Rost – Rust Programming in German
119 comments
·March 26, 2025vlowrian
dathinab
Rost also did do extra work to have maximally diverging naming.
- struktur could have been strukt - umstz could have been impl as in Implementierung was added to the German language - nutz would be a more realistic replacements of use - Mutieren is a German word so mut would stay mut - unsafe is better translated as unsicher, not gefährlich which is dangerous - hinein is a translation for into but .into() a short for "convert into", which in German is "konvertiere zu" so `.zu()`, similar "convert ... from .." would be roughly "aus ... erstelle ..." so `.aus()`. - etc.
in general authors do choose language keywords, syntax and acronyms so that they flow/read reasonable nicely and that isn't true here in many ways. If we don't just try to translate by word but by what we mean with the word in given context then verhalten would be a better choice for trait and you can definieren (define) behavior so `impl Behavior for Thing` become `def Verhalten für Ding`. Similar static wouldn't become statisch but instead global.
wucke13
When I first read the examples, besides my laughter, I felt a similar disconnect im the semantics of the chosen German words. Thank you for you suggestions, I agree with all of them, they are better indeed IMHO.
endofreach
Agree. Felt the same. Just wanted to add that "wesenszug" for trait would be my choice.
nottorp
I've never been able to even use localized UIs on anything that goes on my computers and my phone. My native Romanian looks either foreign or silly when it's on the "File" menu.
It's probably what you got used to when you first learned it though.
Because I am also slow at reading math / the theoretical part of IT in English because I learned it ... in Romanian.
Edit: to the point that I didn't remember the "theoretical part of IT" is "Computer Science" when posting in a hurry :)
rob74
With me it goes so far that I switch everything that can be switched (e.g. Android on my phone) to English. It's not just the terms, it's also the frequent translation errors. One "oldie but goodie" example is a Windows utility (I think it was Registry Editor, but not sure anymore) that translated "key" with "Taste" - which means key on a keyboard, not key as in a thing that opens doors or allows you to uniquely identify a bit of data, that would have been "Schlüssel".
vladde
I do the same thing. When helping friends with their computer problems, having to translate words in a menu is such a hassle, especially when the translations aren't obvious.
When it turns out they were using a different version and didn't have that option, we still had to figure out what translates to what – if the option even is there at all.
umanwizard
As an English native speaker, that makes sense to me. When I read code, I don’t really think of keywords as being related to the English word that inspired them; they’re just their own distinct symbol to my brain.
bloppe
I wonder if it makes more sense for people who use other scripts besides Latin. I know there are some Chinese-character based programming languages
DogRunner
I am a German native speaker as well. That is horrible idea!
piokoch
Horrible idea, but I am not surprised someone decided to do this. In Germany employees have guarantee that they can speak German at work, does not matter the company is international, on the meetings, emails are people from USA, India, Ukraine, Poland. German has to be used if a single German employee wants that.
I have a friend who works in such place. DeepL is a most important piece of software he uses, the problem starts if DeepL messes up some details. Meetings are a nightmare, communication is a nightmare. Managers try to mitigate all that, by avoiding employees from Germany in the projects, what is pretty funny, as company is multinational, but of German origin, and most of the managers are Germans...
This attitude is just one of the many factors that led to https://www.amazon.pl/Kaput-German-Miracle-Wolfgang-Munchau/...
OrangeTux
> German has to be used if a single German employee wants that.
I'm not sure about this statement. See [1]:
"The Regional Labor Court (Landesarbeitsgericht - LAG) of Nuremberg had to rule on a motion by a works council, in which the latter demanded that the discussions held with it be conducted only in German. At the same time, it demanded that all communication between the branch management and the employees be conducted in German. The Regional Court rejected both motions of the works council."
[1]: https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de...
sinuhe69
Yes, but translation must be provided when requested.
"Contrary to the view of the works council, communication in English is also not an obstruction of the works council. The court explained that it is crucial how the works council receives the communication. In the disputed case, texts were previously translated into the German language. Face-to-face conversations were translated by those present into German or into English for the branch manager. This was not objectionable, since the risk of a wrong translation was at the expense of the employer."
miroljub
Why would it be wrong that an employee working in his country prefer to use his native language for communication?
If the team is mixed, that means someone would need to learn and use a foreign language. Why does it have to be always only English?
That being said, I still prefer a programming language in English, but it's not like there are no precedents here. Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German.
Why not code? Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly to and from a universal internal format?
Pavilion2095
> Why does it have to be always only English?
Because a lot of people already know English. You can find good candidates anywhere, bring them together, and they will be able to work together. That's the advantage of English today. There are no reasons to build artificial barriers that hurt cooperation in your company and your country's economy in general, other than nationalistic ones.
It is especially silly in countries like Germany, which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers and an aging population. I'm not saying that immigrants shouldn't learn the local language, but there should be other mechanisms and incentives outside of one's workplace.
FirmwareBurner
>other than nationalistic ones
Welcome to Europe where every country has a different language that's not English. You call this nationalistic, but how many people in the Anglo-sphere would be comfortable working in foreign languages?
