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Rost – Rust Programming in German

by miniBill on 3/26/25, 11:04 PM with 115 comments

  • by vlowrian on 3/27/25, 7:29 AM

    As a German native speaker, it's surprisingly hard to read the code examples. Seems like all common concepts of programming languages like access modifiers, types etc. are hardwired to their English terms in my brain.

  • by piokoch on 3/27/25, 12:28 PM

    Horrible idea, but I am not surprised someone decided to do this. In Germany employees have guarantee that they can speak German at work, does not matter the company is international, on the meetings, emails are people from USA, India, Ukraine, Poland. German has to be used if a single German employee wants that.

    I have a friend who works in such place. DeepL is a most important piece of software he uses, the problem starts if DeepL messes up some details. Meetings are a nightmare, communication is a nightmare. Managers try to mitigate all that, by avoiding employees from Germany in the projects, what is pretty funny, as company is multinational, but of German origin, and most of the managers are Germans...

    This attitude is just one of the many factors that led to https://www.amazon.pl/Kaput-German-Miracle-Wolfgang-Munchau/...

  • by rob74 on 3/27/25, 7:17 AM

    Hmmm... if you are going to use only Bavarian paraphernalia to symbolize "German Rust", you might as well go all the way and use Bavarian instead of German for some extra laughs? Ok, TBF most programming keywords are rather scientific, and dialects are less used in academia, so that might be tricky.

    Also, I would bet that most Germans would also use "fn" as a two-letter shorthand for "Funktion". But it just had to be different, so they chose "fk" for "FunKtion"...

  • by gyulai on 3/27/25, 7:33 AM

    What makes it really funny is that the joke was lost on Microsoft in the mid 90s when you might program macros for MS Office in a version of BASIC that actually did get its keywords translated.

  • by hoc on 3/27/25, 12:33 PM

    The promptly emerging Excel-Schmerz reminds me that the author avoided the use of floating point numbers in the provided example for a reason.

    In german Excel it's might be ok due to its original focus on numbers, but replacing decimal "." with the german "," also forces you to use a semicolon everywhere where you would use a comma (function, vector/array notations). To me the most annoying issue with localized programming languages. And consecutive ";;;" just looks awful. And what would happen to command/line endings...

    BTW, Apple once tried to translate content-specific parts of their AppleScript language (like Dialogs etc) but in the process also hit some enumerations which often sit at the border between programming language and content. Big desaster in certain edge cases.

    Anyway. Of course I like that the effort was made. There are famous Asterix comic books translated into all kinds of languages and dialects. I'd really like to see great localized coding languages, but I guess they will have to avoid line ending semicolons and only use integers :)

  • by skrebbel on 3/27/25, 10:17 AM

    I'm offended that nouns aren't capitalized. This is nowhere near proper German.

  • by skitter on 3/27/25, 7:56 AM

    Why limit yourself to one language, when you can have 23 of them in the same Datei?

    https://github.com/charyan/unirust

  • by dan00 on 3/27/25, 10:06 AM

    You really shouldn't be limited by only one language: https://github.com/charyan/unirust

  • by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t on 3/27/25, 7:51 AM

    This is so hard to read for an English native person, well done.

    I also propose Eierlegende Wollmilchsau as a type, that would be fun!

  • by homarp on 3/27/25, 12:54 PM

    the french version has quite a complete list of other translation

    https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille?tab=readme-ov-file#other-l...

    Rouille was previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490935

  • by keyle on 3/27/25, 9:55 AM

  • by gtirloni on 3/27/25, 7:33 AM

    Any plans to add support for it in the Linux kernel?

  • by 4ndrewl on 3/27/25, 7:40 AM

    I was expecting something along the lines of https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/

  • by mschild on 3/27/25, 9:23 AM

    I'm German. Lived abroad for close to a decade although back in Germany for the past 4 now.

    Generally, I have no issue switching between German and English for anything, be it movies, books, conversation, etc.

