of course the whole point of the article you mentioned is that making such assumptions leads to odd behavior. I (an American) lived in Russia for a while. One time I was having a couch delivered to my apartment and had to give the store my full name. I was delighted to see my middle name show up on the receipt in the отчество (patronymic) field with the Russian patronymic suffix ович attached. I still got the couch no problem, but I got a laugh out of their attempt to shoehorn my (clearly not Russian) names into their naming paradigm.