A lot of workers, especially older ones, still aren't fully comfortable in English beyond ordering a pizza on vacation abroad, and the older ones also have a longer tenure and a bigger voice in the company. And European companies are a lot older than US companies due to a lot of factors.
Plus, most often, European companies build products for local markets rather than the international markets, which means local language knowledge is mandatory besides English, so then when a lot of the product management, sales, marketing, customer support is all done in the local language, how can you expect to have the SW dev team to be the only insular one without speaking the local language?
>which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers
There's no skill shortage in IT work. Every open position gets enough applications form local candidates in this economy. The skill shortage is in poorly paid hard labor jobs that nobody likes to do like elderly care or construction or that requires doing night shifts.
bakuninsbart
One of the unexpected tough parts during my CS studies was keeping track of the german translations of terms. I would sit in an exam and wonder what Halde (Heap) was again. 98% of interesting literature is in English, and even if the lecture was in German, the recommended literature would usually be in English. In my job, I'm thinking and writing in English, then sometimes translate back to German if need be. Switching to an English keyboard was a major improvement, as many really important strokes are less intuitive in the german layout ( {} for example).
I would be really peeved if a random guy on my team could force all of us to program in German. It creates a lot of unnecessary friction.
majewsky
My favorite hate term from that category is my Operating Systems professor saying "I-Knoten" for inode. Not "Indexknoten" oder anything, just the letter I + "Knoten".
yellowmoneybank
Erlangen?
hulitu
> Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German.
And many Japanese are used to writing Excel formulas in Japanese. Excel is such a crap program. Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language.
> Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly
Because some words' meaning is context dependent.
"We don't need no education"
t_mann
> Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language.
Excel always shows the formula names in your system language. If happen to be on a computer set to Japanese and prefer English, just set it to that. Why does the whole world need to assimilate to English to save you the - rare - inconvenience of two clicks?
miroljub
> Because some words' meaning is context dependent.
And English is the only language where that is true?
> "We don't need no education"
Then educate yourself and learn another language. Something tells me you are fluent only in English.
mzhaase
I've never worked at a German tech company where people actually talked German..
tiffanyh
Are you based in Germany?
SAP is also a “German tech company”, and I bet most of their non-Germany based employees don’t speak German either.
mk67
Working at SAP and working language is English, also in Germany.
bowsamic
I work at Qt in Germany and literally everything is English, official language is English
aredox
It is absolutely mad that today, in 2025, with all the computing power available, the mass of extremely well educated programmers, the number of geniuses, and the advances in computer science...
... merely suggesting the possibility that the keywords of a programming language could be freely translated back and forth between two human languages (in a totally compatible way!) immediately generates comments such as "horrible", "a nightmare", "this is why that country is a failure"...
I mean, this is a 1-to-1 transcription of very specific, identifiable, unique, protected words in a text file.
And this is the top-rated comment when I write this. Who are you, people who wrote or upvoted this? Why are you so scared by any deviation from what you are used to?
tialaramex
You're imagining something which can't exist. Maybe because you don't know any other human languages, or maybe despite that (which is worse)
"freely translated back and forth between two human languages" isn't a thing. You might as well insist that Pi is rational.
So what you get instead is awkwardly translated back and forth in a way that increases confusion. Nobody actually wants that. You're arguing for much worse outcomes, as a result of an at best naive understanding of what language is.
aredox
>You're imagining something which can't exist.
Excuse me, what is hard in taking this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-01-keywords.html
And translating those back and forth?
In fact, if it "can't exist", how can Rost be "fully compatible with English-Rust, so you can mix both at your convenience"?
And Rouille? https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille
And Unirust? https://github.com/charyan/unirust
t_mann
It is a 1-to-1 mapping of keywords. It's not the only choice of German words one could have used for those concepts, but neither are the English ones. For some people the particular choices made in German here will make more sense, for others the English ones. What's so bad about being more inclusive?
kuschkufan
only narrow-minded people see an idea which was intended as a joke as validation for their opinion and then go on and drone on about their stubborn ideas to lecture the world with their agenda
other people however are busy implementing something in rost to further anger the former
phartenfeller
That is certainly one way to look at a fun project...
null
isaakengineer
If I am not wrong German was supposed to be a dual language in the United Stated but the German migrants there who contributed to founding the country lost their cultural access; and as someonein love with works by Goethe and inspired by other European authors, I believe the loss of European languages is a humanitarian cultural heritage loss; and a German comapny should endeavour to hire individuals who are interested in German language and culture. Sacrificing a temporary short-term ease of in finding employees at the cost of cultural loss is not wise, imao.
rob74
Hmmm... if you are going to use only Bavarian paraphernalia to symbolize "German Rust", you might as well go all the way and use Bavarian instead of German for some extra laughs? Ok, TBF most programming keywords are rather scientific, and dialects are less used in academia, so that might be tricky.