    Coding is just something though that my German brain will refuse to do. It feels foreign and just downright weird. That's the best I can describe it. I even started learning to code in German. German is also one the languages that generally has a ton of resources translated and translated well. I just cannot do it though. Syntax and technical terms in German just turn my brain to mush.

  • by jjallen on 3/27/25, 9:47 AM

    As an American moving back there from Switzerland and scared to lose the German I know, maybe this is exactly what I need.

    Though I will say that “benutze” is much longer than “use” haha.

    Would be hilarious to make a Swiss German version.

    Edit: the words are abbreviated which makes it that much harder for a non native German speaker. Seems like German is much longer on average. That’s one plus of English over German.

    I do wish more languages had capitalized nouns though

  • by isaakengineer on 3/27/25, 12:25 PM

    the irony must be lost on me here, but I began writing Rust in German and never I had as much fun programming as since I began using German as main language. Forgetting about Kamel or Kebab case? Love it. German is awesome for programming, imao.

    PS. I speak Persian, know Arabic, Serbian too but none offer the ease of text to code as German.

  • by dailykoder on 3/27/25, 6:54 AM

    Oh nice. Today I actually wanted to start learning Rust. As a native german this will make things a lot easier. Thank you!

  • by steveklabnik on 3/27/25, 1:43 PM

    To bring it full circle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust,_Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg

    Some of the German Rust folks have joked about wanting to hold a conference here. We could go to the amusement park!

  • by rbonvall on 3/27/25, 1:02 PM

    Reminds me when Scala was translated to German some time ago, at about the same time of the year:

    https://scala-lang.org/blog/2017/04/01/announcing-skala.html

  • by osener on 3/27/25, 12:57 PM

    So far I've been resisting the Rust hype train but I guess I'll ditch Duolingo and do this instead.

  • by ingohelpinger on 3/27/25, 7:13 AM

    Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache.

  • by betimsl on 3/27/25, 1:32 PM

    You have a typo in the snippet on README.md: SchlüsselWert should be Schlüsselwert.

  • by tdiff on 3/27/25, 11:36 PM

    Fun fact: stack datatype is called "Keller" in German, meaning cellar. You put stuff in it, but to fetch the thing you put there first you need to take out everything else you put there after it.

  • by xg15 on 3/27/25, 8:23 AM

    Behold the almighty SONSTWENN!

  • by t_mann on 3/27/25, 1:55 PM

    I wonder whether LLM programming will make such projects more (easier to get assistance) or less (assistance might not be as good as in the original version) common.

  • by rmetzler on 3/27/25, 7:23 AM

    What does „änd“ mean in the example?

  • by LargoLasskhyfv on 3/27/25, 1:42 PM

    Verdammt. Jetzt hat mein serielles Zeigegerät mir eine Unterbrechungsanforderung geschüttelt.

  • by bowsamic on 3/27/25, 7:17 AM

    Richtig toll

  • by stared on 3/27/25, 12:29 PM

    10 min vibe-translating (Cursor + Claude 3.7, OpenAI for logo) and here we have Rdza - a Polish version:

    https://github.com/stared/rdza

    Polish can into Rust!

  • by impish9208 on 3/28/25, 3:49 AM

    Will the negation for if statements go at end?

  • by enigma101 on 3/27/25, 11:41 AM

    Nein Nein Nein. Nicht gut. Hans lass sein. German in Programming seems like the worst idea ever made. DampfSchifffahrtGesellschaftsVertragsKlasse = nil

  • by fscaramuzza on 3/27/25, 11:53 AM

    waiting for the italian version Past

  • by bradley13 on 3/27/25, 12:06 PM

    Um...just no. I ran an informal Reddit survey some years ago, and got responses from all over the world. Literally everyone programs in English.

    FWIW I teach in a German-speaking area, and all of my material is in English.

  • by Jotalea on 3/28/25, 2:09 PM

    should I do this with Spanish?