On Tuesday, 28 May 2013 at 00:11:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Every time I've been to a programming shop in a foreign country, the developers speak english at work and code in english. Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone does, but as far as I can tell the overwhelming bulk is done in english.
Would you have been to such an event if you could not have understood what people were doing or saying? Of course, when we are working on something with international scope, we tend to do it in english, but it doesn't mean every programming task is performed in english…
Being a non-native english speaker, I tend to see Unicode identifiers as an improvement over other programming languages. It's like operator overloading, it is good when used moderately, depending on the context of the programming task and its intended audience. BTW, I use a Unicode-aware alternative keyboard layout, so I can type greek letters or math symbols directly. ASCII-only identifiers sounds like an arbitrary limitation for me.