alt Hacker NewsI think the industry is moving to English as the programming language, and specifications-context-tdd as the framework for building software.
Many find it distasteful, and many finding liberating. I think it's broadly correlates with how they feel about expressing themselves in english vs say C++.
As a side question, is there anyone who's using LLMs primarily in non-english mode to program? I suspect there's quite a few people using mandarin, but can someone share first-hand account.
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I'm using it 50% English (personal projects)/50% Polish (workplace; reasons being agents.md / team is not that english proficient) and honestly I haven't seen much difference in the output/ambiguity.
Polish prompts tend to be shorter due to the language having a lot of verb forms/conjugations, the only "bad" thing for me is that when it's saying "it broke" it tends to use uncanny / blunt words that make me sometimes laugh.
I think it will eventually be its own dialect of English. Telling LLMs what to do is better using not quite normal English and I think this will continue until it isn't recognizable as natural English anymore, but a new fuzzy programming language (probably >1).
I wonder how well Mandarin works for LLM-based programming. On one hand, it's very token efficient as Mandarin script is very dense in meaning. On the other, I suppose this can increase ambiguity.
I use French nearly all the time, it works well. Not that I can't write English prompts, but I find it easier to use my native language.
I'm teaching my kids to be fluent in tokenese
Natural language doesn’t have the precision required for building systems. We already have languages for specifying systems precisely. It’s called “code”…
I'm using it in english / albanian. Not much difference really. Impressive.
I agree, and those are still too focused on code generation for specific languages are fighting the last war.
It is the revenge of UML modeling.
Eventually it will get good enough that what comes out of agent work, is a matter of formal specification.
Assuming that code is actually needed and cannot be achieved as pure agent orchestration workflows.
You really think that's what the positions on either side boil down to, how they feel about expressing themselves in English vs C++? No, that's ridiculous. That's such a wild reductionistic simplification.
I’m Korean, and I’ve used GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Codex. At first, I prompted them in English, but over time I came to the conclusion that using Korean works better for me. It may consume more tokens, but reducing the time spent understanding and correcting the plan is more valuable. That said, when the context gets close to its limit, the responses sometimes include Korean words that do not actually exist.
As an aside, I don’t think the benefits LLMs bring to non-English users are widely understood. I studied linguistics and Russian, and I’m capable of professional interpretation in English and Russian. Even so, I can read technical documents, understand them, and communicate about them much faster and with far less effort in my native language, Korean. These days, I read most English documentation and HN posts through Chrome’s automatic translation. Sometimes the translation is ambiguous, but in those cases I can immediately refer back to the original English. This has been a major help to me and to other Korean developers I work with.