I've been curious about how people who read/write in different languages program in languages developed by the English speaking world. I've struggled through using a French keyboard before and it was not pleasant. So I began to ask myself, how do people around the world program? Do the Japanese program in Japanese? Are there Japanese compilers? Do the French use accented characters in their code?
We begin at looking at the keyboard layouts. If C++ was designed in English, how does someone without an English keyboard program in an English language? Well the answer is, all keyboards are English.
As you can see, the French keyboard layout contains all the letters in the English alphabet (although the layout is not QWERTY like we're used to). Despite having to accommodate additional special characters, the ability to program in English exists. But what about something more obscure like Japanese?
Surprisingly (or not), the Japanese keyboard can be fully QWERTY. If you do more research into keyboard layouts (wikipedia is a great source), you will find out that most (if not all) keyboards have the ability to switch to some form of the English alphabet. This means that all programmers have the ability to program in English specified languages. However, the question remains, do non-English speaking programmers still program in English programming languages?
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