this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Lots of the industrial programming languages are very different to "normal"/"proper" programming languages, and I can see them being localised.
For example, this is (PLC programming language) Ladder Logic code:
My dad used that a lot to program Siemens Step5 and Step7 PLCs. I think it was German but names were 8 chars since this was straight from the 80s. When he fixed old machines or updated them with new PLCs he had to do full rewrites a few times because nothing was documented in old school machinery.
If he worked in Germany, did he use English or German mnemonics?
If he worked in Germany, did he use English or German mnemonics?
It did depend a little bit, what kind of machine/production line he was working on. Before he retired, he worked for an automation engineering company and had different projects in other EU countries, and tried to be understandable for people in those places. He once even coded some Siemens control panel for an aluminum oven loading robot in the czech republic and tried to translate everything to czech with a dictionary (to have the panel info available in czech,english and German). He did of course speak to the foreman of the workers to get it correct.
That makes sense. I’m also involved in localization efforts. In niche cases, it’s paid off to work with the clients directly on that. You get you a good balance between correctness and day-to-day usefulness.
The language is entirely in English. Only the comments and values are in Portuguese.
Spacing constraints led to accidental French in "Reset_Contage~~m~~"
Since ladder is mostly diagram-based it almost doesn’t need to be localized and isn’t jarring when you use non-English variable and function names with English keywords.
Apart from being strictly left-to-right.
If you think it's jarring to mix names from different languages with English keywords... well, I have bad news for you.