Chinese Character in Programing Language Function or Variable Name (2024)
Chinese Character in Programing Language function or variable name
in china, what percentage of programing language code have chinese character in variable name or function name
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in china, what percentage of programing language code have chinese character in variable name or function name
**There is no definitive public statistic or comprehensive survey providing an exact percentage of programming code in China that uses Chinese characters in variable or function names.** However, based on coding guidelines from major Chinese tech companies and discussions among developers, this practice appears to be quite rare—likely less than 5% in professional or open-source code, though it may be slightly more common among beginners or students.
### Key Insights from Sources:
- **Professional Coding Standards**: Alibaba, one of China's largest tech firms, explicitly prohibits the use of Chinese characters, Pinyin, or mixed Pinyin-English in naming conventions for variables, functions, and other identifiers.
- Their Java Coding Guidelines emphasize accurate English spelling and grammar to ensure readability and maintainability, allowing Pinyin only for proper names like company brands (e.g., "alibaba" or "Hangzhou").
- **Developer Consensus**: In forums and Q&A sites, Chinese programmers overwhelmingly report using English for identifiers in standard languages like Java, Python, and C++, with Chinese limited to comments.
- Production code with Chinese variable names is occasionally mentioned but described as exceptional rather than standard.
- Similarly, discussions note that while Unicode support makes it technically possible, it's avoided to prevent issues like encoding errors or reduced collaboration.
- **Educational Context**: Among students (e.g., in Beijing middle schools), limited English vocabulary can lead to struggles with descriptive names, potentially increasing use of Chinese or Pinyin in learning environments.
- However, even here, educators often push for English to align with industry norms.
### Why It's Uncommon:
- **Collaboration and Tools**: English ensures compatibility in global teams, IDEs, and libraries.
- **Readability and Maintenance**: Mixing scripts can complicate debugging and version control.
- **Industry Influence**: Guidelines from giants like Alibaba set the tone for much of China's software ecosystem.
- If you're looking for data from specific languages (e.g., Python vs. Java) or sectors, more targeted studies might exist in academic papers, but none surfaced in broad searches.