I thought China wanted more people who could read and write code?
Nobody codes in Mandarin! No, not even Chinese people.
They code in English and for a reason! It’s not a great or reassuring reason, but it’s a logical one: English doesn’t have any accent marks and a simple, 26-character alphabet. This means the meaning of code can be understood by a compiler or interpreter without having to deal with encodings or enormous lookup tables to determine if a character is valid for say, an assignment (e.g.
foo = 1).I’ve met developers that tried coding in their native languages using Python, which is one of the few languages that actually supports using non-latin Unicode characters and even right-to-left writing. They all say the same thing: It sucks and it’s not worth the trouble.
Obviously, you don’t understand programming. Programming does not have a strict English proficiency requirement. What is used in programming are identifiers; they merely distinguish variables and have no strict requirement for meaning. You can absolutely use pinyin or arbitrary strings as identifiers. The English level required for programming is only enough to understand reserved words—they’re just basic words.
