I've always wondered why this is not more common. Is there a reason you can't just have localized keywords in each language that map to the same thing? Chinese JavaScript, etc?
Excel seems to be localized and I absolutely hate it. A german version of excel expected me to write WENN instead of IF, or SUMME instead of SUM. It's dumb. Especially since if you're trying to look up code snippets or how to do something in excel, you'll find one in english and then have to find the corresponding german commands.
Google docs had a really interesting quirk that drove me insane for about 20 minutes while I figured it out. I was helping someone with some shared spreadsheet on Google Sheets and figured out that SUMIF(...) was what they needed, by doing a bit of searching. Except that it refused to work where I needed it even when I followed the docs to the letter, and when I explored it a bit more the function seemed to work but only randomly. I'd recreate exactly the same data in the same positions in one sheet where it would behave as I expected, but in another it would fail.
It turns out that according to the locale Sheets will change the separator for params, so in en-US it'll be:
=sumif(A1:A10, "Something", B1:B10)
while in cs-CZ it should be
=sumif(A1:A10; "Something"; B1:B10)
On the one hand, that's really quite cool and impressive. On the other, I would never have expected a language or development environment to support different syntax depending on the locale in use.
The Italian version of Excel requires “;” to serate clauses in the localised version of IF, SE(<condition;<if-true>;<otherwise>) and other differences beyond mere translations, and that drives me up the wall and through the roof.
That's how it works in Excel, I'm not sure how it works under the hood but it's translated to your system locale so you can open up your French speaking colleagues spreadsheet and not notice the difference until they start asking about "=RECHERCHEV()".
Different word order (especially, verb-noun order [1]), different syntax for affixes and adpositions, difficulty in segmentation and even the non-existence of English-like "words", ...
You can't "localize" programming languages in that way. A new programming language, probably similar in semantics but with a completely rethought syntax, is needed for the true localization.
I think it's cognitive overload. I remember when I was pretty young, there was a language named Logo. It has different but similar syntax in Polish and English. Eventually you used only one of them.