Also, I would bet that most Germans would also use "fn" as a two-letter shorthand for "Funktion". But it just had to be different, so they chose "fk" for "FunKtion"...
stefanka
I saw "fkt" as a more common abbreviation for "Funktion", that'd be only one extra character
gyulai
What makes it really funny is that the joke was lost on Microsoft in the mid 90s when you might program macros for MS Office in a version of BASIC that actually did get its keywords translated.
cetu86
Still to this day, when I occasionally use Excel/Libre Office Calc I never know wether to write `sum(` or `summe(`. Function names depend on the localization settings of the system I'm working on.
ensocode
This. I am always wondering if this was a serious decision. In my view it doesn't make any sense to switch function names by locale. It just confuses
tasuki
Presumably one uses the same locale everywhere? So switching by locale should not be a problem?
Supporting multiple languages is a problem all right: googling, communication, etc...
nindalf
It seems obvious in hindsight that everyone, non-native speakers included, prefer to read syntax in English. But was it as obvious 30 years ago?
I mean sure, hurdur Microsoft dumb, it's a classic joke. But if that was the first attempt at translating keywords, then how is it "really funny"?
It just gets my goat when people make fun of innovators with the benefit of hindsight.
gyulai
Microsoft's choices can easily be understood under the following frame: They essentially think of everyone they (supposedly) serve as stupid. Thinking that the need to learn a bunch of keywords in a foreign language is a serious stumbling block to the adoption of their programming language is just one case in point. Having a good laugh at their expense about it feels like karmic justice, because it's bad enough that they keep getting away with it as much as they do.
bloppe
counterpoint: Microsoft does serve a lot of computer-illiterate customers. They also have very literature customers but they have to design for the lowest common denominator
flohofwoe
I was there Nindalf, 30 years ago. And let me assure you, it was already a stupid idea back then ;)
7734128
Microsoft are still doing their forced and absurd localization in all their garbage.
Being forced to use their software while outside an English speaking county is terrible.
Fokamul
Do you realize you can just switch language and locale with few clicks. What's the problem there?
hulitu
> But if that was the first attempt at translating keywords, then how is it "really funny"?
Because they didn't really bother to ask native speakers if the translation makes sense in the target language.
dan00
Well, I'm only saying locale dependent file formats!
hoc
The promptly emerging Excel-Schmerz reminds me that the author avoided the use of floating point numbers in the provided example for a reason.
In german Excel it's might be ok due to its original focus on numbers, but replacing decimal "." with the german "," also forces you to use a semicolon everywhere where you would use a comma (function, vector/array notations). To me the most annoying issue with localized programming languages. And consecutive ";;;" just looks awful. And what would happen to command/line endings...
BTW, Apple once tried to translate content-specific parts of their AppleScript language (like Dialogs etc) but in the process also hit some enumerations which often sit at the border between programming language and content. Big desaster in certain edge cases.
Anyway. Of course I like that the effort was made. There are famous Asterix comic books translated into all kinds of languages and dialects. I'd really like to see great localized coding languages, but I guess they will have to avoid line ending semicolons and only use integers :)
hulitu
> In german Excel it's might be ok due to its original focus on numbers, but replacing decimal "." with the german "," also forces you to use a semicolon everywhere where you would use a comma
The best part is that sometimes you get new numbers.
Excel is showing to a user what AI can do to a document: destroy it.
hoc
It somehow feels that one has to come up with a tailored strategy for each CVS import that contains decimal numbers, dates and/or other data with dots in them. Most of the time I end up regexing my way out of the failing (and different) attempts the different build-in options in Excel deliver. LibreOffice is better, Apple's Numbers partially worse in that regard. Funny to see these things in that state in 2025.
Discussing number data with current LLMs also does not seem right at the moment. Not sure if simple column-specific conversion tasks might work.
skrebbel
I'm offended that nouns aren't capitalized. This is nowhere near proper German.
eru
Oh, no, this is Weimar Republik style, peak Germanity. There were lots of avant-garde movements that were sure that capital letters in general were just about to be phased out in a few years time.
skrebbel
wow missed opportunity
FirmwareBurner
Der Kommentarenbereich ist nun Eigentum der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
eru
Or FRoG for short, in English.
skitter
Why limit yourself to one language, when you can have 23 of them in the same Datei?
andai
They chose the right license!
dan00
You really shouldn't be limited by only one language: https://github.com/charyan/unirust
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t
This is so hard to read for an English native person, well done.
I also propose Eierlegende Wollmilchsau as a type, that would be fun!
Mad_ad
its also hard to read for a german. coding in english is the only viable thing after learning everything in english
homarp
the french version has quite a complete list of other translation
https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille?tab=readme-ov-file#other-l...
Rouille was previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490935
keyle
Bordel!
gtirloni
Any plans to add support for it in the Linux kernel?
eru
Obviously, the Linux kernel would need a Swedish version.
(Swedish is Linus Torvalds' native language.)
Xophmeister
He's Finnish, not Swedish.
dagw
Both Finnish and Swedish are official languages in Finland. Linus' parents are from the region of Finland that primarily speaks Swedish, so Linus grew up speaking Swedish at home.
As a German native speaker, it's surprisingly hard to read the code examples. Seems like all common concepts of programming languages like access modifiers, types etc. are hardwired to their English terms in my brain.